By Charles P. Henry
WOULD THE ELECTION OR EVEN THE NOMINATION OF BARACK OBAMA FOR president of the United States represent a form of racial reparations? After all, affirmative action is considered by some a form of reparations and Geraldine Ferraro has suggested Obama is an affirmative action candidate. Nearly everyone agrees that the unprecedented success of his campaign marks a turning point in American race relations. The question is--turning towards what?
Explanations for Obama's success have often emphasized his calmness, coolness and lack of anger. MSNBC's Chris Matthews said, "no history of slavery ... all the bad stuff in our history ain't there with this guy." Conservative writer Shelby Steele contends Obama is "a bargainer who makes a very specific deal with whites: 'I will not use America's horrible history of white racism against you, if you will promise not to use my race against me.'" In exchange the bargainer grants a kind of innocence or moral absolution for White goodwill and generosity. Rush Limbaugh calls him a "magic Negro." Like many popular culture roles played by Sidney Poitier, Morgan Freeman, Will Smith, Don Cheadle and others, he is there to assuage White guilt. Obama himself acknowledges that some see his candidacy as "an exercise in affirmative action" based on "the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap."
This apparent reaffirmation of White innocence has led some to question Obama's "Blackness." Author Debra Dickerson has contended, "Black, in our political and social reality, means those descended from West African slaves." By Dickerson's logic even those descended from West Indian slaves don't count. Daily News columnist Stanley Crouch joins Dickerson in claiming Obama has not "lived the life of a black American." Ironically, it was Obama's 2004 Illinois Senate race opponent, Alan Keyes, who first charged that Obama was not Black enough: ironic because conservatives are constantly attacking victimology and identity politics.
None of those charging Obama with a deficit of Blackness were to be found defending him for his association with the "too Black" Rev.Jeremiah Wright. The association with Rev. Wright was jarring precisely because it challenged the views of those who saw Obama as someone who if not detached from America's racial past was certainly not bitter or angry about it. The cognitive dissonance created by the public perception of Obama embracing as a family member someone with the views of Rev. Wright forced Obama to confront race head on.
Obama's March 18 speech on race was both honest and nuanced. He did what one would expect a politician to do in disagreeing with Wright's most controversial remarks. However, he then went beyond the conventional in refusing to disown Wright. Obama said the Chicago minister "helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another, to care for the sick and lift up the poor." He added, "I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can disown the black community." In short, Obama tried to speak to what for him were the positive notions of Blackness--the good stuff.
Yet Wright's statements also forced Obama to recall the history behind Black anger. Speaking in Philadelphia about a Constitution that embraced slavery he said: "words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States." He remembered the protests and struggles in the streets and courts. And he linked a history of legalized discrimination to "the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persist in so many of today's urban and rural communities."
Even as he defended Wright and Black anger in general, Obama sought to reach out to White voters. He argued that those persons of Wright's and Ferraro's generation may have good cause to be bitter and angry. Despite their service to this country they have faced obstacles and limitations imposed on them by others. We can understand them without agreeing with them.
Obama's speech is remarkable precisely because it attempts the kind of nuance and understanding so rare in American racial discourse. The United States government has never convened anything resembling a truth and reconciliation commission to remember and seek remedy for the wrongs committed from the time of slavery through Jim Crow to the present. There have been, however, numerous "study" commissions, and one of the most influential studies of American race relations, Gunnar Myrdal's An American Dilemma (1944), was funded by the Carnegie Foundation.
Prior to the urban disorders of the mid-to-late 1960s, social scientists did not seem interested in applying the new science of survey research to Black populations. Thus the anger and bitterness reflected in the violence in Watts, a Los Angeles neighborhood, just days after the signing of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, caught both social scientists and the general public by surprise. What followed was a host of "riot studies" including that of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (Kerner Commission) appointed by President Lyndon Johnson in 1967. The Kerner Commission concluded, after 600 pages, "the nation is rapidly moving toward two increasingly separate Americas." Yet the sociologist Kenneth Clark in his testimony before the commission was pessimistic about the outcome. "I read that report ... of the 1919 riot in Chicago, and it is as if I were reading the report of the investigating committee of the Harlem riot of'35, the report of the investigating committee on the Harlem riot of'43, the report of the McCone Commission on the Watts riot." Clark proved prophetic.
Late in his second term, President Bill Clinton sought to take on the challenge of separate Americas by appointing a presidential advisory board on race. Chaired by the distinguished historian John Hope Franklin, the board was to assist the president in a year long "great and unprecedented conversation about race." From the beginning the board was plagued by disagreements with the White House, complaints from conservatives that their views were not welcome and charges from other minority groups that the proceedings were too focused on African American concerns. Although Franklin wanted to take up the issue of reparations, Clinton deemed it not a "productive" issue for discussion. The board did, however, deal with the issue of an apology for slavery. In a remarkable transcendence of the issue it concluded since an apology could not be adequately expressed in words--it would make none!
Someone who did take up the issue of reparations was conservative activist David Horowitz. During Black History Month of 2001, he offered the campus newspapers of some fifty elite universities an advertisement entitled "Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks Is a Bad Idea for Blacks--and Racist Too." Most campus newspapers rejected the ad but seven--Brown, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Duke, the University of Chicago, the University of Arizona, and the University of California at Berkeley and at Davis--chose to run the ad (the last two newspapers later apologized).
A firestorm of criticism rose on each campus that ran the ad. As the campus newspapers came under pressure the debate shifted from reparations to press censorship. The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal, U.S. News & World Report, ACLU, NAACP, and others all rallied in support of Horowitz. Ironically, those newspapers that did not run the ad were spared any criticism over press censorship. Horowitz had exactly what he wanted, a debate on what he perceived as a lack of tolerance on liberal college campuses for conservative viewpoints, and showed up at Berkeley two weeks later to argue the issue.
Lost in the debate over freedom of speech was any substantive discussion of the issue of reparations. Such Horowitz pronouncements, for example, as "what about the debt Blacks owe to America" (for ending slavery) served to reduce the possibilities of calm, cool discussion and genuine understanding of differing perspectives, as Horowitz must have known. The Horowitz ad is a masterful example of the historic tradition in American racial discourse. Those with power and resources are able to frame the issue of race in a way that either gives them an advantage or precludes serious discussion. This tradition has either individualized Black claims for justice, denied Whites' responsibility, or made them the victims. This paternalistic tradition also holds that whatever action Whites take must be in the best interest of Blacks--even if Blacks argue otherwise.
More than a half century ago James Baldwin published one of the best critiques of such discourse in "Everybody's Protest Novel." Baldwin targeted literature that attempts social improvement by stirring its readers into moral outrage. Such works as Uncle Tom's Cabin and Native Son, Baldwin maintained, have almost the opposite effect on social change. Instead of provoking self-examination or radical criticism, they lead us to a kind of comfortable anger that affirms our own moral framework. This "medieval morality" is inadequate to confront the implications of slavery or the racial injustices that follow it.
For Baldwin, protest novels--and, by extension, racial discourse in general--refuse to acknowledge the fundamental difficulties of moral improvement. Martin Luther King Jr. was quick to add that our technological capabilities had far outstripped our moral capacity to control them. Or, as he stated the problem, we have "guided missiles in the hands of misguided men." Baldwin believed the first task was to find a language that conveyed a moral message without entirely sacrificing complexity to intelligibility. After all, he stated, American public discourse has no way to accommodate a story that so deeply undercuts its own assumptions.
Reparations are exactly such a story. It is ironic that a word that means "to repair" has come to signify just the opposite, "to divide," in contemporary America. As Obama has said, "talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism." Rather than framing reparations as reverse racism as did Horowitz, columnist Charles Krauthammer sarcastically endorsed giving each African American $5,000 if they would promise never to raise the subject of racial inequality again.
Unfortunately, writers like Krauthammer and some reparations advocates themselves have succeeded in framing reparations discourse as solely or mainly about money. When one shifts the dialogue away from who pays and who receives to ask about an apology, the framework changes and the answers become more convoluted. After all, we live in an "age of apology" in which the Pope apologized to Galileo, Australia has created a "National Sorry Day" for indigenous peoples, and two United States presidents, Clinton and Bush, have apologized to Africans for the slave trade--but not to African Americans for slavery.
An apology would mean an official recognition that a gross harm had occurred and acceptance of responsibility--not guilt--for that harm. Most importantly, a reparations process, which starts with an apology, includes a solemn guarantee that such actions will not be permitted to happen now or in the future. Comments by public figures, like Bill O'Reilly's that he might have to put together a lynching party to go after Michelle Obama if she doesn't show proper pride in America, do nothing to reassure Blacks that we live in a "post-racial" or "color-blind" society. That is why cultural reparations in the form of human rights curricula in schools and museums of remembrance are important forms of restitution.
Many countries, in addition to the United States, have trouble dealing with the past because the past is still with them. Memory of historical injustice is not a trivial matter to be swept under the rug in the name of progress. A nation is an intergenerational community, and the existence of historical obligations is predicated on our moral relations to our successors. Memory, or more precisely remembering, is an important part of the identity of individuals and communities. The moral identity of a nation may be defined as the remembrance of those events that comprise its obligations and entitlements.
So how will the election of 2008 be remembered? Will it mark the continuation of American superpower rhetoric that boasts an exceptionalism dividing us from the rest of the world while denying the history that undercuts it? Will we simply pat ourselves on the back for entertaining the nomination of a woman and an African American for the highest office in the land? Or will we come together around the newly activated young people, women and Blacks and build a new discourse of reparation, reconciliation and common humanity?
Charles P. Henry is professor and chair of the Department of African American Studies at the University of California at Berkeley. His most recent book is Long Overdue: The Politics of Racial Reparations.
