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...And while, the current conjuncture of neoliberalism and assertions of empire, the outcome is uncertain, reparations form a fertile site for coalition building and activism in a global struggle for justice.
In recent years, especially after September 11, a culture hostile to political democracy and justice, multilateralism and international law has emerged in America in neopopulist guise, (1) proffering a grand strategy enunciated in the so-called 'Bush Doctrine'. (2) This strategy is driven by a corporate global agenda, the demands of social conservatives, among them fundamentalists, and is orchestrated and legitimised by ideologues in the Bush administration, Republican Party and neoliberal/conservative think-tanks. (3)
The imperial claims espoused in the Bush Doctrine are deployed against nation states that resist a new pax Americana. The iconography of this hegemonising strategy and culture, circulated in the mass media, official texts and academic and policy treatises, is manifest in revisioned and prophetic narratives of the nation. (4) A case in point is the jingoistic and divisive rhetoric of the 'axis of evil' and the 'war against terrorism', promulgated to obtain Americans' support for repressive domestic and imperial policies, including the further militarisation of strategic regions of the world. A powerful and unaccountable US imperium simplistically demarcates nations and cultures between 'them' and 'us', invoking the 'clash of civilisations' and subordinating allies to the dictates of Washington. (5) The recent Anglo-American war and occupation of Iraq assert the presumptions and practices of empire and herald the prospect of the forcible re-mapping of the planet, beginning with the Middle East. (6)
Domestically, the neoliberals/conservatives' project manifests itself in a systematic assault on public life, civil liberties and civil society; on the environment, labour and the welfare state. The enduring and related problems of equity and diversity are, too, the target of efforts to reshape education, especially higher education, through contesting programmes that foreground race and social inequality. At the same time, the federal government is directing a systematic assault on immigrant groups and communities of colour. Immigration policy has become more restrictive and discriminatory, especially in the aftermath of September 11, so that FBI interrogations and INS raids, and the secret detention and deportation of immigrants, occur almost routinely. (7) And the assumptions upon which affirmative action and social welfare policies were once based are now challenged in the courts on the basis of claims that racial discrimination in American society has largely disappeared and that the persistence of racial inequality can be attributed to personal and cultural factors affecting African Americans. (8)
Any consideration, then, of reparations for slavery and colonisation (and their shared and lasting legacies) is framed by this historical conjuncture and necessarily calls the nation and American polity to account for slavery and other pandemic crimes against humanity. Yet many civil rights supporters, who agree with reparations in principle, warn that the prevailing climate of virulent conservatism renders any discussion of reparations at this time inopportune and needlessly confrontational. (9) On the contrary, such regressive tendencies actually affirm the need not only to reiterate the goals and advances of past civil rights campaigns (now threatened), but also serve as a precondition for further progress.
The Black Manifesto
The historical foundation of the reparations movement, its raison d'etre, is foremost the institution of slavery. Slavery was not marginal to, or an aberration in, the formation of the United States. During the colonial period, a racialised social order evolved, as did codified slave laws and institutionalised slave practices at the level of everyday life. Constitutionally inscribed and morally and forcibly sanctioned slavery lasted in the republic until 1865. What followed slavery was a century of segregation, exploitation and deprivation--the social and economic consequences of which continue to affect the life chances of African Americans adversely. (10)
The central claims and organising and legal principles of the reparations movement are laid out in the Black Manifesto. The Manifesto is premised on the historical fact that the United States was constitutionally founded on slavery and that the persistence of racial inequality and injustice in American society is derived from slavery. (11)
It may be useful to quote, at length, several of the Manifesto's essential declarations:
Whereas the United States government has never acknowledged or taken responsibility for its role in the enslavement of Africans and the promotion of white supremacy; Whereas the experience of enslavement, segregation, and discrimination continues to limit the life chances and opportunities of African Americans; Whereas all Americans and the United States government have benefited enormously and continue to benefit from the unjust expropriation of uncompensated labor by enslaved Africans, the subordination and segregation of the descendants of the enslaved, as well as from discrimination against African Americans; Whereas the principle that reparations is the appropriate remedy whenever a government unjustly abrogates the rights of a domestic group or foreign people whose rights such government is obligated to protect or uphold has been internationally recognized; let it be hereinafter resolved: First ... It is never too late to seek justice. Reparations for African Americans are justified by the legal doctrine of unjust enrichment ... Slavery, the expropriation of the labor of another without compensation, is a paradigm instance of unjust enrichment. Through intergenerational transfers [inheritance] the ill-gotten gains continue to accumulate to the greater impoverishment of African Americans and their descendants and the greater support of white supremacy. Second, the government bears responsibility. The denial of a fair forum in which to seek redress is part of the burden that American civilization must carry along with its responsibility for creating the context in which slave trading could be carried on as ordinary commerce, slave ownership could be protected by the fundamental law of the land, segregation could be enforced, and white supremacy could thrive. Third, the injury survives the death of victims. Among the many injuries inflicted by the enslavement of African Americans, poverty ranks as fundamental to the system and enduring in its consequences. Therefore, hearings should be held in the Congress of the United States to establish the basis for reparations to African Americans, and to determine the amount of such reparations; whereafter, a private trust should be established for the benefit of all African Americans. (12)
The Manifesto articulates the legal principle for reparations for African Americans. According to Wade Henderson, Executive Director of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, this principle affirms that 'for every wrong there is a remedy, and ... that remedy is not extinguished by time itself, particularly when the manifestations of the problem are current day and visible to all'. (13) The issue, contends Henderson, is 'how do you establish that principle beyond a doubt?' (14)
Judiciously, the Manifesto does not specify how to assess the damage for reparations, calling for congressional hearings to determine the basis for compensation. This is not an insignificant concern, as Ali A. Mazrui argues in respect of the global case for reparations for African peoples: 'how do we assess the damage for reparations? Do we do it on the basis of damage to African people? Or do we do it on the basis of gain to economies which formerly used slave labor? So do you do it by benefit to recipients or do you do it by damage to African people?' (15)
While the Manifesto implicates the US government as a principal benefactor and enforcer of slavery, it intentionally does not specify the form or forms of reparations, except to call for the establishment of a 'private trust', which may imply financial as well as other forms of restitution. Mazrui has delineated three categories of reparations considered during his membership of the Group of Eminent Persons. The Group was established by the Organisation for African Unity (OAU) in 1992 to address reparations in the larger context of African slavery and colonisation. The categories, broadly defined, are 'capital transfer', 'skill transfer' and 'empowerment'. The first of the three is self-evident, implying financial compensation; the second concerns the acquisition of skills and presumably knowledge to compensate for the deprivation and underdevelopment caused by slavery and colonisation; the third, 'empowerment', calls for the apportionment to Africa of 'out of proportion power' in institutions like the World Bank and for veto authority in the Security Council of the United Nations. (16) Within these three categories, reparations can take several forms. For example, they may involve financial compensation for (246 years') unpaid labour during slavery, the restitution of lost property or other forms of dispensation to be determined for the incalculable loss of slave descendants' 'African culture, heritage, family, language[s] and religion[s] ... self-identity and self-worth ... destroyed by repression and hatred' (17) Reparations can also be directed to the struggle against pandemic illnesses like HIV/AIDS that have disproportionately affected Africans, as Henry Louis Gates has recently suggested. (18)
Historical context
The call for reparations in the US is not of recent vintage. On his match through Confederate territory in 1865, General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15 on 16 January which reserved land largely in the Sea Islands and on the South Carolina and Georgia coasts for the settlement of freed blacks. That year, nearly 40,000 former slaves settled on 400,000 acres in the 'Sherman Reservation'. (19) Although Sherman (and his contemporaries who advocated land distribution) did not define this as reparations, he ordered that...
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