The Problem of Reparations

Reparations was a subject easier to digest when it was a fringe subject among certain Black people I grew up around. We used to call the advocates “Hoteps,” but never to their faces. They were older, very eager, very strident "Afrocentrists". They were among the first to call themselves African before it became more fashionable. Some had the goal to return to Africa, long before we had the benefit of DNA tests to tell us where we were specifically from, but they never seemed to make it there. And also on their list was how the United States owed us descendants of slaves reparations. The Hoteps were part wise, well-read sages, and part comical dashiki-wearers who spiced their conversation with broken Swahili, so I didn't put too much thought in them and selected what I could from their experience. Now that the topic of reparations is mainstreamed, not only by Congressional Hearings but also its advocacy by presidential candidate/Oprah guru Marianne Williamson, my unease with the subject has focused and come down in a surprising place. While hindsight is 20/20, and those Hoteps in retrospect were much wiser women and men ahead of their time, with reparations, I am on the opposition - for principled and practical reasons. An Approach of the South African Communist Party An editorial from the South African Communist Party [SACP] published in 1993 in its journal, The African Communist, tackles an aspect of the reparations issue with a discussion on affirmative action, which is arguably one form of reparations. Entitled "Affirmative Action - Time for a Class Approach," the SACP, the oldest communist party in Africa, makes the analysis of affirmative action that we should to reparations. The SACP "thoroughly rejects" "the promotion of individuals into managerial posts and into shareholding," it writes. The Party then goes on to list issues pertinent to the working class of South Africa, like pensions for the elderly, paving roads and electrifying rural communities, free health care, and free, guaranteed education. "Once you speak of affirmative action in this way, you are on the right track," the article says emphatically. The urgency of the debate, the article goes on to contextualize, was provoked by maneuvers of the leadership of the ANC Youth League of the time, which was reportedly vying for dominant shareholder status in a cellular phone company in order to be financially independent of the ANC itself. "Is financial dependence on the ANC worse than financial dependence on the profitability of the cellular phone business? ... Most progressive formations," the SACP instructs further, "try to build financial independence by relying on their organized base." The SACP nears its conclusion with this warning: "We have said in the past that the imperialists and the local ruling bloc, having failed to smash the ANC, now have as their prime objective the transformation of the ANC. A key component of this strategy is, precisely, to transform leadership elements into a bureaucratic bourgeois stratum by giving them 'a slice of the action'." Keeping the interests of the working class central I relate this analysis to reparations because while the debate is still somewhat in the embryonic stage for some, in the hands of a capitalist country run by two capitalist parties, its unions weakened and labor movement attacked, any reparations risks totally overlooking the negative beneficiaries of chattel slavery - the working class, and this not only includes the Black working class and poor but also the white working class and poor and the First Nations, who have been overwhelmingly devastated at the disruption of their societies and total loss of their lands in order that those plantations be built in the first place. The dominant forces in this country are reactionary and cannot be trusted to implement a correct policy. African descendants in the US are owed reparations. Let's get that clear. But what was pushed by the Hoteps of my youth and being pushed now is not the way. I daresay most in the US give little thought to the several hundreds of years of forced labor; our ignorance about chattel slavery is largely the fault of our so-called educational institutions, the textbook industry, and a political class who resolutely do not want us to think much about the history of slavery, the slave trade, and its consequent enrichment of the West. But this ignorance is deepened when we look further. Reparations are also owed Africans throughout this continent. We’re familiar with the arguments for why reparations are needed here in the US; but the whole of the American continent benefited from African forced labor and our social units broken apart so we could be bought and sold like cattle. And as internationalists we must go even further in this discussion. Reparations must also be paid to Africa itself. Millions of young people - and they were young, many children - were kidnapped from complex, developing societies as part of the “underdeveloping” by Europe of Africa by white colonialism and capitalism. These kidnappings retarded immeasurably the organic processes these various civilizations were going through by depleting countless generations of brain trust from their progressively evolving communities. So justifiably we’ve just doubled or trebled or quadrupled the reparations bill due. Who’s going to write these checks? The Congress of the United States? Even if you believe the Democrats in the House are serious about this issue - and I for one do not - what chance will it have in the Republican Senate? Furthermore, what does it mean to give me a check? And what does this check really mean with this capitalist system still in place? A Black woman working in a typical service-industry job, very low pay, will absorb that check quickly and be no better the next month, or next year, when bills are due; whereas someone of more financial means might be able to invest the check in his 401[k]. By ignoring the class dimensions, the supposed benefit of reparations will be horribly lopsided.

That is why the SACP nailed it: "Once you speak of affirmative action in this way, you are on the right track" - social and physical infrastructures The push of AFRICOM, the French intrusions into their former "Francophone" colonies, apartheid Israel wanting membership in the African Union, and even the Chinese "investments" show the continent is still in play globally. And it is dubious whether any of these entities cares about Africans. Rather, it is what the Africans have that they care about. So what does my reparations check mean in the US when it purchases the continued rape of that Mother Continent as a source of cheap, mineral resources? Again, the SACP "thoroughly rejects" "the promotion of individuals into managerial posts and into shareholding,"
"Collective empowerment, not Black yuppies"

No, like the SACP we too must "thoroughly reject" this current reparation stance, and we must do so with internationalist, anti-capitalist principles and remember where our struggle is. Capitalism has always sought to "transform" sectors of Black and marginalized communities "into a bureaucratic bourgeois stratum by giving them 'a slice of the action'." We have much less polite names for these people too in the Black community.
The SACP directs in its 1993 editorial that "we must never allow ourselves to confuse the advancement of a new middle stratum with the totality of national liberation. In Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union," the analysis continues, "socialism collapsed because the party and the state increasingly substituted for the class they claimed to represent." "We want collective empowerment, not the individual enrichment of a small band of Black yuppies," concludes the SACP in its editorial, clarifying the right stance we should take towards the working class and poor, Black or white, Latin or Asian, First Nation or conquered Pacific Islander Besides that, I suspect this whole reparations production hearing in the House is not about reparations at all, and certainly not about resolving the issues of the working class and poor: it's about steering Black voters to 2020 and delivering us to another bad nominee.


Postscript:
This article was declined by the "editorial collective" of the Communist Party USA's People's World. The rejection doubted the historical accuracy of my work. Excluding my own experience with the Hoteps, I can only speculate what they meant since there was no elaboration. I'm old school. Old school journalism and old school educated in political science and history. I do not make assertions I cannot prove. My own experience was the Hoteps as the ones advocating reparations, and that is why it features in my opinion piece. It was not until much, much later I learned of Audley Moore - Queen Mother Moore - who had been very active as a member and organizer with the Communist Party but quit the Party in the 50's for what she perceived as the Party's abandonment of Black issues. Solid members of the Party dispute this contention that Black issues were ever abandoned, yet this is the contention of those who left and of many academic discourses. It was after quitting Moore was free to take up reparations and other issues once encouraged within the Party, and she is a pioneer. But growing up Queen Mother Moore was not the person I associated with reparations: this, unlike the underdevelopment of Africa by Europe by its thieving of Black generations and resources, cannot be debated.

Here Queen Mother Moore is with Winnie Mandela and Kwame Ture.