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10/14/2005:

"Randall Robinson Interview"

...Q: Moving on to the subject you’ve been most closely associated with in the last few years: reparations for slavery. Why do you think that’s necessary?

Robinson: Let me give you some conditions that don’t get talked about. The U.S. has the largest prison population in the world: two million people. The country with one-twentieth of the world’s population has one-fourth of those in prison. One out of every eight prisoners in the world is an African American. We are warehousing people as a profit to shareholders or for benefits to communities that get to host federal prisons. It is modern slavery. The whole future of America’s black community is at risk. One out of every three young black men in Washington, D.C., is under one arm or the other of the criminal justice system. These are the continuing consequences of slavery.

We have sustained so much psychic damage and so much loss of memory. Every people, in order to remain healthy and strong, has to have a grasp of its foundation story. Culture is a chrysalis—it is protective, it takes care of you. That’s what cultures are for. You cannot rob a people of language, culture, mother, father, the value of their labor—all of that—without doing vast damage to those people. People need their history like they need air and food. You deprive them of that for 246 years and follow that by 100 years of de jure discrimination, and then you say with the Voting Rights Act: It’s over, you just go take care of yourself!

Average people do not survive that. You plant twenty coconut trees over here, and twenty coconut trees over there, and you water this batch and don’t water that batch. Of the batch you water, nineteen will survive and one will die. Of the batch you don’t water, nineteen will die and one will survive. And then we have somebody like George Bush. I can’t think of a more mediocre human talent than George Bush. He obviously is a product of family advantage, and he’s the worst American President of all time.

Anyway, in my arguments for reparations, I’m not talking about writing checks to people. The word reparations means to repair. We’ve opened this gap in society between the two races. Whites have more than eleven times the net worth or wealth of African Americans. They make greater salaries. Our unemployment rate is twice theirs. You look at the prison system and who that’s chewing up. Now we’ve got the advent of AIDS. Fifty-four percent of new infections are inAfrican Americans. Many infected men are coming out of prison and infecting their women. So when I talk about reparations, I say there has to be a material component. It has to have a component of education that is compensatory. It has to have a component of economic development that’s compensatory. But in the last analysis the greater damage is here [points to his head]. So I’m not really talking about money. And I’m not really talking about the concerns of people who say, “I didn’t benefit from slavery.” Nobody said you did.

It’s important for white America to be able to face up. Far beyond its relations with the black community, it is important for white Americans. It’s important in helping us in our approaches to the rest of the world, and in being sensitive to Islam, and to look at the way other cultures handle their management of themselves, and to look at it with respect, with the possibility that you even might learn something. We’ve got a country that never takes any responsibility for anything. It forgets its role and makes everybody else forget what happened, too. And that it is not just dangerous for the victim, but also for the perpetrator.
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