[Peace-discuss] Affirmative Denial

[Ken Urban]

Published on Tuesday, July 15, 2003 by In These Times  
Affirmative Denial  
by Salim Muwakkil  
  
One of the primary reasons I support the congressional bill to study
the feasibility of reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans
is the need to acquaint Americans with the devastating effects racial
slavery has had on African-Americans. 

That need was never more apparent than during national discussions of
the Supreme Court’s recent affirmative action rulings. In a 5-4 vote,
the high court ruled that the University of Michigan law school (and
thus all colleges and universities) could constitutionally consider race
as a factor in admissions. The court also ruled that the school’s
undergraduate admissions point system, which awards points for certain
racial identities, is unconstitutional. 

Progressives applauded the top court’s law school ruling as a victory
for the forces of social justice. But it was a win by default only. The
law school maintained it took race into account to help produce a more
diverse student body. Diversity enhanced the university environment, it
argued. A slim majority of the court bought that argument, which
reasoned, essentially, that minorities should be tolerated because they
add texture to whites’ educational experience. 

Thus it seems that even when the top court acts in the interest of
social justice, its motives are tainted by assumptions of racial
hierarchy. Other than Ruth Bader Ginsburg, none of the other justices
thought it necessary to link structural racial barriers to continued
social and economic disparities between black and white Americans. These
racial disparities endure, and in some cases have worsened. And
remember, affirmative action was a program born specifically to help
beat down barriers that cause those disparities. 

Ironically, toppling racial barriers also was the raison d’*tre for
the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment that foes of
affirmative action now use to justify the program’s demise. In fact,
irony is a consistent theme in this debate: Not only do we have the
specter of affirmative action foes quoting Dr. Martin Luther King out of
context about the “content of character” rather than the color of
skin, we now have Justice Clarence Thomas using the black abolitionist
Frederick Douglass to bolster his anti-affirmative action point. 

Quoting Douglass’ 1865 speech before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery
Society in Boston, Thomas wrote, “All I ask is, give him [‘the
Negro’] a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! … Your
interference is doing him positive injury.” Thomas failed to mention
that Douglass’ speech was responding to the patronizing excesses of
many Northern abolitionists, who, at the time, seemed to regard freedmen
as so much flotsam and jetsam of the Civil War to be handled, rather
than as human beings to be supported. 

This recasting of the past is becoming a routine rhetorical tactic of
the shameless right, but Americans’ lack of historical perspective
makes it much easier for them to get away with it. This historical
ignorance is the precise target of the congressional bill I mentioned
earlier. 

This bill, which has been introduced annually by Rep. John Conyers
(D-Michigan) since 1989 but languishes in committee, seeks to
“establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery … and
economic discrimination against African-Americans … to make
recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies.” 

Few Americans know of the legacy that racial slavery and Jim Crow
apartheid has bequeathed to African-Americans. Because of that
ignorance, many white Americans either are mystified by blacks’
disproportionate miseries or attribute them to some intrinsic quality
(be it genetic or cultural). African-Americans often are urged to “get
over” race; that is, accept racial inequities as a state of nature and
shut up. 

A more honest reckoning of our history would reveal the difficulty of
transcending racial disadvantage without some attempt to repair the
damage done to a people victimized by 16 generations of racial slavery
and Jim Crow apartheid. 

After all, African-Americans exist only because there was a
transatlantic slave trade; racial slavery was a new species of human
bondage, now considered one of history’s longest-running crimes
against humanity. Slavery stole the labor of enslaved Africans for more
than 250 years, and by depriving their descendants of any material
inheritance—except poverty— slavery also damaged their futures. 

Jim Crow apartheid blocked blacks from access to America’s fruits for
a century following slavery’s demise. In fact, African-Americans were
not fully enfranchised as citizens until 1965, and racial barriers
erected to justify and protect slavery still to this day inhibit
blacks’ social and economic mobility. 

The peculiar institution also severed the ancestral sources of identity
and cultural continuity of enslaved Africans, leaving them and their
progeny especially vulnerable to the widespread biases of white
supremacy and its corollary, black inferiority (including the negative
aesthetic values of “kinky” hair, thick lips, and dark skin, as well
as notions of intellectual inferiority) that still permeate American
society. These Afrophobic biases are also a legacy of slavery, and may
have been just as damaging to the psyches of African-Americans as the
more overt injuries of social and economic discrimination were to their
life chances. 

The problem becomes more complex and expensive as the legacy of slavery
lengthens; affirmative action is inadequate to the task, even without
the equivocal dodge of “diversity.” In fact, affirmative action
itself is a timid euphemism for reparations. Passing Conyers’ bill
could help relieve our timidity. 

Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times, where he has
worked since 1983, and a weekly op-ed columnist for the Chicago Tribune.


In These Times *2003