Prometheus 6

What happened to day 4? It's the day I lifted for a previous post. Since there were no comments left the first time around I decided to just post up the last day of the series.

This has actually been a pretty productive series of posts as far as I'm concerned. See, I've been in reparations discussions before, and they've never been pretty. This is the first time I've seen the discussion proceed rationally. I don't know if people are just respecting that it's my blog and therefore giving me that last word at times, or if they genuinely see the overwhelming superiority of my analysis.

It's my house
We play by my rulez
The first rule is "I never lose in my house"

I was going to sum up the week in this post, but figured, nah. Maybe I'll post links to all the Startin' Stuff posts at the end of this one. I'll figure that out by the time I get to the bottom of the page.

I started typing up what "we" have learned from the discussion, then said to myself, nah. The fact is most folks who've visited P6 this week haven't expressed an opinion at all. That's the norm in online discussions, and to talk about what "we" have learned under those circumstances is one of the more hubristic gestures I can think of, especially since the discussion took place in the comments and a significant fraction of readers in the BlogNet don't click links.

So I started thinking about what I saw. I mean, since that's all I could write in any summary anyway. And I'm not limiting it to what happened here on P6…I'm including the couple few things I linked to in the process of writing the series. I'm also slipping in a few thoughts that sort of hang over the edges of the discussion.

I saw there was pretty much no point in basing a reparations argument on slavery. I think there is a combination of reasons for this, but the critical one is that most non-Black folks reject the idea out of hand. No argument will sway them on that point. And the reason for that is that everyone takes this race stuff personally, no matter how much they deny it. Your average person wants to know why I should "pay for" something I didn't do. They note that my ancestors came here after slavery was ended, that I never owned slaves, nor did any of my ancestors. There is hardly ever a discussion of justice, or debt, or ethics.

I've also seen that most folks, Black and white, want the discussion to revolve around slavery if it has to exist at all. And I've seen that's an error. Slavery wasn't the only damaging event, unless you realize that Jim Crow was implemented to have the same impact as slavery without all the legal problems. Jim Crow essentially divided slavery into its component parts and named each part individually. Those parts that could be successfully challenged (which boiled down to defining humans as property) were disposed of in order that the overarching structure could be maintained. American Slavery is so evil, even when the factors that made it the worst implementation of slavery in all known history are unknown, and we all identify so strongly with our assumed race, that no one really wants to look at it. It's actually something of a toss-up who wants to forget slavery ever happened more, Black or white folks.

Because everyone takes race personally, everyone assumes you're talking about their personal actions in the discussion, so you must sever slavery from Jim Crow, redlining, etc. I've seen reasonable people will see this when its pointed out. And since Jim Crow was so recent, since it was within the lifetime of most living Americans, it can be more successfully supported…we can discuss that.

I've seen that a major argument against reparations is that we shouldn't do it because we don't know how to do it correctly. My response is we should do it, and therefore we must figure out how to do it correctly. Doing it correctly involves recognizing that cash payments should not be the goal. I've seen too many broke-ass lottery winners in the news to think cash is the cure. Doing it correctly means recognizing that since the damage was done environmentally, structurally, reparations must either change the mainstream structure or help create an African American environment and structure that strengthens our communities so that we can withstand the forces generated by the mainstream structures.

I've seen that I can, and we must, create the argument such that the assault we point out is pointed out impersonally. Many Black folks resist this idea. Many want white folks to accept personal responsibility for the racism around them. But if we want reparations we must give up on that entirely. It doesn't weaken the argument and loses no one anything but a little personal satisfaction.

Finally, I've seen that the ethical argument about the why of reparations must be kept separate from the legal arguments over how, who "pays" and why the "payer" is obligated to make the payment. The legal argument is to be made on legal terms using an accounting metaphor.

I think that pretty much sums it up.

LATER: One more thing. We touched on the very valid case Hawaiians have for reparations and the similarity of their case to that of American Indians. I said I felt the African American case was different enough that the Hawaiian case wouldn't be useful as a "test case" for reparations for Black folks.

LATER-LATER Reading this Sunday morning with a near total lack of sleep, I see a major contradiction in the idea that everyone wants the reparations discussion to revolve around slavery, yet everyone wants to forget slavery ever happened. So be it, because it's the simple truth and as an old email sig I used to use said, "I refuse to be the only consistent human being on the planet."

Finally…I promise this time… I'd like to include part of a comment I left at MaxSpeak the other day:

…there are any number of configurations this country can assume given economic parity (the same sort of wealth distribution in the Black communities as the white ones…I'm not foolish enough to believe poverty will be eliminated altogether). Some of them you would not like at all, and I strongly suspect most of the unpleasant ones would be unpleasant because of unresolved racial issues.

Comments