12228: Reparations; Simidor responds to Mambo Racine (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: karioka9@cs.com

Generalizing from one's personal experience often leads to the wrong conclusions. In this case, your family experience leads you to believe that African-Americans are generally lazy and dumb. And that, my dear Mambo, is a racist assumption. Let me explain.

The argument that pre-World War II white immigrants escaped poverty through education and hard work, and that the same escape route is therefore accessible to all, namely the black poor, flies in the face of evidence and crashes, like my Mission Aviation friend would say, on the particular mountain of White Skin Privilege. Bob will probably not allow a general discussion about race or reparations, so I'll keep it short and to the point.

The public school system in NYC (Newark, Philadelphia, Boston, etc) played the role you described for your father's generation and for the one before his. But guess what? All that changed in the 1960s after school segregation ended legally. Now most white kids in those cities go to private schools (and to public school in the suburbs), and the innercity public schools have been left to rot. Many black and latino kids attending those schools are functionally illiterate, and if you were familiar with the situation in
NYC you would know that depending on the age of the kids, their parents, too, often can't read. To say that everybody in this country can go to college is just not true, and for more than one reason. But folks who made it like to insist that it's up to the individual, because they refuse to acknowledge their own debt to institutional racism.

Mambo makes a big deal about identifying the companies that enslaved one's ancestors and then suing them if they are still in business. What an absurd requirement! The vast majority of whites benefited from the wealth associated with slavery - those who owned slaves and those who didn't, those who came on the Mayflower and those who only got off the boat in the last century. Slavery was a crime perpetrated by the United States of America and by all the institutions associated with it. It was not a
"peculiar institution" that some people developed separately. It was the foundation of wealth in this country, and as such fueled the growth of American capitalism. I speak objectively and without anger because Haitians purged the crime of slavery in the blood of their oppressors. But it always amazes me how glibly some people minimize the overwhelming reality of 400 years of racial oppression in this country. Most whites would even deny been insensive, but then again, white skin privilege often causes blindness. White skin privilege doesn't just protect you against racial profiling on the New Jersey turnpike, it imposes a separate reality and a different consciousness for whites and for blacks.

More specifically about Haiti, it is the "independence debt" that is of immediate concern. I say this without breaking rank with the larger reparation movement. Rather, it is a more practical, limited and quantifiable agenda. And we know who the culprits are - the French government. So I'll be waiting for you Mambo to "be there with bells on."

Daniel Simidor