Dear RFAers,
My sense, as a Vermonter who knows Dean and knows his politics, is that he will be smart enough to 'dance around' the issue of Reparations enough that A-A folks will understand he is at least *somewhat* sympathetic to it.
His advisors are also canny enough to tell him that he had better not endorse the idea directly, because too many 'white' people think it's hogwash, and because he knows that the unconsciously-racist, middle-America 'whites' all the way from Florida to Utah will not understand it and will likely reject it 'out of hand'.
The issue of Reparations requires a certain amount of wisdom to understand. The US public has been sold for centuries on the idea that justice=punishment. The intellectual leap that 'true justice is making things right' is one that most people still haven't made.
To most 'white' USAers and to a lot of 'black' ones too, Reparations doesn't make sense because all the former slaves and slaveholders are dead, therefore there is no one to compensate and no one to receive compensation. Remember, I write this as a 'white' activist for Reparations ... I run into this stuff all the time.
Here in my small 'white' hometown in Vermont, we are having a helluva time getting the local high school to understand the need for *symbolic* reparations -- I'm going to a meeting at the high school tonight where abandoning 'the Southern Colonel' -- the symbol of an antebellum plantation owner as the school's sports mascot, will be discussed. People don't want to do it because 'it's tradition' and because Brattleboro was named after a British colonel who never even visited here. But mostly they don't want to do it because they don't understand the need to personally begin making reparations 'here at home' with this one symbolic gesture.
I find that both 'blacks' and 'whites' have the same problem, in that there is still quite a 'learning curve' to get well into before we understand that Reparations must be based not upon whether the Lehman Brothers owned slaves personally, but upon the millions they made running northern blockades with southern cotton shipments for England and Germany during the Civil War, and even upon all the cotton shipping they did while southern 'blacks' were working under *legal* slavery, and after the war, when slavery went from being 'de jure' to 'de facto'. In other words, most of the damages from racism and bigotry don't descend from actual chattel slavery at all ... they descend from umpteen generations of domination, exploitation, and despair.
And more than that, Reparations must also be based upon the continued subjugation of African people all around the globe in a worldwide hierarchy of race which has 'white' people on top and 'black' people on the bottom. Why else would millions die in Congo -- fighting over oil rights and the rare minerals needed to make cellular telephones and computer keyboards -- while the USA gets all het up over 500 servicepeople dying in Iraq or 3,000 in the World Trade Center? Why else would we make little or no noise in this country about the prison population doubling from 1 million to 2 million between 1995 and 2002, with most of those being people of color?
No, reparations cannot *only* be about paying the descendants of slaves being compensated by the descendants and corporate heirs of slaveowners -- it must be about *true* justice ... that is, equity. Equitableness must be the outcome, not a few African-Americans growing rich and starting a new residential enclave with million-dollar homes, or a new Liberia with repatriated African-descended people. Been there, done that, eh?
Only truth and reconciliation commissions, properly conceived and executed, will come close to filling the bill -- to creating the new equitableness between and among the races in the Americas and around the world. Material Reparations must be combined with symbolic ones in order to move the mountain that is public indifference to this issue.
Dean's handlers are smart enough to understand that Reparations is an issue that could get him killed, either politically or bodily -- it would be whites doing the killing either way. Unless I am badly mistaken, we have quite a ways to go before it can become an issue in a Presidential campaign ... though I believe with all my heart that it should be that. Endorsing reparations would be political suicide for Dean right now ... he remembers what Bush One did to Dukakis with the Willie Horton smear -- this would invite a response from Karl Rove that would make Willie Horton look like angel food cake.
John Wilmerding
CERJ
Brattleboro, VT
My sense, as a Vermonter who knows Dean and knows his politics, is that he will be smart enough to 'dance around' the issue of Reparations enough that A-A folks will understand he is at least *somewhat* sympathetic to it.
His advisors are also canny enough to tell him that he had better not endorse the idea directly, because too many 'white' people think it's hogwash, and because he knows that the unconsciously-racist, middle-America 'whites' all the way from Florida to Utah will not understand it and will likely reject it 'out of hand'.
The issue of Reparations requires a certain amount of wisdom to understand. The US public has been sold for centuries on the idea that justice=punishment. The intellectual leap that 'true justice is making things right' is one that most people still haven't made.
To most 'white' USAers and to a lot of 'black' ones too, Reparations doesn't make sense because all the former slaves and slaveholders are dead, therefore there is no one to compensate and no one to receive compensation. Remember, I write this as a 'white' activist for Reparations ... I run into this stuff all the time.
Here in my small 'white' hometown in Vermont, we are having a helluva time getting the local high school to understand the need for *symbolic* reparations -- I'm going to a meeting at the high school tonight where abandoning 'the Southern Colonel' -- the symbol of an antebellum plantation owner as the school's sports mascot, will be discussed. People don't want to do it because 'it's tradition' and because Brattleboro was named after a British colonel who never even visited here. But mostly they don't want to do it because they don't understand the need to personally begin making reparations 'here at home' with this one symbolic gesture.
I find that both 'blacks' and 'whites' have the same problem, in that there is still quite a 'learning curve' to get well into before we understand that Reparations must be based not upon whether the Lehman Brothers owned slaves personally, but upon the millions they made running northern blockades with southern cotton shipments for England and Germany during the Civil War, and even upon all the cotton shipping they did while southern 'blacks' were working under *legal* slavery, and after the war, when slavery went from being 'de jure' to 'de facto'. In other words, most of the damages from racism and bigotry don't descend from actual chattel slavery at all ... they descend from umpteen generations of domination, exploitation, and despair.
And more than that, Reparations must also be based upon the continued subjugation of African people all around the globe in a worldwide hierarchy of race which has 'white' people on top and 'black' people on the bottom. Why else would millions die in Congo -- fighting over oil rights and the rare minerals needed to make cellular telephones and computer keyboards -- while the USA gets all het up over 500 servicepeople dying in Iraq or 3,000 in the World Trade Center? Why else would we make little or no noise in this country about the prison population doubling from 1 million to 2 million between 1995 and 2002, with most of those being people of color?
No, reparations cannot *only* be about paying the descendants of slaves being compensated by the descendants and corporate heirs of slaveowners -- it must be about *true* justice ... that is, equity. Equitableness must be the outcome, not a few African-Americans growing rich and starting a new residential enclave with million-dollar homes, or a new Liberia with repatriated African-descended people. Been there, done that, eh?
Only truth and reconciliation commissions, properly conceived and executed, will come close to filling the bill -- to creating the new equitableness between and among the races in the Americas and around the world. Material Reparations must be combined with symbolic ones in order to move the mountain that is public indifference to this issue.
Dean's handlers are smart enough to understand that Reparations is an issue that could get him killed, either politically or bodily -- it would be whites doing the killing either way. Unless I am badly mistaken, we have quite a ways to go before it can become an issue in a Presidential campaign ... though I believe with all my heart that it should be that. Endorsing reparations would be political suicide for Dean right now ... he remembers what Bush One did to Dukakis with the Willie Horton smear -- this would invite a response from Karl Rove that would make Willie Horton look like angel food cake.
John Wilmerding
CERJ
Brattleboro, VT
