Carl at Young Anabaptist Radicals found several things troubling about my “Dukes don’t emigrate” post last week. He posted a couple of comments below my piece, and then wrote his own lengthy response here.
In my comments section, I had written:
We need to be honest about the mistakes of our ancestors. We also need to see those mistakes in a historical context, and avoid the tendency to mythologize and glamorize those who were the victims of colonization. Cruelty is a human universal, and sin — at least the capacity for sin — is found in every tribe and nation under the sun. Collectively, some have inflicted both more harm (and perhaps more good) than others.
Carl, politely but firmly, found that response wanting:
I can’t count the number of times that I’ve heard something along the lines of “cruelty is a human universal” from white people as a blanket dismissal of the idea that Euro-American culture might have anything significant to learn from indigenous people. Same goes for the tired bit about “don’t mythologize the victims of colonization.” You don’t have to be a romanticizing, mythologizing, self-hating fool to be willing to simply look at another culture and say, “You know, I value many of the things my ancestors taught me. But I think these folks have some things figured out about how to live on this earth that my ancestors once knew, but lost somewhere along the way.” In my experience, the resistance to this idea is huge - and the cliches in your paragraph are a key piece of that resistance.
That’s fair enough. I’m quite prepared to believe that indigenous groups in the Third World had “ways of seeing” nature and reality that were — and perhaps still are — immensely valuable. I don’t know how well I live out that conviction in my own life, however. Sure, I go to the health food store and stock up on homeopathic, “natural” remedies that were (so the advertisers say) the secrets of indigenous peoples. In recent years, I’ve spent lots of time with my wife’s family in rural Colombia, enjoying their “simpler”, more “pastoral” life. I’m never allowed to do any actual work when I’m on the finca, however. Despite my often sincere attempts to pitch in, my status as a guest (and perhaps, my status as a — comparatively — staggeringly affluent white man) means that despite my protestations, I’m generally waited on and catered to and told to lie in a hammock. Generally, I get a week or two to observe and to witness a different way of being. I come away appreciative for the tremendous hospitality of those who have so little, and filled with gratitude for the extraordinary privileges I have.
I’ve also been on a number of “mission trips” to Mexico, doing the usual things affluent white Christians do down there. Lots of short-term bursts of hard work (hey, I learned how to use a cement mixer in rural Sinaloa a few years ago), lots of prayer, lots of pious and hackneyed sentiment about how we Americans had “so much to learn” from those who “have so little.” Forgive a touch of cynicism, but after you’ve done a couple of these weeks south of the Border with a group of earnest teenagers, it’s hard not to poke a bit of fun. I’m aware, deeply aware, that no matter how much I try to humble myself, I’m still going to be the affluent white man waltzing into an impoverished community for a few days, bringing a bunch of chattering teenagers who come to do just a little bit of work. It’s easy to find oneself slipping into the role of the munificent bwana, filled with self-congratulation because I’ve left behind the air conditioning and the high-thread count sheets for a few days of sweat, dirt, ranchera and frijoles. I do make a sincere effort to avoid that role, but it invariably seems to be thrust upon me. Perhaps I unconsciously insist on playing it.
Carl also deals with the issue of reparations for the “sins of the ancestors”:
Many people talk about privilege and “working for a more equitable society” entirely in the present tense, without any reference to the critical role of accepting _real responsibility_ for the sins of our ancestors. Responsibility in this case means recognizing that we benefit from our ancestors’ sins (i.e. owning slaves, stealing land), and then making things right. This choice has very practical implications. Here in South Dakota, there are plenty of well-meaning white folks who will say, “Yes! Let’s work towards a more equitable society!” The unspoken implication is: become a part of my society, on my terms, and I’ll try to help you get your piece of the pie. There are far fewer white people who are willing to hear Lakota people say “We don’t want your society - we want you to give back the Black Hills that you stole, and then leave us alone.” Doing the latter requires an understanding that the theft of the Black Hills is not ancient history, it’s of critical present-day relevance. Same goes for slavery - it ain’t ancient history, folks. We don’t just need “a more equitable society” - we need to make actual, physical reparations! Until there’s been real recompense, the wounds of the past are still open and bleeding - they are, in fact, the continuing wounds of the present.
I’m not familar with the Lakota struggle (beyond a cursory knowledge from American history classes.) I am curious to know how many of the living Lakota have European ancestry themselves, however. When one is descended from both colonizer and the colonized, isn’t it cherry-picking to identify with only one aspect of your heritage? Isn’t it odd to demand reparations, when that means your mother’s side of the family ends up paying your father’s? Perhaps it isn’t odd at all; I’ll admit I’ve given it remarkably little thought.
As for reparations for slavery and other injustices, fine. On my mother’s side, my ancestors certainly owned slaves. (Though one branch of the family first came to California in the early 1850s, selling their plantation in East Texas and freeing their slaves, following the patriarch’s sudden revelation that slavery was immoral. That’s a feather in our family cap, one we periodically display.) Whatever modest wealth my mother’s side of the family was able to generate was at least in part built on slave labor. Here in California, my great-great grandfather made a living as a lawyer, serving as counsel for the railroads, “foreclosing on widows and orphans”, making money, I acknowledge, on the backs of Chinese laborers. Some of that money (not much) has trickled down to my generation.
Do I feel guilt because my ancestors owned slaves or served as hired legal guns for Southern Pacific? No. Do I admit some of my material benefits may have been connected to those acts of exploitation? Yes. I tithe on what I have and on what I inherit. I vote Democratic and support affirmative action. I am willing to support, with my money and my vote, programs that seek to redress historic inequities. But what else am I supposed to do? Shall I play amateur geneaologist, track down the descendants of slaves my ancestors owned, and send them a check? Shall I demand that we sell the small piece of land my family has owned in the Northern California hills, bought well over a century ago with money derived (in part, not in whole) from the largesse dispensed by the railroads? It was once Ohlone Indian land, and there are no Ohlone left. Shall we find the one or two folks who still have a drop of Ohlone blood, get on our knees, and make a personal and abject apology?
I’m not trying to offend, but I’d like some clear-cut clarification of what is asked of me. I give my first fruits to God and his work. I support government and private programs that seek to offer redress. If you want to raise my taxes to fund a massive reparations program, sure. I’ll write the check gladly. What else is there?
My favorite spot on earth is my family’s ranch in the hills northeast of San Jose. My family has been in those hills since Rutherford B. Hayes was president, and though most of what we once owned has been given to the public park system, a few very small parcels remain in our hands. In our old ranch house, pictures of my great- and great-great and great-great-great grandmothers and fathers hang on the walls and sit upon desks. I love looking at those people I never knew, knowing that they were the ones who crossed the plains in covered wagons, came around the Horn in storm-tossed boats, who longed for something new and bigger and better and different. There is a restlessness in the northern European, WASPy soul; a restlessness I see in my family’s history and in my own life. The longing for the new and the different runs deep in some of us. Call it the “pioneer spirit”. And it is, I fully acknowledge, a mixed legacy. Lord knows, that restlessness runs deep in me.
I love these ancestors of mine. I don’t worship them, but sometimes — as unChristian as it may seem to do so — I talk to them. I walk the hills and canyons of my truest earthly home, and I feel a cloud of witnesses hovering nearby. I talk to old “Albert Alfonso”, who first built the ranch houses. I talk to “aunt Jacqueline”, the family’s near-legendary matriarch. They died before my mother was born, and yet I still feel them to be a part of me, and I feel them most when I am on the land that they loved. Do I judge them perfect, blameless? No. Do I think that the means by which money came into their lives to have been so sordid that it vitiates any other good that they did? Of course not.
Do I know that the land I now call “mine” and “ours” once belonged to a native people, long since wiped from the earth? You bet. Do I grieve that? Yes. But will renouncing my heritage, giving up that land, right an ancient wrong? No. I don’t believe it. Perhaps I don’t want to believe it.
If you refuse to feel shame or guilt for what your ancestors did, why should you feel pride, either? You can’t have the good things reflect upon you but the bad things be just ancient history.
Selling your land in itself wouldn’t do any good; but giving it away to the right charities might (or giving the money that you got from selling it, or your portion of it) — equally, giving all the inheritance you got away would also help. I’m not saying you should do this, but you’re creating a false set of options here. You could donate what you’d otherwise spend on hotel and restaurant costs everytime you visit the ranch, for instance. (I know you generally give a lot to charity, I’m thinking specifically about this land that you brought up as a “well, we own it now, what can I do?” example.)
I am neither a better nor a worse person, wolfa, beecause of my ancestors.
I am proud of them. not of myself. And in focusing more on the good that was done than on the bad, I do what we all do and all ought to do: practice a certain level of forgiveness and understanding, just as we do with our living family members. This isn’t denial.
My parents divorced when I was small. My father was in many ways a lousy husband to my mother. He also changed his life and did many wonderful things, remained good friends with my Mom, was a devoted father and husband to my stepmother. When he died, we were very proud of him –and we focused not at all on his shortcomings. That’s what families do with the living, the dead, and those who died beyond living memory.
that last part of the post made me think of my asian culture. i don’t see how it can be thought of as unChristian since Christianity has incorporated many pagan views, traditions, and rituals into their repetoire in the past. why stop now? something that i have to admire about christianity is how at times, it is so adaptable, accepting and flexible about including someone else’s culture into itself. now if only we could swing them on that gay issue.
the Ohlone indians and ranch part reminds me of the whole ongoing palestinian-israeli nationalistic claims to the gaza strip/west bank. i won’t say much on it since i’m still researching and getting caught up on the whole conflict. either we’ll have peace, or a winner ending up with ancestral guilt 100 years down the line.
In the United States, all races, not just whites, owned slaves. About 6 percent of whites and about 1.6 percent of free blacks owned slaves. (Some of the South’s largest land owners and slave owners were free black men.)Virtually all Native American Indian tribes owned slaves before and after the European disover of American. Indian slaves tended to be communal property, so virtually all Native Americans are the descendants of slave owners. (The Cherokee, who were the last people in the United States to give up slavery, recently voted to deny tribal membership to descendants of Cherokee slaves.) Since most white Americans are the descendants of immigrants who arrived in the United Sates after the Civil War, white Americans are not much more likely to be the descendants of slave owners than African Americans, and are less likely than Native Americans to be the descendants of slave owners.
Thousands of white slaves were transported from Europe to the United States of Americas. These are not to be confused with white indentured servants; they were slaves in the sames sense as black slaves were slaves. Should we pay the descendants of white slaves reparations?
Most slave owners could not afford more than two or, at the most, three slaves. They toiled in the fields alongside their slaves. Even the large plantation owners tended to be land rich and case poor. Their wealth mostly vanished along with the Confederacy. If slavery produced so much wealth, why is the South–blacks and whites alike–the poorest part of the country?
The primary argument against raparations is that African Americans enjoy a much higher standard of living than Africans who were not transported from Africa to the Americas; therefore, they are beneficiaries rather than victims of slavery. This also applies to Chinese Americans whose ancestors worked, along with the Irish, on the transcontinenal railroad.
“Virtually all Native American Indian tribes owned slaves before and after the European disover of American. Indian slaves tended to be communal property, so virtually all Native Americans are the descendants of slave owners.”
This is, quite simply, NOT TRUE. I’m not sure where you got this idea.
Some native societies had variants of slavery pre-contact, but not “virtually all”. It’s doubtful that more than a small minority did.
Since most white Americans are the descendants of immigrants who arrived in the United Sates after the Civil War,
Giving us plenty of time to derive unjust benefit from Jim Crow laws, and other institutionalized prejudice favoring people who look like us over people of a darker shade. It’s not as if everything was made just fine for African-Americans once the Civil War was over.
white Americans are not much more likely to be the descendants of slave owners than African Americans
Actually, considering certain unsavory sexual aspects of slavery, African-Americans may well be more likely to be descendants of slave owners than white Americans. But I don’t think personal descent from slave owners is really the point.
Every single living person is the descendant of an unbroken chain of survivors. This means we are all the descendants of the tribes that won, of the men who raped, of the women who were captured and raped, of slaves and their masters, but not equally - most of our forebears, if they were involved in conflicts or slavery at all, were the conquerors, victors, and slave-holders. That’s how you get to have descendants.
This doesn’t excuse our responsibility to right known, recent wrongs to the best of our ability.
I’m in favor of extending affirmative action for a few more generations to compensate for Jim Crow laws and segrations; the problem is that shifting demographics is making a mockery of affirmative action. I live in a border city of 750,000 that is 80 percent Hispanic. Intermarriage between Anglos and Hispanics is common, yet the offspring of these unions(think Cameron Diaz)are also eligible for affrimative action. Once the city’s African Americans, Native Americans and non-Hispanic white females are counted, about 95 percent of the population is eligible for affrimative action. As you might guess, about 95 percent of the residents support affirmative action, even though the benefits tend to go to upper-middle and upper class Hispanics.
Hispanic Americans have surpassed African Americans as the nation’s largest majority and will soon become the absolute majority in Texas and California, the nation’s two more populous states. So, they will become, are already have become, the primary beneficiaries of affirmative action.
Of course the link between affirmative action and past racial injustices no longer exists; now that the emphasis is on “diversity,” the only thing that counts is whether or not your group happens to be under or over represented.
Isn’t it odd to demand reparations, when that means your mother’s side of the family ends up paying your father’s?
Not if your father’s family is living in a shack in a crappy part of town because your mother’s family ripped his off to buy a mansion. Eh?
Native American As Slave Onwers
The Navajo, easily the nation’s largest tribe, were notorious for slave raids on New Mexico settlements. One of the reason the New Mexicans put up little resistance to U.S. troops that occupy Santa Fe during the Mexican War is that the United State promised to stop the slave raids.
The Cherokee, the nation’s second largest tribe, actually wrote the right to own slave into their constituion. It was the only consitution in the United States that specifically condoned slavery. (The U.S. Constitution is mute on slavery; it was only ligitamized by court rulings–the infamous Dred Scott case.) Following the Civil War, slavery was still legal in the Indian Territory, which later became Oklahoma. The United Sates ended slavery by buying slaves from the Indian tribes and declaring them free. The Cherokee were the last to give up their slaves. (The Cherokee Nation voted a few weeks ago to deny tribal membership to the descendants of Cherokee slaves. The story made headlines across the United States.
The largest slave market that every existed in the Americas was the one the Aztecs maintained outside Mexico City in pre-Columbian days. Indians in what is now the United States took slaves from white settlements as well as rival tribes. They were used not only for labor but for trade between other tribes.
Do I know that the land I now call “mine” and “ours” once belonged to a native people, long since wiped from the earth? You bet. Do I grieve that? Yes. But will renouncing my heritage, giving up that land, right an ancient wrong? No. I don’t believe it. Perhaps I don’t want to believe it.
Every square inch of this planet has been fought over and/or taken from somebody else, somewhere in history. That does not make any of it any less wrong — I think the question is: when to let go? I don’t know of any easy answer to that, but I do know that if you don’t let go, you end up with situations like those existing in Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle East, Kashmir… people still fighting over past wrongs.
Given that practically all peoples have been enslaved and/or displaced at one point or another, can it be determined when a people have “recovered” from it?
Personally, I’d say that anything from before my grandmother’s time? Not relevant to my current situation. Why should I blame the families of the Yankee soldiers who ransacked my great-great-grandmother’s house after capturing her rebel officer husband, leaving her destitute, with small children, in West Virginia? Would I be richer, better educated, or happier if it hadn’t happened? Who can say?
Just some thoughts.
I’m not trying to offend, but I’d like some clear-cut clarification of what is asked of me. I give my first fruits to God and his work. I support government and private programs that seek to offer redress. If you want to raise my taxes to fund a massive reparations program, sure. I’ll write the check gladly. What else is there?
Wow, Hugo. And not my usual, admirational sort of wow. Quite frankly, you sound like you’re adopting precisely the sort of privileged, `token signs of material support are good enough’ attitude you find so facile and frustrating earlier in the post, speaking about mission trips to Mexico with your youth group members.
It’s not the job of the oppressed to come and find the privileged and ask (beg) for help. It’s the job of everyone to actively seek out and fight oppression. The very ability to sit back and pretend that the fact of oppression in the world isn’t an urgent threat to one’s own well-being is arguably a good definition of privilege.
There is always more we can be doing to make the world a better place. Out of infinitely many options, I chose to spend the bulk of my day reading philosophy articles. I could have decided today was the day I would take over my school’s unofficial GSA (gay-straight alliance), and put all my energy into the campaign for official recognition. I could have lobbied my university to build a rape crisis center instead of another new dorm. I could have sold all my possessions and used the money to start a microloan bank in rural Ghana. I chose to do none of these things, and as a result I’ve fallen far short of moral perfection.
I don’t apologise for this failure on my part, and I certainly don’t blame the gay members of the university, or rape victims, or the Ghanese rural poor for not coming and asking me to deign to help them. Instead, I recognise that tomorrow is a chance to do better. I probably still won’t head off to Ghana, but maybe I’ll ride my bike instead of driving to school; I still won’t be perfect, but at least I’ll be doing better. I’ll aspire to perfection, and try to move towards it, without ever making excuses for falling short.
Noumena, when it comes to what I am called to do as a Christian, I am a great believer in being pro-active. Challenge me as a man, challenge me as a Christian, challenge me as a redeemed sinner — and I will rise to the occasion.
Challenge me as a white man, however, and I draw a blank. Challenge me to make amends for my ancestors, and I am not clear what it is that’s being asked of me. I’m not being lazy or disingenuous; I really, truly, honest-to-God don’t get it!
Dude. Talking to the dead is not un-Christian. Remember that line about “the communion of saints”? Yeah. Theoretically that would involve access to the entire Body of Christ regardless of location in time. (I guess it sort of operationalizes Eternity. Go figure.)
…says the non-Christian, but FWIW.
Have you seen this post? http://blog.shrub.com/archives/tekanji/2006-03-08_146
I just read it for the first time a couple weeks ago, but it seems appropriate to this post/discussion.
(I don’t know how to do links, I just cut and pasted the URL.)
I don’t know of any easy answer to that, but I do know that if you don’t let go, you end up with situations like those existing in Ireland, the Balkans, the Middle East, Kashmir… people still fighting over past wrongs. …
Personally, I’d say that anything from before my grandmother’s time?
You know, a lot of what fueled the conflicts in the Balkans happened during my grandmother’s lifetime. She was born under Turkish rule. She personally remembered the Balkan wars (the two in the early twentieth century), in which her father and other male relatives fought. And some of the historical wrongs that fueled the war in Yugoslavia in the 90s had happened during WWII. Same deal with those other areas; the cycle of past wrongs may go back centuries, but it’s not as if it went through a lull of centuries before getting revived again.
Now, I personally don’t have a deep, ongoing problem with any wrongs the Turks may have done to my grandparents, for a simple reason. I’m not suffering in any ongoing way from those wrongs. I am, in fact, richer and better off than the average Turk. But it’s difficult to get beyond people fighting over past wrongs when the wrongs keep getting renewed. And that, unfortunately, happens the whole world over.
Professor Schwyzer,
While discussing reparations in class today, I was able to bring up a point I first heard from you: every ethnicity has a history of oppression and therefore an “enemy,” so to speak. I remember you said a student came up to you after class and asked something similar to, “I’m (insert ethnic group here), who should I hate?” and you told him that he missed your point but you did have a response as to whom he may have historical “beef.” Thus every group has a case for reparations. I see a slippery-slope here, as every ethnicity would have an apology to make, a financial payment to make, a legal policy to implement. Where shall it stop?
Similarly today in class the only two minority, myself and a black student, did not find reparations too important a legal venture to pursue. Maybe as minorities we are simply ignorant to our histories in this country and do not care, or maybe the generations which have passed have eased some tension, or maybe the reparations talk is out of hand when simply financial compensation is the main solution, rather than changes in law and policy.
That said, females also have a particularly interesting history of abuse, regardless of time period or culture. Mary Wollstonecraft, as you have taught me, essentially had to issue a challenge to males in the early 19th century in order to let them value the brain of their daughters, rather than simply their exterior. If reparations be made, I find a stronger argument for the subjugation in the history of females, rather than any simple ethnic group, Japanese-Americans and Fred Korematsu included. If any reparations be made, let it be to the Japanese we felt the effects of our nuclear weapons to end the second world war.
In closing, if reparations need be made, why is money often discussed? Can we really put a price on oppression? What then separates reparations from high-sum tort cases? Can money make someone whole again? Honestly? The fact that a black man and a white woman are leading the race for the American Presidency seems to me a good start to fixing oppressions made in the past.
The interesting thing is that reparations are considered a step (or several steps) beyond affirmative action, and yet I oppose AA/quotas while I’m very receptive to the idea of reparations. AA and quotas affect people individually (i.e. “you’re not getting this job because of your race/gender/cultural background”), whereas with reparations we can address people as a whole.
Reparations are how we can attend to the injustices groups have done unto others over the last 250 years. But I will not — as Carl would like — claim “responsibility” for the actions of my ancestors. President Clinton’s “apology” (while he was in office) for slavery was an attempt at a kind gesture, but he shouldn’t have made it, because he (just like any other living American) wasn’t responsible for slavery. We can join hands and condemn it together and we can attempt to make things right via reparations, but no living person should be indirectly claiming blame for something that ended nearly a century and a half ago.
The problem with reparations isn’t that they’re not just - they are - but that in the case of reparations for slavery, they won’t help the actual problems that have resulted from slavery’s legacy. Giving money to people who don’t know how to help themselves out of poverty won’t get them out of poverty; it will just give them money to blow. It’s like how most people who win the lottery are back to where they started a few years later. If, on the other hand, you make reparations more of an ongoing thing, like orderly payments over a period of years, it’ll be like welfare has tended to be - a system that encourages dependence.
What people need and (mostly) want - and what the idealized America promises to provide - is the ability to do meaningful work and be part of society, to earn enough to provide for basic needs and to be able to enjoy your leisure time. To fulfill that dream, you need to get a good education. That means not just that a good education is available to you (which it sadly isn’t in some schools), but that you have the attitudes and home support to be able to make use of the resources available.
I’m a middle class person living off my own earnings. Some luck is involved (in that, e.g., I haven’t become disabled through an accident or disease), but the main reason isn’t just that my parents happened to have money (which in fact they had very little of), but that they had a whole culture that valued education and achievement. And, of course, they and I have the skin color that is most valued and encouraged by our culture.
How can money make that happen for the African Americans who are not succeeding currently? I don’t think it can.
During the early 1900s, New York City school districts that served the children of desperately poor Jewish, Irish, and Italian immigrants were renowned for their academic excellence. Kids who lived in one-room or two-room, cold-water flats with a communial bathroom down the hall got an excellent education. Many went on to New York City College. Always a poor kid’s school, NYCC once rivaled Harvard and Yale for academic excellence, but now graduate students renowed for their illiteracy (I had to spell check “illteracy.)
So what has changed. Taking infaltion into account, we spend far more money per student in inner city shools than we did then; so what has changed. Is it the teachers, the curriculum, or the student body?
Uh, let’s not get into major thread drift here… Blair, good question, but pretty damned far afield.
I’m all for reparations, if, and only if, the affirmative action card gets taken out of the deck, Al Sharpton, Jesse “Baby Daddy” Jackson, and other Race Warlords get jobs and a cup of STFU, and a host of other things.
Yeah. That’d be worth the investment.
Reparations? Hell yes.
Speaking for my mother’s side of the family, I want my reparations from the English, who drove my ancestors out of Great Britain and made them flee for their lives lest they be murdered simply because of their religious convictions. I want my reparations from the English colonists who discriminated against her Irish ancestors when they got here. For my father, directly, I want reparations from the Japanese for imprisoning and torturing him simply because he fought back when the Japanese attacked us first. I’m glad they nuked Japan - if they hadn’t, my Dad might have died on some sandbar somebody with a limited sense of humor called an “island.” And for crying out loud, my Dad wasn’t even born in the U.S. - his family immigrated when he was a kid because Europe was so totally screwed-up in the first part of the 20th century that people like the German Socialists put people like him in concentration camps, dontchaknow.
Geez, am I sick of all the yammering about reparations. I agree, everybody has a beef vis-a-vis their ancestors (including the people we call “Native Americans,” who actually weren’t the first people on the continent and who as Blair correctly stated enslaved each other. But that’s another topic). Let’s get over it and stop the “poor me” BS. The U.S. is a country where everybody has the opportunity to succeed as long as they put in the effort. But that means they have to spend more time applying themselves than they do fretting about being some sort of “victim” who deserves reparations from culpable white males, regardless of whether or not we could actually decide who those “culpable white males” actually are.
Ooops, how could I forget to respond to this from Anthony: “If reparations be made, I find a stronger argument for the subjugation in the history of females…”
Oh hell yes! Throughout the entire history of my family, in every generation on both my mother’s and father’s side, there were females.
I want my reparations!
Many repartions advocates based their argument on the disparity between the net wealth accumulated by white householes compared to black households. According to one study, the average net worth of white households is around $80,000, most of it equity in their houses (Bill Gates does a little better.) So, we could wipe out the accumulated wealth gap by paying each black household $80,000 in reparations. (This would pay for a new car with enough left over for a nice downpayment on a house, but it wouldn’t pay the montly mortgage payments when they come due or have an impact that lasts beyond a generation.) Having paid reparations, white America would likely consider all debts squared; the support for affirmative action and other social programs that tend to disporportionately benefits blacks would probably vanish. For this reason, I think repartions is a poor strategy for civil rights advocates.
Having paid reparations, white America would likely consider all debts squared; the support for affirmative action and other social programs that tend to disporportionately benefits blacks would probably vanish. For this reason, I think repartions is a poor strategy for civil rights advocates.
Yeah, the Race Warlords would have to get real jobs then, and the Democratic Party would have to find a new way to buy the votes of minorities.
The last time the subject of reparations came up in the Christian blogosphere, I started wondering if we could draw any analogies from the New Testament. To some extent, I think we can: the Jews were an oppressed people, and opening the church to gentiles meant opening it to people who oppressed them or, at least, benefited from their oppression in various structural ways. Although Christians tend to focus on how legalistic the Jews were, it’s worth noting that the Law was an essential part of the identity they were hanging on to in the face of imperial occupation. It’s no wonder that losing it caused a stink.
The model of reconciliation between ethnic groups in the NT doesn’t look much like what Carl describes. Both parties have to give and take — Jews give up the Law, gentiles give up their gods and vices. The idea of specifically repenting and compensating for the sins of your ancestors doesn’t enter the picture; God’s general forgiveness gives everyone a chance to start fresh. Nor does the idea that you have to repent of every fallen social structure that you benefit from. At one point in Acts, Paul calls upon his rights as a Roman citizen when he’s hauled in front of the authorities. Now, you could reasonably say, “How can he call upon ‘rights’ that many of his fellows don’t share, and that was gained by imperial power?” Yet he does.
Having said that, the NT hardly offers a recipe for complacency, or for sitting happily on your wealth: what happened to Ananias and Sapphira is clear enough! But it is fairly practical about living in a fallen society while at the same time living in the Kingdom. I guess every generation has to figure out that balance anew.
Hugo, thanks for the thoughtful and self-reflective response, I appreciate it. A few thoughts on your post and the conversation thread:
Past wrongs are relevant, not because of some mystical energy passed down the bloodline (well, maybe there is, but I wouldn’t know), but because the same wrongs are still reflected in present-day power relations. There are still white people building massive condos and exploring to dig up uranium and further pollute the Black Hills region, while Lakota people living next door on Pine Ridge still have an average life expectancy under 55. Slavery is still relevant because the wealth gap (and health gap, and police brutality gap, and numerous other gaps) still exist, and it just might have something to do with a couple hundred years of forced servitude while my white Mennonite ancestors were busy staking claims to acres of farmland in Indiana that had recently been cleared of its Potawotami inhabitants. That’s why I don’t have much patience for white folks trying desperately to divert the conversation by yammering about how someone mistreated their great-great-grandpa, or Mennonites (that’s my people) asking if they should get reparations from the Swiss who forced them off their farm in 1637. Or this ridiculous business of “Native people mistreated each other too!” Well, of course. But what a transparently self-serving diversion! Sure, the Lakota and Crow fought all the time, but you know, I don’t hear too many Crow talking today about the terrible effects of “Lakota colonization” - which, of course, is first of all because skirmishing with the Lakota was a completely different thing from European colonization, and secondly because it’s not reflected in today’s power structures. In my mind, this is a much more useful guide than some kind of arbitrary “nothing before my grandmother’s day” rule.
Hugo, why is being confronted as a white man so mysterious? Why is it any different from being confronted as a man for your role in oppression of women? You talk in another thread about your “deep masculinity work” - all I’m talking about here is a very similar need for “deep whiteness work”.
The second part of your post, I think, reveals that you really do have a pretty good idea of some things you could do, but you choose to mock your options and take an aggrieved defensive stance instead of thinking creatively about your options as opportunities for growth. I don’t know much about your specific situations in California, but if you were living here in the Black Hills area I wouldn’t give a damn what you buy at your natural-health store, I would want to know whether you showed up last summer at the rally to protect the prayer site Bear Butte from further destructive biker-bar development, or three days ago at the day-long summit (organized by Lakota people) to strategize against further uranium mining in the Hills region.
When I mentioned learning from indigenous people, I didn’t mean “mystical secrets of nature” (which you might find advertised in your local new-age store, quite possibly because some mega-corporation with a new age brand biopirated and patented somebody’s centuries-old knowledge). Obviously anyone who lives in close daily contact with the rhythms of nature, and depends directly on it for survival, will have more such knowledge than most of us do today (and that includes European ancestors of mine, too). But the myth of the “long-gone noble savage” generally functions to make real, present-day indigenous people and their concerns invisible. And in my opinion, white people flooding to reservations to pick up some mystical secrets and co-opt someone else’s culture (because they aren’t satisfied by what they see in their own) is just the latest wave of colonialism.
Camassia: When I think of what Jesus had to say to the oppressor (which, it’s important to remember, was not who he generally addressed his message to), I think of him telling the rich young man to give away everything he had. On the topic at hand, here’s a biblical model that’s all over the Hebrew scriptures: Lev 26:39-42 “Those of you who are left will waste away… because of their sins; also because of their fathers’ sins they will waste away. But if they will confess their sins and the sins of their fathers—their treachery against me and their hostility toward me, which made me hostile toward them…—then when their uncircumcised hearts are humbled and they pay for their sin, I will remember my covenant with Jacob and my covenant with Isaac and my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land.”
Ok, that’s more than enough… thanks everyone for the interesting conversation.
Forgot to mention one thing - I think Anthony has a great question when he asks why we always think of only money in terms of reparations. Here in South Dakota, the Lakota people have refused monetary payment for the taking of the Black Hills (which the Supreme Court in 1980 called one of the most “rank and dishonorable dealings” in US history) for over 25 years, because they want the land, not money. In general, I don’t think it’s up to the oppressor to quibble about the form that amends take - it’s up to us to do the work of making sure we’re ready to hear what form it needs to take. Really, it’s simple stuff - just like in individual experience, if you wrong somebody badly, you don’t go preaching to them about how they need to get over it, or tell them what kind of amends they need to accept, or tell them to let “bygones be bygones” and look to the future. If you want a continued relationship, you prepare yourself to listen carefully and understand what kind of amends will actually contribute to healing. Same things apply on the collective level.
And I pasted that Leviticus verse from the New International Version - the New Revised Standard Version has a translation that communicates better: “And those of you who survive shall languish… because of their iniquities; also they shall languish because of the iniquities of their ancestors. But if they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their ancestors… if then their uncircumcised heart is humbled and they make amends for their iniquity, then will I remember my covenant with Jacob; I will remember also my covenant with Isaac and also my covenant with Abraham, and I will remember the land. ”
Let’s hope it’s not too late for this land - or this world, for that matter.
While I’m not neccesarily against reparations as a practical way to address inequalities, I don’t like the discourse that surrounds them. Looking at inequalities as one group “owing” another just misses the point. We should all be striving to make the society we live in as just as possible. We need to revolutionize the way people treat eachother, not just compensate people for being mistreated.
I know that in the wake of the residential school system here in Canada, while there were reparations offered, what a lot of survivors have said is that it was the apology that mattered more, the aknowledgement that something wrong happened, and there’s a great deal of frustration directed at the churches which have yet to apologize. Money can be a part of reconciliation, but I don’t think it’s at the heart of it. If all the descendants of slaves got some lump sum of cash, they’d still be economically behind white America, because it isn’t just the legacy of slavery that keeps people poor in modern America - it’s an economic system that is instutionally racist in the here and now. That system needs to be changed.
Perhaps the fairest thing to do is to gather representaties for every continent, racial group and ehtnic group and make an MTV-type video in which they all simultaneously apologize for slavery. We could follow it up with a video in which repesentatives from nations that still condone slavery and human trafficking would promise to end it.
My wife and I should name our baby-on-the-way Adolf. Such an honorable name. Mr. Hitler did so much to expand our understanding of science, build up industry and advance the cause of Germanic peoples like me.
Of course, this is ridiculous. How Hitler became powerful and what he did with that power is a pretty essential part of the story.
Isn’t the same thing true for those of us who have benefitted from the actions and decisions of our ancestors? We don’t detach the name Adolf Hitler from his past, so why do we attempt it ourselves? The ways we who are white became privileged as a group–and the ways we continue to benefit from our whiteness as a social group–make it impossible for us to simply rewind and start over.
Its an excuse pure and simple not to fully engage in this analysis because we don’t know what to do with it. We don’t expect faith to be something handed to us on a platter, with all the answers included, nor should we expect our own struggle to understand history and its total impact on our identity to come easily either. The struggle is both personal and communal, and like faith, we need to be nurtured, encouraged and challenged on both levels.
Godwin’s Law strikes again.
Warfare among Native American tribes wasn’t just “skirmishing,” it was incessant, brutal and genocidal. As a percentage of population, casualty rates were much higher than in European wars of the 20th century. The purpose of tribal warfare was to anihilate or decimate rival tribes, and push them off their land.
The perception that Native American tribes have lived on their “ancestral land” since time immemorial is wrong. The tribes migrated constantly due to climate change, the depletion of natural resources, or pressure from hostile tribes. As they migrated, they collided with ribal tribes that sought to resist the invaders.
The Lakota Sioux are a perfect examble. The French had already explored the Black Hills before the Lakota arrived in what is now South Dakota. The Lakota migrated from the Great Lakes area to the Black Hills. As they migrated west toward the Black Hills, the Lakota pushed other tribes out of the way. Near the Missouri, they attacked the fortified villages of the Arikaras, Mandans and Hidatsas, murdering and mutilating 400 men, women and children at one site and 75 at a second site. (By comparison, 150 to 180 Cheyenne and Arapahoes died during the infamous Sand Creek Massacre, the most famous of white atrocities against Native Americans.) They arrived in the Black Hills around 1775, about 40 years ahead of the first permanent white settlement. Native Americans boast about the defeats they inflicted on other tribe and don’t complain about their loses to other tribes because they expected and gave no quarter. They certinaly didn’t set up reservations or attempt to perserve the culture of tribes they defeated in battle.
Today, most Native Americans live in large cities. Reservations with small populations and abundant natural resources, such as oil and gas or mineral deposits, or gambling casino, are relatively prosperous, although casinos are only highly profitable on reservations located near large metropolitan areas). Native Americans trapped on poor reservations can escape poverty by leaving the reservation.
Warfare among Native American tribes wasn’t just “skirmishing,” it was incessant, brutal and genocidal. As a percentage of population, casualty rates were much higher than in European wars of the 20th century.
Unless you’re talking about warfare that was prompted by European invasion and trade, I want to see a source for that. I’m not aware of any wars that happened in between first nations in what is now the US that could be accurately described as genocidal.
Blair, Real historians don’t try to make generalizations across an entire continent. Just something you might think about.
Plenty of native groups rarely or never went to war. Some participated in fairly brutal warfare regularily (although nothing as horrifying as the European warfare of the same period, where travelling soldiers lived “off the land”, raiding farms and cities as they went). Some lived in sedentary settlements. Some migrated constantly. Some indeed lived in the same place for thousands of years.
One fact is pretty uncontentious and broadly applicable - There are enourmous amounts of land in the US and Canada that was never ceded or conquered, but which the Governments of those countries lay claim to. While their might be some contention over which native group has historical claims to native land due to historical migration, that doesn’t mean America has any claim to it.
Labyrus said: “Unless you’re talking about warfare that was prompted by European invasion and trade, I want to see a source for that. I’m not aware of any wars that happened in between first nations in what is now the US that could be accurately described as genocidal.”
The Cheyenne who lived in what it now modern-day Montana and Wyoming were notoriously ‘genocidal’ with the Lakota, Mandans and other northern plains and Hudson Bay Indians (before they made ‘peace’ with them at spear-point). In fact, the Cheyenne made war as far south as Texas (via trade routes through modern-day Colorado) and east to the Mississippi with the express purpose of either subjugating or wiping-out other tribes. As Blair noted, this was a major concern for the Navajo, who were at the time occupants of what is now known as New Mexico and Arizona. In turn, the Navajo waged ruthless war on the Hopi, who were almost completely wiped-out by the Navajo and who may also be responsible for the disappearance of the Anisazi of the Four Corners region. Also, some members of the Iroquois nation gave smallpox-infested blankets to other members, notably the Mohawks, with the intention to wipe-out those tribes. This is well-documented in Elizabeth Fenn’s excellent work Pox Americana: The Great Smallpox Epidemic of 1775-82.
Now, how about you provide evidence that the people we call “First Nations” did not engage in inter-tribal warfare and genocide? The facts clearly show that the image of “noble savage” as it relates to peaceful inter-tribal coexistence, environmentally conscious and responsible living, etc., prior to contact with Europeans is gargantuan myth.
Continuing: “Blair, Real historians don’t try to make generalizations across an entire continent. Just something you might think about.”
Nor do they make generalizations across an entire race, especially one as diverse as “whites.”
“Plenty of native groups rarely or never went to war.”
Such as? What do mean when you say “groups?” Families? Clans? Tribes? Nations?
Names and citations please.
“Some participated in fairly brutal warfare regularily (although nothing as horrifying as the European warfare of the same period, where travelling soldiers lived “off the land”, raiding farms and cities as they went).”
Absolutely not true. So-called Native Americans did exactly what you describe above, but in addition, killed the men, raped the women and enslaved them along with the children.
“Some lived in sedentary settlements. Some migrated constantly. Some indeed lived in the same place for thousands of years.”
Same thing with many, perhaps most, whites. Your point is?
“One fact is pretty uncontentious and broadly applicable - There are enourmous amounts of land in the US and Canada that was never ceded or conquered, but which the Governments of those countries lay claim to. While their might be some contention over which native group has historical claims to native land due to historical migration, that doesn’t mean America has any claim to it.”
Why?
This thread is now closed, for rampant thread drift. Pleading to have it reopened in order to rebut what someone else said will get ya nowhere.