Of course, these developments, like others of the past few years, elicit various angry diatribes by reparations opponents.  By now, we have all encountered the general arguments; indeed, some might argue that there is nothing new to hear from the anti-reparations faction.  Yet because I listen to the debate with a historian’s ear, I have been struck by an aspect of some arguments offered against reparations that, while escaping the notice of many, deserves careful scrutiny.  Indeed, some anti-reparations rhetoric sounds more than a bit peculiar.

I choose this term deliberately.  Slavery, our nation’s “peculiar institution,” gave rise to a body of justifications.  No doubt many assume that these rationalizations, defenses of an institution that we now consider indefensible, have been relegated to a rhetorical scrap heap. Yet in some common arguments made against reparations, echoes can be heard, revealing how the legacy of slavery continues to shape Americans’ racial perspectives. 

Consider the recurring statement made by those who oppose reparations that Africans, too, were involved in the slave trade.  Recent letters to the editors of the Memphis Commercial Appeal and the Washington Times illustrate the use of this claim. “Where did the slaves come from?” the former demanded.  “Most were purchased from warring [African] tribes.” The latter asserted that “the enslavement of Africans abroad would not have been possible without the cooperation of Africans eager to sell Africans of other tribes to white slavers who brought them in chains to the New World.” 

Notably, these arguments are not limited to (presumably white) letter writers or to those who might be amateurs in the fields of domestic and international history and politics.  Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for example, commented in 2001 on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that because “there’s plenty of blame to go around among African and Arab states, plenty of blame to go around among Western states,” we should “look forward, not point fingers backward.”

Supporters of reparations do not deny this fact, yet opponents continually bring it up, as if it somehow mitigates Americans’ responsibility.  Nineteenth-century Americans relied on a strikingly similar strategy of rationalization and deflection when confronted with the evils of slavery.  New Yorker James Kirke Paulding, in his 1836 apologia Slavery in the United States, argued, “It should be borne in mind that the slaves of the United States are the posterity of those Africans, who, by capture in war, and in other circumstances, had become hereditary bondmen in their own country, and whose posterity would have remained so to this day had they continued there.”  “It is to the Africans themselves,” New England pamphleteer Calvin Colton declared in the 1839 tract Abolition a Sedition, “that this trade owes its origin.”  Although Colton conceded the complicity of the West, he nonetheless mitigated it:  “It is…the inexpiable scandal of Christian Europe, that the flood gates of African barbarism were let out upon these Western Isles and shores, to gratify the lust of gain in those monsters who carried on and profited by the traffic, and to entail a long protracted curse on the less guilty, though not innocent, tenants of this new world.”
 
Both the factual and moral bases of this argument, in its nineteenth and twenty-first century manifestations, are suspect.  While no one denies the involvement of Africans in the slave trade, colonialism and Western exploitation are and have for many centuries been the cause of the degradation of Africa.  Considering this complex relationship, to try to separate those involved from the larger system and to rank degrees of guilt is disingenuous.  Yet the attempt to deflect blame from Americans by citing Africans’ role allows contemporary reparations opponents, like apologists for slavery, to avoid acknowledging both their responsibility and their debt.  For if it is true that there is guilt on both sides, the effects of this history demand different responses from Americans and Africans.  As Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explained in a 2001 op-ed in the New York Times, “[M]any Western nations reaped large and lasting benefits from African slavery, while African nations did not.  African regrets, profound indeed, do not have to be other than regrets, because the results of African slave trading have, in Africa, been negative, an economic curse.  The results in many parts of the West, and spectacularly in the English North American colonies, later the United States, have been economically positive.  So Western regrets about slavery have a different character because here the responsibility for slavery is carried forward from past to present in the form of wealth. Slavery is embedded in American prosperity.  That will not go away.”  Nineteenth-century Americans, reaping the benefits of the slave trade directly and indirectly, preferred to avoid looking critically at American economic power and its global consequences.  Two hundred years later, many Americans are no closer to facing the disparity.

A second peculiar claim made by reparations opponents involves other groups who have experienced oppression in the United States.  Why should compensation go to descendents of slaves, they ask, rather than, say, European immigrants who labored in exploitative conditions?  Filmmaker Arlene Corsano, producer of the documentary Slave Reparations: The Final Passage, recently described the defensive reactions to her project of her white friends, who countered that Italians and Irish also were oppressed in the United States.  When the Roanoke Times & World News ran a letter to the editor in November 2003 by Gloria Jean Coan arguing for reparations, angry responses appeared in the newspaper for over a month, many of which sounded the theme that others – Northern factory workers, Irish and German immigrants, and Chinese railroad workers – suffered as well.

Of course, there is nothing wrong with bringing up the very real sufferings experienced by others in the United States and with asking Americans to face up to that history and, in some cases, to seek restitution.  (Coan, in fact, mentioned in her letter that reparations had been given to Japanese Americans and Native Americans.)  But opponents of reparations do not bring up the suffering of others to expand critical discussion of America’s past but to dismiss reparations claims and ridicule its supporters.  Facts and common sense are tossed out in favor of defensive and inaccurate clichés, such as that offered by a respondent to Coan’s letter:  “All of our ancestors worked to death building this country into the great nation that it is.” 

Antebellum apologists for slavery adopted a similar – and similarly dubious – strategy to counter abolitionists.  Particularly after the abolition of slavery in Britain, proslavery American writers and speakers often pointed to the sufferings of laborers in England and Ireland.  If abolitionists were “resolved to interfere” with others’ affairs, Calvin Colton remarked, let them “go to England, to Ireland, and to the British manufactories.”  In 1853, Julia Tyler, wife of former President John Tyler, responded to an appeal from various eminent Englishwomen to Southern women exhorting them to help end slavery, which was published in New York newspapers.  Tyler’s "To the Duchess of Sutherland and the Ladies of England," which was published in many Southern newspapers and magazines, declared that poor English factory workers were worse off than American slaves.  Indeed, Tyler asserted, "the negro of the South lives sumptuously in comparison with the 100,000 of the white population of London." 

While contemporary opponents of reparations would not likely echo the former first lady’s contention that slaves were better off than the British poor, they repeat the defensive mantra that everyone has suffered.  Although not stated explicitly, the subtext is that slavery is not so different from other forms of oppression.  Even after decades of groundbreaking scholarship from historians such as John Hope Franklin that reveals the particular horrors of slavery by focusing not on the accounts of white Americans who observed it but the perspectives of slaves themselves, Americans are still reluctant to admit that slavery was unique.  Even after the work of economists quantifying the amount of slaves’ unpaid labor, Americans invoke the clearly false but comforting historical myths that “everyone suffered” and that this presumably “universal” oppression is all behind us now in order to avoid facing the unique debt that is owed.

Perhaps the most disturbing argument about slavery and its legacy that has surfaced in the context of the debate about reparations hinges on comparisons between present-day African Americans and Africans.  This line of reasoning is illustrated in the recent comments of Chicago Sun Times columnist Neil Steinberg that the movement for reparations is a “mystery” to him because he cannot see why African Americans cannot just change their “outlook” on history:  “[I]f you compare them with Africans living in Africa . . . [t]heir lives are far, far better, by every measure. . . .  My guess is that the average African, scraping out a living in Uganda, would leap at the chance to change places with the most humble resident of the West Side of Chicago….  While slaves certainly suffered, terribly, their descendants benefit, tremendously, by being here and not being back in Africa.  Why focus on the harm of the past and not the benefit?”  Expressing her anger both at Steinberg’s argument and the fact that it no doubt would never have been published had it been made about any other ethnic group, Mary Mitchell, Steinberg’s colleague at the Sun Times, pointed out that his “is not a novel view, nor is it one that has been only expressed by white people.”  Indeed, it has been made by many pundits from various racial and ethnic groups over the past few years, including Larry Elder, Dinesh D’Souza, David Horowitz, and the late writer and concert pianist Balint Vazsonyi. 

Not surprisingly, the general premises of these arguments have nineteenth-century proslavery parallels.  “If we take into consideration the origin of this race, the barbarism, the brutal degradation, and the customary inhuman vices of their ancestry, which remain the same to this day in Africa,” Calvin Colton maintained, “we think…that no other people can be found on the globe…who have, within the same period of time, risen so much, or been improved so much…as that portion of the African race now to be found in the United States of America.”  In an 1847 speech, Kentucky politician and slaveholder Henry Clay asserted, “It is a philanthropic and consoling reflection, that the moral and physical condition of the African race in the United States, even in a state of slavery, is far better than it would have been if their ancestors had never been brought from their native land.” 

The response of Frederick Douglass to Clay’s assertion is also relevant to the present-day forms of this argument.  "I can scarce repress the flame of rising indignation, as I read this cold blooded and cruel sentence," Douglass declared in a letter to Clay published in Douglass’s newspaper the North Star; "there is so much of Satan dressed in the livery of Heaven, as well as taking consolation from crime, that I scarcely know how to reply to it."  Yet Douglass did respond, exposing the assumptions on which the argument is based.  “Let me ask you what has been the cause of the present unsettled condition of Africa?” Douglass demanded.  “Because of this very desolating traffic [in slaves] from which you seem to draw consolation.  For three hundred years Christian nations…have looked to Africa only as a place for the gratification of their lust and love of power, and every means have been adopted to stay the onward march of civilization in that unhappy land.” 

Douglass’s words are instructive.  Those who maintain that the descendents of slaves have fared better than those whose ancestors remained in Africa ignore the effects of the slave trade itself on nineteenth-century and present-day Africa, choosing instead to believe in a notion of an “uncivilized” continent and to ignore the decimating effects of Western intervention.  Responding to such arguments, Political Science professor Adolph L. Reed, Jr., remarked that claims that African Americans are “better off” than they would have been had their ancestors never been brought on slave ships to America “fit all too neatly within a nearly two-centuries-old line that slavery rescued black people from a hopeless African savagery and was therefore a benefit for the enslaved.” 

It is notable, too, that, as Mitchell aptly remarked, this argument is not made about other groups whose ancestors experienced oppression in their native lands.  (I have never been asked, as an Armenian American, to consider the genocide that no doubt forced my ancestors to emigrate in terms of its “benefit” to me because I was born in the United States and am “better off” as a result.)  And why are African Americans asked to compare their positions with the situations of Africans rather than with those of other American citizens?  White leaders, from Colton and Clay to present-day pundits and politicians, suggest that people of color are not truly part of the body politic, with the same rights to fight for full inclusion, restitution, and civil rights as other Americans.  White authorities assume that they should deem what choices, opportunities, and resources are available to people of color, casting them as “ungrateful” or out of line when the limited alternatives offered are rightfully challenged.

It is precisely the fact that the reparations movement constitutes a challenge not only to the control of the resources accrued from the past but also to the way the past is narrated and, by extension, to white power and privilege, that it evokes such angry anti-reparations rhetoric.  And in these peculiar arguments we hear the reverberations of past defenses of the status quo by those with a vested interest in the slave system.  Opponents of reparations might find themselves shocked to be put in such company – after all, they would no doubt argue, they do not deny that slavery was an evil institution and that it needed to be abolished.  We can grant them this acknowledgment while still demonstrating that their rhetoric echoes the racist presumptions that helped perpetuate slavery and compelling them to see the ways that their contentions, like those of their nineteenth-century forebears, attempt to distort the historical record; minimize the evils and the legacies of slavery; avoid responsibility; and, to use Douglass’s words, “take consolation from crime.”

Ironically, too, as reparations opponents bring these assumptions out into the open, they prove that, as reparations advocates assert, the legacy of the nation’s history of racial oppression still affects us, pervading thinking about race as well as the continuing realities of racial oppression.   They reveal that slavery’s legacy is still with us rhetorically and ideologically as well as legally and economically.  And those of us who support reparations must continue to counter these anti-reparations claims, just as antislavery activists took on their opponents, refusing to let them off the hook for the damage done, the ill-gotten gain accrued, through the evil system.  For there is much to repair, not only the injustices and inequalities in our nation but also the racist foundations on which they are built and the rhetorical legacy that enables them. 

Jacqueline Bacon’s most recent book is Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper (forthcoming from Lexington Books, 2007). She writes frequently on African-American history and rhetoric, reparations, contemporary culture, and the media.  Her website is www.jacquelinebacon.com.