| excerpted from: Alfred L. Brophy,
The Cultural War over Reparations for Slavery , 53 DePaul Law Review
1181-1213 (Spring 2004) (116 footnotes)
American democracy is a most dramatic form of social organization,
and in that drama each of us enacts his role by asserting his own and
his group's values and traditions against those of his fellow citizens.
Indeed, a battle-royal conflict of interests appears to be basic to our
conception of freedom, and the drama of democracy proceeds through a
warfare of words and symbolic actions by which we seek to advance our
private interests while resolving our political differences. Since the
Civil War this form of symbolic action has served as a moral substitute
for armed warfare, and we have managed to restrain ourselves to a debate
which we carry on in the not always justified faith that the outcome
will serve the larger interests of democracy. Unfortunately, this
doesn't always work out, and when it doesn't, the winners of a given
contention are likely to concern themselves with only the fruits of
victory, while leaving it to the losers to grapple with the issues that
are left unresolved. Ralph Ellison, author of Invisible Man
Reparations for slavery and its claims for accounting of past
injustice, for apologies and truth commissions, for a reconciliation of
decades-old debts and forward-looking relief, and for group-based relief
represents yet another front on what has been called the culture wars of
the 1990s and the present. The case for reparations rests on how we view
the past and what one should do about it. Indeed, reparations taps into
a decades-old debate over how to deal with inequality in American
society. Should we try to ensure equality of outcome or equality of
opportunity? Is racial progress best achieved by demanding equal
treatment through the courts or by a gradual process of accommodation?
By having a reckoning with slavery and the legacy of Jim Crow or by
focusing with single-minded devotion on the present? At the beginning of
the twentieth century, the debate on these issues was between Booker T.
Washington and W.E.B. DuBois. More recently it has been between public
intellectuals and reparations skeptics like John McWhorter and Ward
Connerly and reparationists like Charles Ogletree.
The case for reparations rests, in large part, on determining
critical issues like what is the value of truth commissions and can
racial reconciliation take place without a remedy? This Article first
identifies the issues at stake in the culture war over reparations. Then
it turns to an in-depth exploration of the arguments against
reparations. It addresses how reparationists view those arguments, as
well as the independent arguments reparationists put forward. The
Article concludes with an assessment of the utility, as well as
disadvantages of reparations, and what we might expect to gain (and
lose) through a comprehensive reparations program.
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