Monday, May 17, 2010

RENOVATED RAVITCH'S NEW BOOK

Commentary on Diane Ravitch

from Brother Dinizulu Tinnie

So miracles ARE possible! Diane Ravitch has come around to embrace common sense. Is this "intellectual honesty," as Wolfe asserts, or just more of the same, cranking out commentary that is critical of the status quo, as the marketplace of the times dictates.

I suppose there are circles in which Ms. Ravitch's apparent conversion (as some might call it) will be taken seriously and as something to be celebrated. They will suggest, as Professor Wolfe, does, that the decision-makers of the educational world should heed her advice and insights today (much the way the ideologues of yesteryear did, when she was putting forth ideas that made real educators cringe).
Personally, I might be counted among those useless cynics who just don't get excited about the slow progress of those whose on-the-job-training in life is gradually bringing them around to understanding what so many unheralded, un-credentialed, supposedly "uneducated" people have been knowing and saying for years. (This critique of "choice" and testing certainly fits that profile.)

Cynicism aside, all constructive criticism is good, but it is only really good (in that it produces good results) if it serves to light the proverbial lamp rather than merely curse the darkness. To write a book and make a name for oneself by criticizing failed policies, as a shift from criticizing those who criticized those same policies two decades ago, is OK, but it is still more necessary (and interesting) to discuss solutions rather than problems. And the problem with education in this country is not a procedural one (should we rely on choice and testing or not?), but a much deeper-seated malaise that is at the root of defining what education is at all, and what its purpose should be.

Prof. Wolfe, making the most of this latest Ravitch opus and what it represents, implies that the answer to that question lies in imparting the kind of rigorous discipline and intellectual honesty that Ravitch herself is supposed to have benefited from in her own education, with one teacher. (And the rest? But that's another story...) We might, in the spirit of honest intellectual inquiry, ask how integrated that school was, and how diverse was the student body who benefited from that teacher's inspiration. Indeed, we might ask about that teacher's own upbringing and background.

To be almost ludicrously simple-minded about this, I will introduce an idea that I used to share with my community college students, partly as a reality check for us all, and partly as a way of letting them know how much I appreciated the decision and the effort they made to come to college at all. (This was particularly the case with evening classes and more mature adults.) What I pointed out to them is that education as we know it did not originate as something for regular folks who have to work jobs, cook meals, make beds, iron clothes, etc. It was an elitist activity. Libraries were in the homes of wealthy people who had servants and had time to read, and write, and exchange their intellectual observations with total open-mindedness except, arguably, if it came to questioning their own socio-political status. Or, as Frederick Douglass observed most incisively in this context, of all the respected gentlemen who scientifically debate whether slavery is right or wrong, there is not a single one who would agree that slavery is right for HIM!

Any number of examples can be used to make the same point, which is that education functions very much to maintain the social status quo. This, arguably, is universally human, but the question is whether the status quo in question is a system of traditions and values that challenge all human beings to do what they do best and to be the best at what they do, or one which is invested in maintaining unearned privileges for one segment of the population at the expense of another, or suppressing the opportunities of one segment of the population for the material (but not moral or spiritual) benefit of another, which is, I think it can be said fairly, what we are facing in the USA.

What does America produce, really, in terms of both products and people? It is not written anywhere in the Constitution that the purpose of the nation is to be a marketplace to make money for those who can best exploit it? Yet, the prevailing myth and behavior has made capitalism is a virtual state religion, not to be questioned on any account, and money the equivalent of power and justice.
So whatever it takes to have money is OK, if one succeeds.

This has gotten so out of hand that education and health care are perceived to be rights of those with money while the rest are disposable or only need to be managed so as not to cause problems because of the problems that are being caused for them. University education is no longer a quest for knowledge ("liberal arts" is all but a dead concept) but access to a network.

The dream, as in plantation days, is to be among the brains while others do the hard work to make the dream come true. (Today it is "globalized" sweat shops rather than plantations, as those forced-labor camps are still euphemistically called). "Success" is equated with the monetary "bottom line at the end of the day."

I have on occasion offered a contrasting model, just for the sake of comparison, and to shine a light from a different direction on the issue. The motto of the old Kingdom and modern State of Hawai'i translates roughly as, "The life of the land is perpetuated by righteousness." Righteousness (which can mean a lot of things) is defined, in turn, by the Hula discipline, of which the dance is just the most outward expression:

It is about having our relationship right with God, with Nature, and with the rest of Humanity. It is practiced by practicing "doing the right thing, in the right way, in the right place, with the right people, at the right time, the first time."

This is one example to illustrate what a journalist friend of mine once referred to as the difference between education in the US and elsewhere in the world. "Elsewhere, the purpose of education is to learn how to live and live with. In America it is to get a job and make money." It is so much so that even the slightest questioning of that is dismissed as "impractical idealism" and therefore useless.

Maybe the real question is how PUBLIC schools, which embody the very noble and sensible idea that ALL people need to be educated, got hijacked into this whole matrix of capitalism-as-religion, social-Darwinism, glorification of the rich and demeaning of the poor, etc.
Part of the answer is the elephant in the room.
History might objectively show that the last 500 years or so of human history have been a bold experiment in what the world would look like if it were run by the merchant-and-banker class, including the industrial and information revolutions, etc. But there is a serious subjective factor which cannot be overlooked, which is the doctrine of "white supremacy" gone global.

This is not an indictment of any "race" (there is only one human race anyway) or group of people, but it is a fact that this doctrine has served to entrench the cancer of greed, to justify hugely unhealthy disparities in health and well-being, to consume inordinate amounts of resources, in order to maintain an artificial and unnatural social order that can only be sustained by a regime of unrelenting violence and terrorism (either threatened or actual).
The presumptive myth that "God" has somehow ordained one group genetically (not earned by any heroic effort) to rule and prey upon all others is at the heart of the present world order. That it is accepted, promoted, justified, propagated, and sustained by many of the "best educated" minds should give us serious pause to consider what we mean by education in the first place, regardless of whether such low-level operational decisions as choice or testing is involved.

We have heard many times that the challenge for the American people in the 21st century is to "take our country back" from the few, the arrogant, and the greedy -- the very foxes who design and maintain the henhouses into which we entrust our children for education.
Renovated Ravitch is right, as Wolfe points out, in declaring that the charter school "solution" is not one. After all, "until all of us are free, none of us is free," and that is still true. It seems to me that the solution has to be in affirming the value of every human being, rather than debating how some, but not all, should be "educated" in dysfunctional schools with questionable purposes.

Is it not interesting that in the present financial crisis, as school budgets get cut, the first thing to go are the arts programs -- the very ones which help each child to find his or her own voice and expression -- because it is supposedly more important that they be drilled with facts and procedures that will make them, what?, "productive members of society" (sounds like the same thing they said as they unloaded the traumatized, emaciated survivors of the Middle Passage).

Ravitch's new book might stir up a bit of a tempest in a teapot and might, most importantly, reap some profits for author and publisher, but a cynical view might see it as so much other inadequate research efforts to eradicate this or that disease because once the cure is found, there will be no more employment for the researchers. Obviously, the books contributions are much more positive than that, however, and, if anything, Dr. Ravitch's opportunity to exercise research as an art form and a fulfilment of her personhood can be celebrated and appreciated as an example of the kind of opportunity that ALL children should have.
Even those who disagree with its premise or question its motives will do well to be reminded of the African proverb, "When the fool speaks, the wise person listens." At the very least, she has made a contribution to the discussion, as has Prof. Wolfe. If nothing else, it touched enough of a nerve fro me to stop what I needed to be doing to weigh in verbosely upon it, for whatever that might be worth.

The problems to be solved and the solutions to be implemented won't happen overnight. "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." So we appreciate all forward steps along the path, recognizing that as we stagger toward health, there will be some sideways and backward steps as well, but these, too, have their purpose, and must be taken, for us to regain our balance and progress with our eyes on the prize.

That's the view form here.

DGT
Miami

VHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVHVH

The Education of Diane Ravitch

Will and Deni McIntyre/Corbis

May 6, 2010-- nytimes.com
By ALAN WOLFE

THE DEATH AND LIFE OF THE GREAT AMERICAN SCHOOL SYSTEM

How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education

By Diane Ravitch

283 pp. Basic Books. $26.95

Attending high school in Houston in the 1950s, Diane Ravitch came into contact with a teacher named Ruby Ratliff. A passionate lover of literature and a fierce editor of homework, Ratliff, following Tennyson, told Ravitch “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.” The student evidently followed the teacher’s advice. Ravitch, a historian of American education and assistant secretary of education under the first George Bush, has long sought to find out what makes schools work. She has now found what that is, or at least what it isn’t: choice and testing. Her case against both is unyielding.

Ravitch was lucky to have Ratliff as her teacher — and we are lucky to have Ravitch as ours. Education was once considered purely a state and local matter. In the past 30 or so years it has become a national political football, with left and right fighting over various proposals, while nothing ever seems to get fixed. Meanwhile, many schools remain essentially segregated; how much you earn has a great deal to do with where you were educated; and even the best and brightest seem to know less geography and grapple with less history than when Ruby Ratliff discussed “Ozymandias” with her Houston class.

Ravitch’s offer to guide us through this mess comes with a catch: she has changed her mind. Once an advocate of choice and testing, in “The Death and Life of the Great American School System” she throws cold water on both. Along the way she casts a skeptical eye on the results claimed by such often-praised school reformers as New York’s Anthony Alvarado and San Diego’s Alan Bersin, reviews a sheaf of academic studies of school effectiveness and delivers the most damning criticism I have ever read of the role philanthropic institutions sometimes play in our society.

“Never before,” she writes of the Gates Foundation, was there an entity “that gave grants to almost every major think tank and advocacy group in the field of education, leaving no one willing to criticize its vast power and unchecked influence.”

The trouble all started, in her telling, with Milton Friedman, whose 1955 article “The Role of Government in Education” advocated the idea that parents should be given vouchers that would enable them to purchase schooling of their choice. In the Reagan administration, Friedman’s essay provided the rationale for efforts to promote what Secretary of Education William Bennett called the three C’s: content, character and choice. Before long, support for school choice became bipartisan when urban public officials, many of them black Democrats, saw in vouchers a way to give minority parents the same options available to middle-class families who could afford houses in desirable school districts.

Testing, as Ravitch shows, also has something of a trans-ideological intellectual history. Though conservatives historically opposed a strong federal role in education, in the 1990s they began looking with dismay at evidence that schools were failing and turned to the idea of national standards as a way to overcome the problem. Liberals, meanwhile, hoped to see more money made available to the schools, and if testing was the price to be paid to identify schools that were failing poor and minority children, so be it. No Child Left Behind, passed in the fall of 2001, seems to belong to another political century: Edward M. Kennedy, a firebrand liberal, and George W. Bush, a compassionate conservative, were equally proud of it.

Choice never fulfilled its promises, Ravitch argues, because its advocates spent more time talking about how education should be delivered than examining what education is. With so little effort devoted to the promotion of a sound curriculum, voucher schools, like those established in Milwaukee, turned out to offer few if any gains for those who attended them. As for charter schools, they have skimmed off the most motivated students without producing consistently better results than traditional public schools. She is skeptical of the charter movement’s free-market model of competition and choice.

“At the very time that the financial markets were collapsing, and as regulation of financial markets got a bad name,” Ravitch points out, “many of the leading voices in American education assured the public that the way to educational rejuvenation was through deregulation.” Instead of treating markets as a panacea, she argues, we should look at the data, the latest of which shows that charter schools as a whole do not do better than traditional schools. Given that result, we should be working harder to preserve the benefits of community and continuity that neighborhood schools offer.

Testing experienced much the same fate as vouchers. Knowing that their students would be tested and that the results would be used to evaluate which schools would be rewarded, educators began teaching to the tests, at the expense of sound curriculum.

But educational testing, Ravitch shows, is inexact, roughly the way public opinion polling is. Far from holding schools accountable, testing resulted in massive cynicism. Meanwhile the level of education received by many students remained “disastrously low.” Ravitch points to a 2009 study sponsored by the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago showing that the increases in the performance of the city’s eighth graders in math and reading were due mostly to changes in testing procedures, and that in any case such gains evaporated by the time those students reached high school.

Some may ask whether we should trust someone who was once widely viewed as a conservative but now actually says nice things about teachers’ unions. But for all the attention paid to Ravitch’s change of heart, she has always been less an ideologue than a critic of educational fads, whether the more touchy-feely forms of progressive education popular in the 1960s and ’70s or the new nostrums of choice and testing. Ravitch now supports ideas associated with the left not because she is on the left. She does so for the simple reason that choice and testing had their chance and failed to deliver.

Ravitch ends with a call for a voluntary national curriculum, and believes that a consensus around better education is possible. On this point I do not share her optimism: parents who want creation science for their kids are not going to accept the teaching of evolution, and any push to establish common curriculum is likely to raise an outcry similar to that surrounding the 1994 history standards, drawn up by a panel of left-leaning historians and vociferously denounced by Lynne Cheney, the former chairwoman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, and other conservatives. (Ravitch writes that she was “disappointed” by the partisan nature of the standards, but “thought they could be fixed by editing.”)

I have always relied on Ravitch’s intellectual honesty when battles become intense. And her voice is especially important now. President Obama and his secretary of education, Arne Duncan, seem determined to promote reforms relying on testing and choice, despite fresh data calling their benefits into question. I wish we could all share Ravitch’s open-mindedness in seeing what the data really tells us. Somehow, I doubt that’s what will carry the day.

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Alan Wolfe, a political scientist at Boston College, is writing a book about political evil.

__,_._,___

An Update on the Doll Test Still Shows Deep Racist Internalization

<<"All kids on the one hand are exposed to the stereotypes" she said. "What's really significant here is that white children are learning or maintaining those stereotypes much more strongly than the African-American children. Therefore, the white youngsters are even more stereotypic in their responses concerning attitudes, beliefs and attitudes and preferences than the African-American children.">>

Watch videos at:

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2010/05/14/ac.doll.part2.cnn
http://cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2010/05/14/ac.doll.part3.cnn

http://cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2010/05/17/ac.mother.doll.test.cnn
http://cnn.com/video/?/video/bestoftv/2010/05/17/ac.father.doll.test.cnn

CNN's Anderson Cooper creates a short videodoc revealing how deeply embedded white supremacist ideas about whiteness and blackness within the minds of our children: Black/White/Latino/Asian. It also indicates how the US educational system and the dominant white cultural media help rationalize these racist misconceptions.

(CNN) -- A white child looks at a picture of a black child and says she's bad because she's black. A black child says a white child is ugly because he's white. A white child says a black child is dumb because she has dark skin.

This isn't a schoolyard fight that takes a racial turn, not a vestige of the "Jim Crow" South; these are American schoolchildren in 2010.

Nearly 60 years after American schools were desegregated by the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling, and more than a year after the election of the country's first black president, white children have an overwhelming white bias, and black children also have a bias toward white, according to a new study commissioned by CNN.

Renowned child psychologist and University of Chicago professor Margaret Beale Spencer, a leading researcher in the field of child development, was hired as a consultant by CNN. She designed the pilot study and used a team of three psychologists to implement it: two testers to execute the study and a statistician to help analyze the results.

Her team tested 133 children from schools that met very specific economic and demographic requirements. In total, eight schools participated: four in the greater New York City area and four in Georgia.

In each school, the psychologists tested children from two age groups: 4 to 5 and 9 to 10.
Since this is a pilot study and not a fully funded scientific study, the sample size and race selection were limited. But according to Spencer, it was satisfactory to yield conclusive results. A pilot study is normally the first step in creating a larger scientific study and often speaks to overall trends that require more research.

Full doll study results

Spencer's test aimed to re-create the landmark Doll Test from the 1940s. Those tests, conducted by psychologists Kenneth and Mamie Clark, were designed to measure how segregation affected African-American children.

The Clarks asked black children to choose between a white doll and -- because at the time, no brown dolls were available -- a white doll painted brown. They asked black children a series of questions and found they overwhelmingly preferred white over brown. The study and its conclusions were used in the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education case, which led to the desegregation of American schools.

1947 Doll Test results

In the new study, Spencer's researchers asked the younger children a series of questions and had them answer by pointing to one of five cartoon pictures that varied in skin color from light to dark. The older children were asked the same questions using the same cartoon pictures, and were then asked a series of questions about a color bar chart that showed light to dark skin tones.
The tests showed that white children, as a whole, responded with a high rate of what researchers call "white bias," identifying the color of their own skin with positive attributes and darker skin with negative attributes. Spencer said even black children, as a whole, have some bias toward whiteness, but far less than white children.

"All kids on the one hand are exposed to the stereotypes" she said. "What's really significant here is that white children are learning or maintaining those stereotypes much more strongly than the African-American children. Therefore, the white youngsters are even more stereotypic in their responses concerning attitudes, beliefs and attitudes and preferences than the African-American children."

Spencer says this may be happening because "parents of color in particular had the extra burden of helping to function as an interpretative wedge for their children. Parents have to reframe what children experience ... and the fact that white children and families don't have to engage in that level of parenting, I think, does suggest a level of entitlement. You can spend more time on spelling, math and reading, because you don't have that extra task of basically reframing messages that children get from society."

iReport: Where do we go from here?

Spencer was also surprised that children's ideas about race, for the most part, don't evolve as they get older. The study showed that children's ideas about race change little from age 5 to age 10.

"The fact that there were no differences between younger children, who are very spontaneous because of where they are developmentally, versus older children, who are more thoughtful, given where they are in their thinking, I was a little surprised that we did not find differences."

Spencer said the study points to major trends but is not the definitive word on children and race.

It does lead her to conclude that even in 2010, "we are still living in a society where dark things are devalued and white things are valued."

-------------------

CNN's Jill Billante and Chuck Hadad contributed to this report.

=========================================

Monday, May 10, 2010

Our Message To The Workers Of South Africa During Workers Month!!
South African Communist Party Red Alert

May 2010
http://www.sacp.org.za/main.php?include=pubs/umsebenzi/2010/vol9-08.html

Throughout April, together with our allies, the SACP waged a campaign to intensify the struggle against corruption. We launched the 34-days of intensified struggle on the 29th March at a highly successful seminar on corruption in Braamfontein. Through April month, and in honour of our fallen hero, cde Chris Hani, we carried forward the campaign in communities and in work-places. On Friday 30th April there was a massive SACP-led march in Durban against corruption led by our general secretary Cde Blade Nzimande, and COSATU general secretary, Cde Zwelinzima Vavi.

And on the following day, May Day 2010, as SACP speakers, together with our comrades from COSATU and the ANC, we used the occasion of Workers` Day countrywide to conclude this first phase of what must now be an ongoing and intensified struggle against the scourge of corruption.

But why has the SACP chosen the theme of an intensified struggle against corruption? Are there not other important issues confronting the working class in SA at this time? Yes, there are many challenges, but unless we defeat the scourge of corruption everything else will be lost.

The struggle against corruption is a moral struggle, but it is not just a moral struggle. It is part and parcel of the struggle of the working class and popular forces against those who are compromising, weakening, undermining and literally selling out our National Democratic Revolution.

To understand why we say this, it is important to step back a little and think about the present SA reality.

16 years of democracy...

and yet our people still live in poverty

On Tuesday this past week, we celebrated 16 years of democracy in SA. In those 16 years, together, we have achieved many things. And yet the workers and poor of SA continue to suffer with poverty wages, unemployment, land hunger, poor health-care facilities and generally poor education and training opportunities.

Over the past 16 years we have achieved many things - but:

When we started out in 1994 the unemployment rate (narrowly defined) was at crisis levels of 24%. By the middle of 2008, just before the global capitalist crisis hit SA, and after 15 years of economic growth, where was the unemployment rate (narrowly defined)? It was more or less EXACTLY where it had been when we started out - 24%!! (Since the recession, and the loss of nearly 1 million jobs last year, this unemployment crisis has worsened) When we started out in 1994, after centuries of racial oppression, we were one of the most unequal societies in the world. And now, after 16 years of "service delivery" to our people, where are we? Shockingly, our income inequality (measured by the so- called GINI coefficient) tells us that we remain as unequal as ever. We are one of the worst in the world. And this inequality remains highly racialised. When we started out in 1994, in our RDP document we estimated that the housing shortage was 3 million. Incredibly, over the last 16 years we have actually built more than 3 million low cost houses. So what is the housing shortage now? According to the Department of Human Settlements the housing backlog is somewhere between 2 and 3 million houses!!

Why do we seem to be going around in a circle? Why, when we have done so many things over the last 16 years, do we seem to be arriving back in the same place?

The DA and other opposition parties tell us that we cannot go on blaming apartheid. And, in a way, the SACP agrees with them - (but only to disagree with them radically, of course, in the end). Yes, it is true that we cannot go on blaming apartheid. It is CAPITALISM that we must blame.

After all, we have dismantled the apartheid system, we have abolished apartheid laws and the apartheid constitution. But beneath apartheid there was always a system supporting and shaping it. and that system was a capitalist system.

And before apartheid, during the period of segregationism of Jan Smuts there was a system that rolled on and on, shaping the destiny of our country and its people.and that system was a capitalist system.

And before segregationism, during the period of colonial conquest and dispossession there was a system that sent armies to our shores, that laid down railway lines and built colonial ports, that coerced millions of peasants into migrant labour. It was a system that underpinned the formation of SA itself back in 1910, now almost exactly 100 years ago..and that system was a capitalist system.

We have abolished apartheid, Smuts has come and gone, the era of imperial conquest and settlement of our country lies in the past.but what continues to roll on is the same oppressive system of capitalism.

And here, we are not talking about capitalism in general, but the particularly virulent brand of semi- colonial capitalism that has been imposed on SA over the last one hundred years. It is a brand of capitalism that persists to this day.

If we are to understand why, after 16 years of democracy and a huge amount of "service delivery" to our people, we are still going around in a circle - then it is absolutely essential that we understand the nature of this South African capitalist growth path. We need to understand it, in order collectively to uproot it and destroy it, and place our country on a new developmental path.

South Africa`s semi-colonial capitalist growth path

In order to understand the main features of the capitalist growth path that have been in place over the last 100 years, it is necessary to first remember how capitalism came to SA. It did not emerge organically. It was imposed, brand-new, out of the box, imported from the most advanced capitalist countries of the late 19th century. It was the mining revolution in the late 19th century shipped in from outside that marked the beginnings of SA`s capitalist revolution.

Ever since, our economy has been dominated by these realities that shaped our society:

Still today, SA is over-dependent on EXPORTING unprocessed, primary commodities, like minerals. Still today, SA is over-dependent on IMPORTING manufactured goods, machinery and technology and luxury goods. Still today, our economy is dominated by a web of powerful mining and financial corporations. Still today, there is a very high level of monopoly concentration in our economy - the many scandals around price-fixing of bread or steel, for instance, uncovered by the Competition Commission, are an indication of this. Linked to all of the above - our small- and medium-scale industries are very poorly developed and our manufacturing sector is weak (and it has become even weaker over the last ten years as many parts of our country have been de- industrialised). Yet, these are the sectors that are generally most labour-intensive. Still today, as at the beginning of capitalism in SA, we have a very divided labour market. On the one hand, a small stratum of skilled artisans and technicians - formerly almost all exclusively white. And, on the other hand, a mass of unskilled and semi-skilled labourers. Originally the majority of these workers were migrant workers to the mines. But with the development of capitalism, there arose a more settled, urbanised black working class - but this didn`t change the highly divided labour market; We continue to have a divided working class because our education and training system still reproduces a tiny minority of skilled persons, and a mass of under-skilled and often unemployable people. We have a divided working class because the mass of workers and poor continue to be marginalised in bleak and faraway dormitory townships. Even our 3 million RDP houses have reproduced this kind of apartheid space - Group Areas live on in reality, if not in law. Now they are reproduced by the capitalist property market.

Combined together, these key features of SA`s capitalist growth path lie at the heart of the explanation to the question: Why, 16 years into democracy, do we seem to be going around in a circle?

We have to place SA onto a different growth path. This is exactly was President Zuma said in his State of Nation Address to Parliament this year. This is exactly was cde Pravin Gordhan said in his budget speech this year. This is exactly what government had in mind when it unveiled our new Industrial Policy Action Programme this year. IPAP is a critical component of changing our present semi-colonial capitalist growth path. The same applies to all of our other strategic priorities - job creation, rural development, health-care including an NHI, education and training, breaking out of the dormitory township mould and building mixed-income communities, fighting crime and corruption - these are not disconnected challenges - they are all interconnected and integral to putting our society onto a different developmental path.

But why did we not begin to do this a lot sooner?

The subjective factor - the 1996 class project

So far, we have been looking at the OBJECTIVE reality that we are confronting - this semi-colonial capitalist system that goes on reproducing poverty, unemployment and inequality. But to explain why we have not seriously transformed this objective reality, it is also important to look at ourselves, the SUBJECTIVE reality - in other words, we need to look at what has been happening within our own movement - the ANC-led alliance.

Over the last ten years, after a difficult and protracted ideological and organisational struggle within our movement - the SACP, together with a wide range of Alliance forces, from the branch level up, succeeded in defeating the domination within the ANC and government of an anti-left, reformist current - what we called "the 1996 class project".

In the media, and among our opponents, our struggle against this tendency has often been portrayed as a narrow sectarian battle between personalities and factions simply to seize control over the ANC. It is important to keep reminding ourselves that this was NEVER what OUR struggle against the "1996 class project" was about.

We said it was a struggle against REFORMISM, and for a very precise reason. From the mid-1990s, the ANC came to be dominated by a tendency that was unable and unwilling to recognise that advancing and defending the NDR after 1994 required an intensified struggle to radically transform (and not merely reform) the semi-colonial features of SA`s century-long capitalist growth path.

Instead, they believed that market-led growth (i.e. in practice, the perpetuation of the same semi-colonial growth path), but now under the co-direction of a new black capitalist and political class stratum, was the key strategic objective of the post-1994 NDR. "Go out and get filthy rich!" they told ANC leadership cadres.

But this "1996 class project" had a whole series of internal contradictions. One of these contradictions was the tension between:

the requirements for restoring capitalist accumulation back to its traditional growth path after a decade of deepening crisis in the last years of apartheid, on the one hand; and the primitive accumulation process required for establishing a new stratum of black capitalists ("capitalists without capital"), on the other.

The first objective required that the new political stratum use state power to create an investor friendly environment, to facilitate conditions for major South African corporations to expand regionally and internationally, to take a tough line on the budget deficit (i.e. reduce the tax "burden" on the bourgeoisie), and to address bottle-necks that had built up during the last 15 years of apartheid rule. It also required the stabilisation of bourgeois "rule of a law", the guarantee of property rights, and "sound" political management of the state (i.e "sound" as assessed by the international ratings agencies and transnational auditing firms).

The second process was faced with the dilemma of how a stratum of aspirant capitalists was to acquire capital. Two inter-linked strategies have been used to spur the creation of BEE capital:

Using legislation and other means, the existing bourgeoisie has been required to reserve a slice of the action for BEE entrepreneurs. In essence, this has been a marriage of convenience between elements of the new political caste in the state and established capital. In exchange for the lobola of "market friendly" state policies, established capital grudgingly agreed to release a percentage of ownership stakes to the new elite. We know, of course, that this kind of narrow BEE empowerment has been full of weaknesses. Targets are seldom met.

Not all of the hungry capitalists without capital can be accommodated in the board-room. BEE capitalists were often given highly marginal operations (like many of the BEE mines - see the recent Aurora scandal). Much of BEE capital is also highly indebted capital. It is often shares on loan requiring re-payment over a five-year period, for instance, and subject to the fluctuations of the stock market. BEE capital is, therefore, also typically not productive capital - but rather capital taken out of productive circulation - and therefore out of job-creating investment. Moreover, this BEE capitalist stratum often does not, and cannot, play the full role of a capitalist class. Its ownership role is often nominal (it fronts for others), and its active managerial role in the investment and redistribution of capital is limited. These are the reasons we have described it as having "compradorial" tendencies - i.e. it often acts as a go-between, representing the interests of big capital (both domestic and international) in local deals, particularly state tenders.

The use of BEE charters and legislation to levy capital from the existing bourgeoisie to empower a new stratum of black capitalists has been ONE source of BEE capital. The second major route has been the shameless looting of public resources. Like all emergent capitalists before them - from the modernising landowners of 17th century England who enclosed the commons, to the Randlords of South Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries - our own emerging black capitalists have often shown little concern for the niceties of law, or respect for public property and resources. Over the past decade and a half, there has been a massive looting of public resources, using state procurement whether on a grand scale (as with the arms package) or on the micro, local government level. Privatisation deals, tender- preneurship, javelin-throwing, inflated "performance" bonuses in parastatals, have all been mechanisms for this kind of primitive accumulation. Some of this has had the sanction of "law", much of it has been plain corruption.

It is easy to see how, sooner or later, the 1996 class project would run into a series of internal contradictions, particularly between the requirements of upholding a bourgeois rule of law that would meet the approval of Ernest & Young and their kind, on the one hand, and the inherent lawlessness implicit in a primitive accumulation process parasitic on the state and public resources, on the other.

From around 2005, the contradictions between the interests of those who were now firmly established as capitalists (and who were happy for a blind eye to be turned on their own earlier plundering) and those who felt they had not yet sufficiently arrived began to play themselves out within the ANC and government. The leading personalities associated with the1996 class project were unable to maintain stability among the contradictory forces that they themselves had unleashed. This contributed directly to their defeat at the ANC`s Polokwane 2007 national conference.

As we have said before, the forces propelling this defeat were themselves not united. On the one hand, the SACP, COSATU and many others within the ANC advanced a PRINCIPLED criticism of the reformist POLICIES of the1996 class project. On the other hand, there were those whose opposition to the circle around former President Mbeki was rooted not in policy considerations, but in petty personal rivalries, frustrated business ambitions, and a sense of injustice that the rule of law was being bent for others, but not for them.

The new tendency

The current challenges and tensions within the ANC are essentially between:

those for whom Polokwane was about clearing more space for their own appetites, for their own turn at the primitive accumulation feeding-trough; and all of us, those for whom the ousting of the Mbeki group was about creating the conditions to change policy, to focus on the key task of placing our country on to a different growth path, to focus on our major strategic priorities

- job creation, health-care, education, rural development and fighting crime and corruption.

And this is why, on this May Day 2010, as the SACP, we are saying that the key OBJECTIVE challenge of our national democratic struggle in 2010 going forward is to place our country onto a new developmental path

But if we are to rise to this objective challenge, then we must, simultaneously address the key SUBJECTIVE challenge - to defeat the scourge of corruption in our society in general, including in the private sector, of course, but, especially, within our own ranks, within our own movement, and within government.

Over 40 years ago, a young Chris Hani bravely drafted and attached his signature to a memorandum addressed to the ANC leadership in exile. In the memorandum Hani and his co-signatories sought to analyse why the armed struggle was flagging. The memorandum identified factionalism, personal favouritism, a loss of revolutionary zeal and morality and the corroding impact of corruption within our own ranks. Some in the leadership at the time had Hani arrested for "mutiny". However, others in the ANC leadership recognized the wisdom and constructive intentions of cde Chris and his comrades and they were eventually released. The memorandum played a direct role in the convening of the ANC`s famous Morogoro Conference in 1969, and this, in turn, led to the re-vitalisation of our movement and a dramatic upturn in popular revolutionary struggle in our country in the next decade.

In 2010, let us honour the revolutionary memory of Cde Chris Hani. On the shop-floor, in parastatals, in the public and private sectors, in our communities and organisations, let us all solemnly commit ourselves to stand up against and root out all forms of abuse and corruption.

Together, let us be vigilant!
Tivusa Tingwenya!
Let the tenderpreneurs, the fraudsters, the rent- seekers, those who grow fat from stealing from the people, let them tremble!
A LUTA CONTINUA! LONG LIVE THE FIGHTING SPIRIT OF CHRIS HANI!!
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Monday, May 03, 2010

Skip-Ass Gates' Deliberate Mis-Read

of the African Slave Trade

I am posting a response to Harvard Professor's, Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, 22 April 2010 Op-Ed piece on the African collaboration in the multicentury long African slave trade. This response is from my good friend and great Miami-based activist/artist, Dinizulu Tinnie.

I would like to add, however - that the multicentury transAtlantic and TransAfrica slave trade was not static. It evolved over time from a crude grab and snatch level to a more nuanced and complex form as you described. Like these Gatesian folk look at Africa as a homogeneous country, they also look at slavery as stuck in one period of its evolution as seen thru the mythical lens of white supremacy and deep Black Ignorance. --SEA

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Dinnizulu Tinnie writes:

On or about April 23, I shared the NY Times article by Skip Gates which is at this link: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/23/opinion/23gates.html

At the time, I promised (or threatened) a reply. It is almost impossible not to reply to such a statement except in a lengthy way, unfortunately, but I would respectfully offer the following points for consideration.

DGT

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Dr. Henry Louis “Skip” Gates, Jr. has what it is probably fair to say that most academicians lack, which is the quality -- for better or worse -- of being a showman. He is credited, along with Dr. Cornel West, with having restored to American society the role and persona of the “public intellectual,” and they have done so with the added coup of making that role one that is dominated by African American scholars. As a showman, Dr. Gates has demonstrated an aptly remarkable knack for attracting the spotlight of attention, as in the brouhaha of his confrontation with the Cambridge, MA, police as he “broke into his own home,” which even garnered the attention and involvement of the President of the United States. This follows less publicized controversies, such as the television series of his trip to Africa, which left many of his African/American countrymen and women frankly embarrassed to have been represented that way to dignitaries and common folks of the Motherland.

As a scholar, it is probably fair to say that he has been trading in the market value, to some, monetary or otherwise, of keeping the issue of “race” alive and important. This is not to say that it is unimportant – as too many people every day pay the price of racist oppression, discrimination and exploitation. But it is to recognize the scientific reality that our commonly held notions of “race” are a myth, as modern DNA evidence has proven again and again. (The Human Genome Project revealed that fully 98.2% of all human DNA is identical, so that only 1.2% of our entire genetic makeup accounts for ALL of the differences we perceive among individuals, including height, body type, and certain personality traits, as well as what are called “phenotypical” [“racial”] characteristics. Indeed, one DNA study showed that the two ethnic groups that were the most genetically similar were Australian Aborigines and Finnish Lapplanders. So much for the “scientific” basis for genetic entitlement to unearned privileges.)

Not only is “race” an arbitrary and mythical construct which originated in the era of European exploration and colonization, with its doctrine of “White Supremacy,” as a tool of racism itself. To keep the concept and the issue alive, by focusing on “race relations” is, in fact, a backhanded way of assuring the White Supremacists that they are still important, that they still have the power to control other people’s lives. (Racism has a very hard time accepting the fact that, even during the slavery era, enslaved people had many more important things to think about and to do than the fact that they were legally enslaved.)

That, from the lens through which I am looking, is the backdrop for this latest Gates flourish, entitled “Ending the Slavery Blame-Game,” which appeared in The New York Times of April 22, 2010. The basic premise of the article is that the history of slavery -- and its continuing aftermath, which have engendered an inevitable discussion of reparations, has been skewed by reparations activists to focus on the misdeeds of “white” people, while ignoring the role played by Africans in supplying the slave ships with captives in the first place.

As a showman, Dr. Gates has found yet another topic to throw on the table that is guaranteed to be sensational, and no doubt will stimulate the kind of discussions and debates that will keep his name on the lips of many for some time to come. (The Cambridge Cop coup had pretty much run its course anyway.) As a scholar and public intellectual, he has put together a well-researched essay, worthy of both academic peer review and popular consumption, which addresses one of those historical realities that is bound to be “uncomfortable” for some, while perhaps being “comforting” to others. In any case, it is hard to argue that it is not a topic whose time has come for an open

The questions that remain are whether this particular article contributes to the better-being of society by offering useful and constructive information, and, if so, what makes it useful. The first of these questions has to be answered by society itself; the article is literally what we make it, but the answer to the second has much to do with what we can make of it.

Amongst the reactions that this essay is bound to generate, my own cannot promise to be of the same academic quality, and represents only one response among hundreds of millions of possibilities, but it is also the same response that I have offered for years. We can begin by accepting the basic truth of Gates’ premise, that a) Africans sold Africans to the so-called “slave traders,” and that this could not have been accomplished except with African participation and support; and b) the question of reparations must take this into account.

Of course, none of this is new. This point has been made many times in many places (Black conservative commentator Thomas Sowell made the same point, as I recall, back in the 1990s, for example) , but not perhaps with the impact of an article in a prominent newspaper with a showman-scholar’s by-line. And the response to it is new either. While it may be quite true that “Africans sold Africans,” this is frankly inane because it is like saying that Europeans killed Europeans during World Wars I and II. The nations of Europe which fought wars and captured prisoners whom they effectively enslaved did not consider themselves fighting fellow Europeans who all shared the same culture or language, but as separate nations, as in Africa.

Why would it be logical to expect Africa, a continent several times the size of Europe, with literally thousands of different cultures and languages, to be any different. As has been often observed by educators striving to undo old stereotypes, “Africa is a continent, not a country.” Different nations of Africans fought and took captives from other nations. Arguably, the same can be said to be true throughout the human race in one form or another.

Moreover, the idea of ridding one’s country of its enemies and unwanted population by sending them on ships across the ocean was not unique to Africa. It was common enough in Europe to dispose in this manner of convicts, debtors, indentured servants, persecuted religious sects, and others with a reason not to stay in Europe. To this might be added the practice of “Shanghai-ing” sailors, who would awake from an induced drunken stupor or a knock on the head, aboard a ship far out at sea, as part of the crew.

These points may prove that the behavior which Dr. Gates ascribes to Africans might be more universally human than racist propaganda would suggest, but it does not negate his basic point that, if it is a matter of identifying the perpetrators of the crime of “slave trading,” then Africans must be included (just as Europeans must be recognized as the slaughterers of fellow Europeans). However, he seems to ignore some of the factors that brought about this African involvement in this nasty business. He states that “The sad truth is that without complex business partnerships between African elites and European traders and commercial agents, the slave trade to the New World would have been impossible, at least on the scale it occurred.”

While he cites the works of distinguished and knowledgeable scholars like John Thornton and Linda Heywood, or David Eltis’ extensive database on slave ship voyages, he seems not to have consulted such authoritative works as Dr. Eric Williams’ classic study of “Capitalism & Slavery” or the late Dr. Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” Such works demonstrate how these “African elites” were often artificially created by being armed and enriched by the European traders in exchange for their collaboration. Walter Rodney insightfully discusses the effects of such strategies as “economic blackmail”: essentially a proposition in which the trader says to a coastal African chief, “If you do not take our guns and procure ‘slaves’ for us, we will sell our guns farther down the coast, and those people will use them to capture you.”

Rodney also even discusses the effect of inflation: Once the cowrie shell was established as a form of money, because of its rarity, trade could be conducted at established rates of exchange. However, as European explorers found locations elsewhere where cowries were abundant, they could return to these old trading places and flood the local economy with money, thereby depressing the value of everything, creating poverty, and then exploiting that situation to coerce people to deliver “slaves.”

And, of course, there is the basic fact, as pointed out by Dr. Alexander Falconbridge, the English ships’ surgeon who wrote the lesser-known commentary that accompanied the 1789 publication of the famous image of the Slave Ship Brooks, that there would have been no African participation in this “trade” in human beings if there were not slave ships creating the demand in the first place.

These practices, added to the depopulation itself that was caused by the “slave trade” succeeded in disrupting social organization and such systems as agriculture and defense, which became a downward spiral and a vicious cycle, of which we see the results today.

The reality of these practices is not a denial of the fact that there were corrupt and greed-driven individuals who were only too happy to gain privileges by trading with the Europeans that their own people would never have accorded them, and to be made into a new “African elite.”

While Dr. Gates suggests that “Advocates of reparations generally ignore” the fact of African participation, choosing instead to believe romantic notions of kidnapping by evil white men, the fact, at least as I have known it, has always been that Black people never denied African involvement. Indeed, it has become something of a fixture in modern culture to remember that “some of those that willingly sold us to the ships are still with us,” as we witness the continued propagation of these collaborator “elites.” This allegation of intellectual laziness and dishonesty on the part of those who espouse reparations borders on some unfortunate stereotyping on Dr. Gates’ part.

Maybe his suggestion is justified by the fact that the reparations issue, the second matter that his article addresses, has been bandied about so much by people who have not given it much more than superficial thought, and these may be the “advocates” to which he refers. His argument would be much stronger if he addressed the more reasoned aspects of the debate, put forth by serious thinkers, but sometimes showmanship works better when it is knocking down a straw man that the performer himself has created, with a little help from his unknowing allies, than more honest debate.

In the spirit of full disclosure, while I may not be one of the most serious thinkers, I do believe that I am far from alone in considering this vital issue of Reparations beyond the lightweight level that Dr. Gates evokes. For what it is worth, my own longstanding position on the Reparations issue may not be one that gets wide agreement, but it is one that I hope will contribute something useful and constructive to the discussion:

1) Reparations are OBVIOUSLY due, as in any case of a crime against another person, causing physical and/or mental harm and depriving the person of rights and property;

2) Although other groups of people have received payments as reparations for past wrongs, reparations for the African World cannot and should not be in money, for at least two reasons:

a) There is simply not that much money on the planet, to pay for five centuries of slavery, colonialism, and their continuing aftermath; and...

b) The only way for the guilty parties to pay would be for them to remain sufficiently wealthy to do so, which means continuing their existing practices, and all of the resulting existing problems, such as global sweatshops and militarism to defend their interests.

3) Other groups who have received reparations payments have gained them as a result of successful legal action after the crimes – such as the Nazi Holocaust or the unjust internment of Japanese Americans – have ceased. The crimes against the African World did not cease with the end of legalized slavery, but continued with terrorism during Reconstruction, the Jim Crow era, and continuing discrimination and exploitation, including “resegregation,” today. Moreover, for this very reason, it is even questionable that a court can be found where a truly fair hearing of the case can take place.

4) The whole notion of what constitutes fair reparations needs to be revisited and redefined, and must be on a global, not just a national scale. Cancellation of all outstanding debt supposedly owed by African World nations, and the removal of all land mines from countries like Angola (and not by underpaid Africans being placed in harm’s way) might be a beginning. The Reparations question is much more of a matter of “restorative justice” than, say, revenge, or arbitrary cash payouts with no real change in the system.

5) In other words, as with all social demands by the African-descendant population in the past, which have always benefited all segments of the population, the Reparations issue for African Americans is the last and ultimate one to be resolved. And it can only be done in a way that all people benefit, and that the African World is restored to self-sufficiency and self-determination going forward.

That is all pretty much oversimplified, but it reflects, I think, a better basis for discussion than the false stereotypes and supposed “solutions” (such as cash payouts – since this is in someone else’s control) that can be only temporary at best.

As to the question of whether Africans owe reparations to those of the African Diaspora, as Dr. Gates points out, African leaders are among the first to recognize that wrongs were committed, but their situation is much different, it seems to me, from that of the actual enslavers in this country and elsewhere, and the difference is not just in their skin color. The focus has to be on who profited the most from slavery, and what kind of “restorative justice” the various parties can offer in order to establish real equality.

This is all very complex, especially while Africa is still being destroyed by situations like those in Darfur, Uganda, and the Congo, and recently in Rwanda, Liberia, and Sierra Leone, all with the eager encouragement of foreign arms dealers. Who can deny that there is African participation in all of these horrors, but this begs the question of how and why these conflicts began, and also of why the many heroic efforts, also with full African participation, to remedy or prevent these ills receive neither the support nor the press coverage that the perpetrators regularly receive.

It is not about blaming “others” – as the title of Gates’ article suggests – but about solving a profound human problem that depends heavily on the destiny of African and African-descendant nations and peoples and how much they are being systematically prevented from having true independence and self-determination. (A major tool for preventing this is precisely the artificial creation of outside-dependent “African elites.”) No one can deny that this is a matter of African responsibility, even though African “elite” participation in it (like African participation in, say, heroin dealing or other destructive practices) is a fact of life. The idea is to find solutions rather than perpetuate the problems, even by continuing to discuss them. With solutions, the “blame-game” will take care of itself, with no finger pointing needed on our part.

What appears to be the consensus on this Reparations question, and why the focus is on European and European-descendant perpetrators of the crimes of slavery and “slave trading,” while appearing to avoid indictment of the African participants, is that the Africans who were involved and their descendants are all very keenly aware of the moral and spiritual currency in which the accounts for past misdeeds will be reckoned. (It is not for nothing that we see performances like what Gates describes on the part of the President of the Republic of Benin.) Justice for African participation will, arguably, take care of itself.

However, if Reparations continues to be an issue at all, it is precisely because “mainstream America” generally recognizes no responsibility for having committed an enormous crime (added to the genocidal “removal” of the Native peoples). To hear most Americans, including the political leadership, all of that was OK, even God-ordained, as if nothing wrong was ever done.

And this is the basic point. It is ironic that Skip Gates' article talks about "ending the blame game" when what it really does is only to continue it. African responsibility for its part in the "slave trade" has never been denied by any serious thinkers in the Black community that I know of. If anything, in the tradition of "keepin' it real" and eschewing phoniness, it has always been fully acknowledged. What this article seems to be aimed at is keeping America's myths of innocence alive, by "letting white folks off the hook," as it were, by reassuring them that they are absolved of the guilt, since it was, after all the Africans who sold the Africans and none of this could have happened if that were not the case.

It is true enough that no living persons who might categorize themselves as "white" today had any hand in the crimes of "slave trading" and slavery, so there is no guilt anyway. The challenge, however, is for the entire nation (and world, for that matter), having inherited the burden of that history and its continuing consequences (including the fundamental distribution of material wealth and political power, for example), to come to terms with this burden and whether we intend to pass it on to future generations (or even, by ignorance, unintentionally pass it on.)

The single most dominant social factor in shaping the last five centuries of human history has been the doctrine of “White Supremacy,” concocted in the wake of western European exploration and colonial expansion. (“Their gain shall be the knowledge of our Faith, and ours shall be such wealth as their country hath,” as glorified pirate Sir Francis Drake is quoted as stating baldly.) This doctrine has no scientific or moral justification, and has only been maintained and supported by violence, whether actual or threatened, whether physical or psychic, but always present.

In these recent centuries (a mere nanosecond of human history), this corrupted mindset has had global reach and a “white” face, but it is a timeless human challenge. There will always be would-be and wannabe oppressors and exploiters of their fellow beings. If there is any “blame game” to be sorted out, it is in how each one of us individually either resists or collaborates with those forces, or, conversely, asserts a society in which such impulses are contained by predominance of sanity.

Dr. Gates would serve our race – the human race -- much better if he had applied his formidable scholarly and showmanship skills to addressing this issue on a more serious and purposeful basis that would contribute to the solution rather than the problem.

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"The Reparations Question"

by Chester Hartman & Richard America

July/August 1994 issue of Poverty & Race

How to make white America comprehend and come to grips with the legacy of slavery? Is this a necessary precondition t, dealing with, and perhaps ending, current institutionalized racism, segregated housing, school and employment patterns, and the prejudiced attitudes and behavior of individuals?

A deeply felt strand of thought and strategic thinking in at least a portion of the black community, and among some whites a well, holds that a program of systemic and large-scale reparations is an essential threshold step, for which precedents certainly exist in recent US and world history. On the other hand, the philosophical, political and practical problems of remedying past wrongs on the scale attributable to slavery, an institution that was formally and legally ended well over a century ago, are immense.

We decided to raise the reparations issue and its problems in the form of an interview with one of its leading proponent: economist Richard America. Accompanying our interview is a supportive commentary by Rep. John Conyers of Detroit, sponsor c a bill to study the legacy of slavery and propose remedies; and a strong but friendly dissent, with an alternative proposal, by Temple University sociologist Howard Winant.

In the September/ October issue of Poverty & Race we will publish a set of additional solicited commentaries by a range c thinkers and activists. We also will consider publishing additional comments by readers, and so encourage you to add your thought 40"N this controversial issue - Chester Hartman.

Chester Hartman: Let's start with a definitional question: How exactly would you define the reparations issue? Who is to be compensated, and for what?

Richard America: Reparations isn't the issue. It's a conceptual framework, a way of looking at a set of related issues. The issues are economic, political and social dysfunction and the management of a large complex multiracial society that's competing internationally less than optimally.

Unjust enrichment based on slavery and discrimination causes this dysfunction. The country will not have a bright future if the problems stemming from past economic injustice and inequity aren't solved.

To improve overall performance, by including people who have been excluded and exploited, we need to provide more than palliatives. We need to invest heavily in them. But the rationale for doing that .has been unpersuasive.

The real question is, what is the present value and distribution of the stream of income that has been coercively and wrongfully diverted from blacks to whites through slavery and discrimination to produce lopsided income and wealth distributions by race, and, in doing so, has robbed too many blacks of skills they need to perform effectively?

The top 20%, disproportionately white, receives 42% of earned income. The bottom 20%, disproportionately black, receives 5% of earned income. Wealth is even more maldistributed. A major reason for this skewed outcome is past injustice-slave labor in agriculture, manufacturing, many services and in infrastructure development-followed by exclusion, discrimination and exploitation. Common resource pools, produced by everyone's labor, were maldistributed, by white decision makers, overwhelmingly to whites, primarily in the form of education and training.

CH: Why are reparations so important?

RA: The country faces a set of complex interconnected problems. We label them as urban, racial, underclass, inner city problems. We talk about affirmative action, reverse discrimination and quotas. Actually we're talking about wealth and income redistribution, but without a sufficient intellectual and analytical basis.

The primary racial social problems are manifested in poor performance and poor quality in employment, education, housing, health, crime, municipal finance, and also in overall deficiencies in our competitiveness and productivity at a macro level.

Chronic racial injustices over generations help to produce these current defects. To remedy the big problems faced by the whole society, we need to correctly define them. But we haven't. That's why the debate is endless and circular. So reparations is actually a concept that's central to getting to consensus and to successful governance and management of long-term economic performance. It's a key public policy concept, so far unrecognized or unacknowledged. And it's also a tool for conflict resolution in circumstances of deep ancestral grievances between groups.

CH: How much money might be involved, and how might it be disbursed and used?

RA: Whites owe blacks $5 to 10 trillion. It should be repaid primarily through investment in human capital education and training over two to three generations. It should also be repaid through investments in targeted housing, capital formation, and business creation. CH: How did you calculate this figure? RA: The basis for the estimates are in work done by James Marketti, at the University of Wisconsin, and in an illustrative estimate done under a program at the University of California, Berkeley. The Berkeley work was based, in turn, on Lester Thurow's modelÑdeveloped in his 1969 book, Poverty and Discrimination. Both were published in my 1990 edited collection, The Wealth of Races.

These estimates add up to over $3 trillion, but they covered limited time series because of data limitations. They don't cover the entire period 1619 through 1994. They were intended to suggest estimating techniques that can be refined and further developed.

The estimates also don't take account of discrimination in investment in human capital in public education, K-12 and college. So $5 to $10 trillion would turn out to be an understatement.

CH: You've elsewhere suggested that the reparations issue is largely an accounting problem. What do you mean by that, and what accounting system do you propose?

RA: It's an accounting or auditing problem in the sense that the first order of business is to establish the accuracy of the claim. After that, the conversation will lead to practical constructive outcomes. But first a solid, fairly rigorous analytical basis must be built. Until then, the discussion tends to be rhetorical only.

The case must withstand scrutiny from economists and policy analysts. Then it will be adopted by political leaders and opinion makers in the media. The concept will make that step to broad respectability when the research is done and stands up.

It will then lead to useful results when it is embraced, ultimately, by most people as right and fair and practical. It will stand the same tests of debate in a democracy as any other concept or proposal.

CH: In May, Denny's restaurant chain agreed to a $54 million settlement with the Justice Department to compensate for and remedy clearly demonstrated patterns of racial discrimination, several thousand victims will receive a hefty cash award. And the State of Florida apparently will be making a large cash payment to a few survivors of racial violence against a black town that occurred over 70 years ago. In what ways do you se these recent events as moving us tow a massive reparations scheme of yP the t you advocate?

RA: The Denny's case and the Florida case have nothing to do with the repara-tions concept. Those are finite judgments based on specific fact situations with individual, identifiable parties. The broad reparations concept is more amorphous. It involves patterns and practices of 15 generations. These are scrutinized and found wanting by current ethical and moral standards that are applied retroactively.

Society in 1994 will say, we cannot in good conscience accept benefits produced by unjust means that we disapprove of. Some of these acts happened long ago, but they produced benefits that were transferred intergenerationally, compounded and bequeathed to us.

I believe society is ready to take that step. But ultimately it is a moral question: is it moral for the top 30-those earning over roughly $45,000, as a class-to accept such unjust enrichments? And, if not, how can we remedy the injustice? Systematic, targeted income and wealth redistribution is the answer.

CH: Is there any contradiction between characterizing it as a moral issue, and the framework you earlier raised in terms of practical, global competitiveness?

RA: The concept is moral in the sense that even when it's shown convincingly that there is such a "debt," there is no power that can enforce collection, although creative legal theories may emerge. So it will be up to society to reflect on this new information and collectively agree to respond. It's a moral and practical matter. Practically, paying these reparations will help strengthen the economy and the social fabric. There's no contradiction.

CH: Another obvious analogy is the reparations payments Congress authorized several years ago to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. Why was this politically acceptable, and not reparations for slavery?

RA: Likewise, the Japanese case is not analogous. That primarily involved identifiable property owners able to step forward and assert claims to specific property, or to prove wrongs against them as individuals.

CH: How is it possible to make clear, credible connections between what happened generations ago, and was formally terminated 130 years ago, and present conditions?

RA: The connection between the past and the present is clear. It's not a connection so much between slavery and current conditions. It's a matter of a continuing process of wrongful, exploitative, coerced, and manipulated income and wealth diversion over 350 years, through various means.

The question is, is it moral to accept benefits produced by means that we now define as wrongful? Society will think it through and reach a consensus that it is not moral. Then a policy of reparations will logically follow.

CH: In a recent book review, Andrew Hacker wrote, "Whites are weary of being lectured about prejudice, .and they resent being told that they are responsible for racial segregation and discrimination." If that's true-and I think there's plenty of evidence it is-why is the white majority going to adopt the moral stance you think they will, simply by comprehending the historical patterns of unjust enrichment?

RA: Hacker and others will, in time, find it constructive to look at the racial problems they study and write about through the reparations lens.

CH: Who would receive the reparations? And in what ways do you distinguish between African Americans clearly caught in the intersectional trap of race and poverty-and assuming you can connect their current conditions to previous conditions of servitude-and the Colin Powells, Henry Louis Gates, Clarence Thomases and Ron Browns, who have been able to succeed wildly in America despite those previous conditions?

RA: Reparations should be paid primarily in human capital investment, along with some investment in hard tangible assets and in business capital formation. These are all benefits that would have been distributed more normally, today, but for the intervention of systematically exploitive and exclusionary practices.

Most of the investment should go to those in the bottom 30%. Some should go to institution building. These institutions, including in higher education and in business, would have grown up except they were consciously hindered in order to benefit competing white institutions and businesses.

CH: Are there ways America can come to grips with its shameful history and the persistent effects of that history other than with cold cash?

RA: The issue is the wrongful diversion of cash. Why would we look for any other remedies other than explicit income and wealth redistribution?

CH: How do you think this will fly politically? Will the majority white community ever accept this idea? And how will other racial minorities perhaps equally disadvantaged or historically maltreated-react? It's silly to play games of who was victimized more than whom, but Native Americans' claims as to unjust historical treatment and current poverty and racial discrimination have to be right up there along with the slavery imposed on African-Americans.

RA: Political acceptability will come as the concept gains intellectual adherents and demonstrates explanatory power. It helps explain why the economy malfunctions, why productivity and competitiveness suffer. It helps clarify the policy choices for remedying all those defects. We should invest in people what is theirs by right to put them in their "rightful place."

A large portion of the population has been willfully deprived-to the benefit of others-of income and wealth that it ought to have received and would have received in a fairly open and competitive situation. Most Americans will come to acknowledge the debt and agree to practical remedies. Indigenous and quasi-indigenous minorities, that is, Native Americans and African Americans, have a case for reparations.

CH: In a society that seems to have little understanding of or respect for history ("that's history"), is a current put down phrased how realistic is it to expect Americans to deal profoundly and responsibly with something that happened long, long ago-and that most white Americans legitimately can say had nothing to do with them or even with their relatives, since their ancestors arrived in the US well after slavery was abolished? What do you do with the response that in essence says, what's done is done, were got to look to the future and not to the past?

RA: The issue is not what happened long ago. The issue is the current unjust enrichment flowing from continuing injustices over many generations. All Americans in the top 30% are part of a class that benefits wrongfully from past practices that were instituted, in part, on behalf of future generations of whites.

CH: What kind of role do you see mainstream national civil rights groups, such as the NAACP, La Raza, Japanese American Citizens League, Native American Rights Fund and Urban League, playing in this effort?

RA: The NAACP and the Nation Urban League should make reparations the central concept in their strategy the next 40 years. Reparations is about economic development, and civil rights; for the next two generations, should be about economic development.

CH: How would a reparations program fit into a larger civil rights agenda! RA:. Civil rights is, or ought to be about how to make median black income roughly the same as median white in come by the Year 2020. The concept o reparations is an inescapable public policy tool for reaching that objective.

Richard America is a Senior Program Manager in the federal government. His books include Developing the Afro American Economy (Lexington, 1977) the edited volume The Wealth of Races (Greenwood Press, 1990) and Paying the Social Debt: What White America Owes Black America (Praeger, 1993). Though views expressed are his own and are no to be taken as representing any institution or organization with which he is affiliated.

Chester Hartman is Director of Research at PRRAC. chartman@prrac.org
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