reading the reparations debate

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Reading the Reparations DebateJacqueline BaconPublished online: 12 Dec 2010.

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Quarterly Journal of SpeechVol. 89, No. 3, August 2003, pp. 171–195

Reading the Reparations Debate

Jacqueline Bacon

This essay examines the ways in which the rhetoric of the reparations debate elucidates the varying accounts of

history favored by Americans of different backgrounds, the political and ideological foundations underlying different

perspectives on the nature and uses of history, and the norms guiding public deliberation in the contemporary U.S.

about how to remember the past. Because the controversy explicitly connects questions about race and cultural memory,

it has generated positions that seem irresolvable; yet, ironically, the debate suggests ways in which rhetoric about race

in the U.S. might begin to move beyond current impasses. Key words: reparations debate, race,

cultural memory, public deliberation, power

FEW issues have generated such heated arguments in the media as proposals tocompensate African Americans and/or African nations for slaves’ suffering

and unpaid labor.1 Not surprisingly, the rhetoric of the debate reflects deeplyentrenched views about the justification of reparations. Polls show that Americansare sharply divided along racial lines, with a large majority of whites opposed and amajority of African Americans in favor.2 Opponents and supporters not only disagreeabout what is to be done in the future. The past is also at stake. The two sides in thedebate construct very different histories and favor contrasting methods of rememberingthe nation’s history, particularly when it involves oppression, guilt, and responsibility.Followers of the debate may be struck by an apparent paradox. On the one hand, it

may seem that the controversy is just one more example of a racial impasse which cannever be fully resolved, like the divisions following the O. J. Simpson trial or morerecent discussions of police brutality. Opponents are extremely resistant to—and angryabout—the arguments of reparations supporters; in the words of Mark Brown of theChicago Sun-Times, “whites are digging in their heels.” Brian Lehrer, host of On the Lineon public radio station WNYC, noted during a segment devoted to a discussion ofreparations that “few racial issues” arouse as “much rage among white callers.” Morediscussion of the issue, these observations would suggest, will not lead to any resolutionor bring the two sides into fruitful dialogue. Some reparations supporters, however,argue that the debate is productive and in and of itself will have a positive effect ondiscourse about race in the U.S. Randall Robinson, for example, maintains that one ofthe goals of the reparations movement can be achieved by “simply raising the issue andprovoking public discussion.”3

These divergent perspectives suggest important challenges for those studying racialdiscourse and the rhetoric of history and cultural memory in the contemporary U.S.Can rhetoric about race bring about meaningful exchanges between white Americansand African Americans? Can varying versions of the past constructed by Americans ofdifferent backgrounds—accounts based on strong ideological and political assumptionsand linked to powerful identities—ever be reconciled or, at least, brought into produc-tive dialogue? In what follows, I demonstrate that the rhetoric of the reparations debatecan provide insight into these crucial questions by revealing the historical and ideologi-cal foundations underlying contemporary discourse about race and illuminating the

Copyright 2003, National Communication AssociationDOI:10:80/0033563032000125304

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QUARTERLY JOURNAL OF SPEECH AUGUST 2003

limits and possibilities of public deliberation in the contemporary U.S. about the

nation’s racial past.

I work from the premise that the highly charged nature of the reparations debate can

be attributed to its position at the intersection of two rhetorical fields—the rhetoric of

race and the rhetoric of cultural memory. As various scholars have demonstrated,

discourse about race in the contemporary U.S. is often highly charged and antagonistic,

placing whites and African Americans in entrenched positions that admit no common

ground and seem to offer no potential for eventual reconciliation.4 As recent well-pub-

licized controversies about the teaching of history have demonstrated, Americans are

also divided about how to remember the nation’s past, what history should mean, and

the role it should have in the lives of citizens.5 Yet I contend that, despite these apparent

deadlocks, the explicit connection of questions about race and cultural memory in the

reparations debate suggests potential ways in which rhetoric about race in the U.S.

might begin to move beyond current impasses.6

Although there have been discussions of reparations at conferences and in academic

settings, much of the debate has taken place in the popular media; indeed, more

Americans would be exposed to the debate through such representations than through

other channels. As various scholars have suggested, the popular media constitute the

public sphere in the contemporary U.S.7 Thus, in addition to considering the rhetoric

of scholars and experts, I include arguments that have appeared in online sources,

newspapers, magazines, and television and radio programs. Indeed, in the debate about

reparations, as in other debates about cultural memory, what we might describe as

“scholarly” and “popular” histories intersect and influence each other. As Marouf

Hasian, Jr. and Robert E. Frank explain, it can be productive to avoid “the privileging

of either ‘official history’ or ‘collective memory’ ” and to consider the way “elite and

public forms of rhetoric stand in dialectical tension.”8

Within this framework, my analysis is fourfold. First, I provide a close reading of the

historical accounts created by opponents and supporters of reparations. Drawing on the

studies of those who explore the rhetoric of history and cultural memory as well as the

work of scholars Mark Lawrence McPhail, Aaron David Gresson III, and Carl

Gutierrez-Jones on contemporary rhetoric about race, I demonstrate that reparations

opponents construct historical narratives based on what McPhail calls the “politics of

innocence,” which allows white Americans to maintain “a nostalgic vision of them-

selves,” while the accounts of reparations advocates demonstrate a commitment to what

he describes as “implicature” or a belief in interrelatedness.9

I then turn to the conceptions of history that are favored by opponents and

supporters of reparations. I demonstrate that their disagreements reveal the ways in

which innocence and implicature also inform Americans’ views of what history should

be and do, particularly when it comes to remembering the nation’s racial past.

Public debates in the U.S. do not take place on some mythical level playing field;

power and privilege intervene. In the third section of the paper, I demonstrate that the

reparations debate reveals hidden norms that influence who can speak in discussions

about race, what can be said, and what will be heard.

Finally, I revisit Randall Robinson’s belief that “simply raising the issue and provok-

ing public discussion” can be beneficial, arguing that, ironically, reparations supporters

may be successful in one sense. By challenging traditional historical narratives, they

fundamentally alter the nature of the debate about race in the U.S. and create

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conditions that potentially can transcend some of the tensions inherent in currentdiscussions about race.Before I begin my analysis, a brief history of the concept of reparations and the

movements supporting it is in order. Although they have received renewed attention inrecent years, calls for reparations are not new, and there is precedent for current effortsboth to bring lawsuits and to seek legislation. In 1782, Belinda, a former slave toEnglishman Isaac Royall in Massachusetts, successfully petitioned the legislature for apension from the Royall estate, arguing that she was “denied the enjoyment of onemorsel of that immense wealth, a part whereof hath been accumulated by her ownindustry” and that an allowance to her would be “the just returns of honest industry.”Anthropology Professor Rosalind Shaw calls Belinda’s petition “perhaps the earliestexample of reparations for the slave trade and slavery.” And 80 years later, AfricanAmerican leader John Rock argued, “It is the slave who ought to be compensated. Theproperty of the South is by right the property of the slave.”10 Various governmentalproposals for restitution that followed the Civil War were unsuccessful: General WilliamTecumseh Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15 (“40 acres and a mule”), issued inJanuary 1865, to provide land to newly freed slaves was reversed by President AndrewJohnson, and Republican Representative Thaddeus Stevens’s 1867 bill to provide landand financial assistance for building homes failed. Yet the issue was not forgotten, andvarious leaders continued to advocate for reparations, including Bishop Henry McNealTurner during the late nineteenth century, Queen Mother Audley Moore in the 1950s,and black civil rights activist James Forman, whose 1969 “Black Manifesto” elaboratedspecific proposals for compensation.11

Recently, the issue has received widespread public attention, particularly as a resultof the activism of various individuals and groups. Every year since 1989, CongressmanJohn Conyers has introduced H. R. 40, a bill to create a commission to study slaveryand its legacy and to “recommend appropriate remedies.”12 Others have exploredvarious ways reparations could be achieved, including: the National Coalition of Blacksfor Reparations in America (N’COBRA); the Reparations Coordinating Committee, agroup of lawyers and scholars; and Randall Robinson, whose popular book The Debt:What America Owes to Blacks appeared in 2000. Three other developments also publicizedthe issue. During Black History Month 2001, conservative polemicist David Horowitzattempted to place an advertisement “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Is aBad Idea—and Racist Too” in college newspapers. The controversy that ensued whenit was published in some and rejected by others led to numerous public appearances byHorowitz and some of his critics. In September 2001, the U.S. delegation walked outof the United Nations Conference on Racism in Durban, South Africa, in part becauseof U.S. opposition to discussion of reparations. Since March 2002, lawsuits have beenfiled throughout the country on behalf of slave descendants against various companieswho profited from slavery.13

Innocence versus Implicature: U.S. Histories in Competition

History as Innocence

As Hayden White and others have argued, historians mediate and organize events byplotting them in a story form.14 The plot structure or “kind of story that [is] told,” Whiteargues, gives the story meaning as an account of the past and an explanation of it. The

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historical narratives constructed by a group of people are intricately intertwined withcultural memory. Any “enacted event,” Hannah Arendt argues, cannot have meaningfor those “who are to tell the story … without the articulation accomplished byremembrance.” As Hasian and Frank explain, collective memories are intertwined withmore “official” historical discourses because they are “the public acceptances orratifications of these histories on the part of broader audiences.” The resulting culturalproducts reflect a society’s knowledge of the past and their understanding of themselves,and help groups construct and maintain identities. Yet this process is not static, and itsresults are never settled. As Stephen Browne explains, “public memory” is “volatile,” a“site of uncertainty, contest, and change.”15

The historical accounts favored by opponents of reparations can be understood interms of contemporary discursive strategies used by many white Americans in discus-sions of race. McPhail argues that contemporary rhetoric about race depends on a“dialectic of guilt provocation and denial.” Although reparations supporters often havecomplex ideas about guilt and responsibility, most opponents have interpreted argu-ments for reparations as positing that whites are guilty. Thus, they adopt the strategiesthat McPhail describes, particularly the denial of both injury and responsibility withrespect to racism. This “politics of innocence,” in McPhail’s terms, leads to narrativesin which reparations opponents propose that white Americans have already paid for thesin of slavery. Describing the abolition of slavery, David Horowitz maintains that “in thethousand years of slavery’s existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement untilwhite Anglo-Saxon Christians created one.” Similarly, Jeff Jacoby asserts:

From the day Africans arrived in America, there were whites who pleaded their cause and

fought for their rights. Many paid dearly for their commitment to black freedom. Elijah

Lovejoy, the fiery abolitionist editor, was murdered by a proslavery mob. William Lloyd

Garrison, founder of the American Anti-Slavery Society, was jailed.16

As scholarship on abolition in the past three decades has demonstrated, Horowitz’sclaim is incorrect, while Jacoby’s is incomplete. African American men and women,including many free-born northern blacks, were instrumental in creating the antislaverymovement that is usually associated with such white leaders as Garrison and Lovejoy.Abolitionist activity was well organized among African Americans in the urban Northbefore many white reformers were willing to go beyond gradualist measures, and itwas through contact with African American abolitionists that leaders such as Garrisonbecame radicalized.17 Yet these selective narratives of the antislavery movement res-onate in the popular imagination. Robert Berkhofer explains that historical accountshave a “political subtext” and are “produced according to some interest.” In addition,as Ronald Carpenter argues, history often reinforces “conclusions Americans learnedpreviously from their popular culture,” and accounts of whites freeing passive AfricanAmericans have been a part of U.S. popular culture from statues of the GreatEmancipator freeing chained slaves to Mississippi Burning.18 These narratives allow whiteAmericans to distance themselves from responsibility for racism by casting whites assubjects and African Americans as objects in history.19 Michael Leff argues that the“hermeneutical rhetoric” of those who interpret historical events leads to “the inventionof usable traditions” for particular political purposes.20 As opponents of reparationsremember the abolition movement, they create a history in which antislavery whitescorrected the sin of slavery, removing responsibility from subsequent generations.These narratives help white Americans to maintain the stance that Gresson calls

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“ ‘white privatization’: whites’ refusal, if not inability, to identity with their racial past.”As Gresson explains, this view entails “a refusal to associate one’s current privilegedplace in society with historic inequities.” This privatization also informs anti-reparationsnarratives that posit that some event—what Hayden White describes as a “transitionalmotif”—separates past and present into a before and after that are presumed to beunrelated. Transitional motifs, Hayden White maintains, effect “a progressive redescrip-tion of sets of events in such a way as to dismantle a structure encoded in one verbalmode in the beginning [of the story] so as to justify a recoding of it in another modeat the end.”21 White’s terms suggest that episodes that resonate in popular memoryas embodying both destruction and resurrection are particular salient. It is not surpris-ing, then, that the Civil War is frequently featured in anti-reparations narratives. Thewar as transitional motif recodes the nation’s self-image from a slaveholding republicto a democracy committed to freedom; in terms of identity, it shifts whites from aposition of guilt to innocence. The almost apocalyptic force of the Civil War in U.S.memory renders it uniquely effective in dismantling the national connection to slavery,creating sharply defined before and after categories.Discussing reparations with guest David Gergen, host Chris Matthews of MSNBC’s

Hardball constructed such a narrative to argue that the quest for reparations is “a littlebit ridiculous”: “We had a civil war in this country, and I hate to say it, but 600,000guys were killed, all of them white, I guess, or most of them white. They paid a horribleprice for slavery.” Some accounts turn the historical tables on reparations supporters,suggesting that African Americans are actually in debt to whites as a result of the war.A letter to the editor of Newsday declares:

As I understand the history of [the Civil War], 1.5 million mostly white “European Americans”

effectively fought a terrible war to free the slaves … . [Reparations supporters] would be on

substantially higher moral ground if they asked their constituents to thank all those poor dead

Americans who made it possible for them to enjoy their current freedom and wealth of

opportunity.

Similarly, David Horowitz asserts in his anti-reparations advertisement, “If not for thesacrifices of white soldiers and a white American president … blacks in America wouldstill be slaves … . Where is the acknowledgment of black America and its leaders forthose gifts?” Whites are not only absolved of guilt, these accounts imply, but they arealso victimized by African Americans who attempt to provoke guilt. Gutierrez-Jonesnotes that contemporary discourse about race occasions continual reframing of how we“read injury,” allowing those who point to “reverse racism” in modern society to invertthe “perpetrator/victim” relationship. Through this rhetorical reversal, Gresson ex-plains, white Americans try to “recover the moral right to dominate other groups.”22

The emphasis in these accounts on white Civil War soldiers is telling. More than180,000 African Americans fought for the Union in the Civil War, and nearly 40,000died,23 a fact frequently omitted from anti-reparations rhetoric. As Hasian and Franknote, “the selective forgetting of the past” is a “significant function of histories andcollective memories.”24 The absence of soldiers and abolitionists who were not white inanti-reparations rhetoric places African Americans in a passive role in history andimplies that white Americans alone were responsible for the transition from slavery tofreedom. It also creates a narrative filtered through the lens of whiteness. As variousscholars have demonstrated, powerful but often hidden discourses allow whites tomaintain power in society. One such strategy assumes whites’ experiences to be

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normative and universal.25 Even those accounts acknowledging that not all Civil Warsoldiers were white do so only through a rhetorical construction—they were “mostly”white—which makes whiteness the norm and leaves its cultural power unquestioned. AsNathan Huggins maintains, “A master narrative about free whites creating free institu-tions lacks the context in which whiteness and freedom have meaning,” particularly therelationship of “white power” to the “debasement of blacks.”26

The selective forgetting inherent in cultural memory is related to other choices madeby those who tell historical narratives.27 The omission of African American Civil Warsoldiers and abolitionists in anti-reparations rhetoric is part of a reading of history inwhich data are placed into discrete, clear categories. McPhail argues that “dualistic”classifications are hallmarks of contemporary racial discourse.28 When this tendencyintersects with the production of cultural memories, what gets remembered are thoseevents and actors who can be explained in terms of strict either/or categories that keeptraditional racial identities and historical metanarratives intact. Consider, for example,Horowitz’s response to the criticism by scholars of his erroneous claim that whiteAnglo-Saxon Christians created the antislavery movement.29 “Of course, there weremany slave revolts,” he notes, “in which those who had been enslaved sought to gaintheir freedom. But that was not the point. The freedom they had sought was their own.They did not revolt against the institution of slavery as such.”30 Horowitz’s defense doesmore than suggest inaccurately that slave revolts were not aimed at the institution itself;he also suggests that any blacks who fought slavery must have been slaves. Free AfricanAmerican abolitionists, who do not fit into his categorization of the antislavery move-ment as involving (publicly minded) white abolitionists and (self-oriented) slaves whotake part in revolts, are ignored.The bifurcation here—African Americans were slaves; whites were liberators—allows

contemporary white Americans to construct an identity that is comforting and thatdistances them from past racial oppression. Other actors in history—free AfricanAmericans, or whites who ignored, were complicit in, or profited from the system—complicate notions of guilt and innocence in ways that challenge whites’ beliefs aboutthemselves and their history. The omission of the long tradition of struggle and protestamong African Americans in the U.S. also maintains this innocent history, silencingvoices that challenge narratives based on easy divisions between slavery and freedom,antebellum and postbellum. How can one clear whites’ historical consciences whenconfronted with the scathing indictments by African American abolitionists JermainWesley Loguen and William J. Watkins of the racism of many white antislaveryreformers? Or Frederick Douglass’s declaration in an 1888 speech, after observing thepostbellum conditions of African Americans in the South, that the “so-called emanci-pation” was “a stupendous fraud?”31

Innocence is also maintained through the relationships created between historicalfacts. Histories depend upon “prefigurative act[s]” performed by those who tell them,Hayden White maintains, which create the kinds of relationships that elements of thehistorical record “can sustain with one another.”32 In the histories of slavery favored byreparations opponents, data about U.S. slavery are interpreted in ways that attempt tominimize the institution’s significance. Their attempts to localize slavery to the South,for example, lead to indefensible but telling historical claims, such as Horowitz’scontention in the online magazine Salon.com that “[b]oth slavery and legal segregation,as reparations-proponents tend to ignore, was [sic] confined to the South.” Others maynot deny the presence of slavery in many northern states, yet they nonetheless

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incorrectly minimize slavery’s reach. On Fox News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes,conservative African American economist Walter Williams noted that he favored“individual accountability,” that “slave owners should make reparations to slaves,”which “will have to be taken care of in heaven or hell, wherever they are.” AlderwomanDorothy Tillman of Chicago’s third ward challenged Williams to acknowledge that theeffects of slavery reached beyond the slaveholder-slave relationship: “[W]ould you agreewith me that this country was built off the backs of free labor from—from slaves?”Williams disagreed, offering an account that implied that slavery’s economic impact wasconfined only to slaveholding states:

[W]hich were the slave-rich states? They were Mississippi, Alabama and Georgia. They

were … the poorest states. Now, the slave-starved states, such as Pennsylvania, New York and

Massachusetts, they were the rich states … . slavery does not have a very good reputation for

building … wealth.33

Of course, as recent lawsuits show, Williams’s contention is inaccurate; yet the memoryof slavery as localized allows contemporary Americans to distance themselves from thepast. Williams’s perspective also suggests an important aspect of contemporary discourseabout race among conservative African Americans. As Gresson notes, some AfricanAmerican conservatives, like their white counterparts, embrace privatization, removingindividuals from the historical contexts of oppression. As McPhail points out, “Theblack conservative agenda, like elite white discourse, seemingly ignores the historicalimpact of discrimination and prejudice in American life on the social construction ofracism.” Lauren Berlant notes that this attitude depends on a “vicious yet sentimentalcultural politics” in which the U.S. is not “a space of struggle violently separated byracial, sexual, and economic inequalities” but rather a “nation whose survival dependsupon personal acts and identities.”34 Williams builds on his notion of individualaccountability, in which interpersonal relationships are isolated from larger forces, todistance contemporary white Americans and African Americans from their racial pastsboth morally and financially through his contention that slavery’s economic influencewas minimal. In the accounts of Williams and other opponents of reparations, pastevents can easily be classified and separated from one’s present circumstances, whichdepend entirely on personal choices.Similarly, reparations opponents rely on discrete, dualistic categories when they

suggest that historical responsibility rests only with those white Americans who actuallyowned slaves. Whites are classified as slaveholders or non-slaveholders; the former aredeclared guilty and the latter innocent. In addition, reparations opponents argue thatbecause the number of actual slaveholders was small, most whites can plead historicalinnocence by separating themselves from the institution. In a column in the TopekaCapital-Journal, Dick Snider asserts, “[W]hen only 275,000 out of 27 million ownedslaves, that leaves the vast majority of Americans, then and now, free of any involve-ment, or blame.”35

This argument is bolstered by an incorrect but common assumption perpetuated inanti-reparations arguments, that Americans in non-slaveholding states not only weredivorced from slavery but also generally opposed it. On the Fox News Channel’sprogram The Edge With Paula Zahn, for example, guest host John Gibson challengedAfrican American economist Julianne Malveaux: “[A]re you going to suggest that thepeople of Boston, who ran the most active abolitionist societies in this country, oughtto pay reparations … for a system they stood against?” Ignoring the mob violence

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directed against abolitionists and free African Americans in cities including Boston,Gibson transforms the two categories of white actors in U.S. history into slaveholdersand abolitionists. Erased from this account are the varying levels of complicity withand participation in the system by many white Americans in the North and the Southwho did not hold slaves. Because white consumers, businesspeople, and anti-abolitionistscomplicate the prevailing stance of innocence, they do not appear in anti-reparationsaccounts. In addition, the way the abolition movement is remembered is notable. InGibson’s historical picture, leaders like Garrison were part of the mainstream insteadof radicals considered a threat to the very foundations of society. As Stephen Brownedemonstrates in his analysis of the evolving public memory of Crispus Attucks, societiesmay rewrite the histories of figures who, in their time, were seen as radical, recastingthem as examples of “a greater and all-encompassing tale of American progress.”36

Reparations opponents also understate the nation’s (and the West’s) responsibility forslavery through their interpretation of Africa’s role in the slave trade. Deploying ahistorical tu quoque, they frequently highlight the role of the Africans who sold slavesand suggest, in many cases, that they are guiltier than whites. A letter to the editorof the Washington Times asserts:

The Africans themselves played the critical and most proactive role in the slave trade … .

Many Africans in or around Ghana’s Cape Coast … are the descendants of the African

traders, dealers and others who were key players in that wretched trade. None of these facts

diminishes the culpability of the European traders.

Similarly, a caller to the WNYC radio program On the Line challenged Jomo Thomas,an attorney representing plaintiffs in a reparations lawsuit:

The black Africans who were enslaved and captured and sold were enslaved and captured

and sold by other black Africans … . [T]here are more people that are guilty, and many of

them are black Africans, who sold their own brethren, which is a real disgrace. I think it’s

a disgrace on both sides.37

Although both of these comments contain perfunctory references to the West’s responsi-bility, the choice of terms—“key players,” “the critical and most proactive role,” “a realdisgrace”—places the majority of blame on Africa. The West’s active and fundamentalrole in the African slave trade is ignored; in these accounts, Western nations respondedto conditions initiated and controlled by Africans.The various historical accounts that attempt to minimize responsibility for slavery are

at best incomplete, at worst disingenuous. Yet they have an important function inanti-reparations rhetoric. By suggesting that whites’ involvement in racial oppressionand slavery’s impact can easily be classified and minimized—slavery was confined to theSouth, only a few were involved, Americans were merely buying what Africanssold—reparations opponents maintain a stance of white innocence and preserve thecultural myth that all ultimately have been able to share equally in the nation’s promisesof liberty and democracy. This aspect of U.S. cultural memory is related to tendenciesin more official historical narratives. As Huggins argues, “American historians … havetreated racial slavery and oppression as curious abnormalities—aberrations—historicalaccidents to be corrected in the progressive and upward reach of the nation’s destiny.”The “master narrative” of U.S. history persists even after “new and sophisticated[historical] work” on slavery because, Huggins notes, “it feeds and satisfies our mostprofound sense of identity,” the notion that the U.S. is “a peaceful, industrious, and

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progressive nation, becoming the exemplar of freedom and democracy throughout theworld.”38

History as Implicature

In opposition to an attitude of innocence and denial with respect to race, McPhaildescribes implicature or “the recognition and awareness of our essential interrelated-ness, and an acceptance as basic to the belief that we are materially, ideologically, andspiritually implicated in each others’ lives.”39 This perspective clearly resists the seduc-tive rhetorics of privatization and personal choice and proposes that we acknowledgethe various forces that affect the past, present, and future and understand humanexperience in terms of the contradictions and tensions intrinsic to it. With respect to theconstruction of history, an attitude of implicature leads to a rejection of discretecategories, suggests that people often have conflicting allegiances and motives, andproposes that events can and should be seen as complex and multidimensional.Countering various historical narratives and metanarratives supported by reparationsopponents, reparations supporters create new ways of remembering the past thatchallenge attitudes of innocence and privatization.40

Advocates of reparations, for example, base their arguments on the notion that pastand present are intimately connected. At a round table discussion in January 2000,reparations supporter Randall Robinson argued:

[M]illions of blacks … remain economically and socially disabled by the long, cruel promise

of American slavery and the century of government-embraced racial discrimination that

followed it … . A yawning gap was opened. It has been a static gap since the Emancipation

Proclamation … . We’re here today to discuss this gap and the lasting social penalties of slavery

and how they might be addressed once and for all.41

There are, for Robinson, no clearly separated before and after categories. TheEmancipation Proclamation is not a transitional motif that signals fundamental change;to borrow Hayden White’s terms, there is no dismantling of oppression or recoding ofthe nation’s fundamentally racist orientation. For Robinson and other reparationssupporters, U.S. racial history is still unfolding; a psychological and political burdenweighs on the nation that must be lifted if it is ever to achieve reconciliation. Thisinterpretation of the past presents a challenge to the master narrative that NathanHuggins describes, in which slavery and oppression are “historical accidents to becorrected” and progress is the ultimate motion of U.S. history.42

Reparations supporters also reject the metanarrative of white liberators freeingpassive African Americans. Countering Horowitz’s account of the abolition movementin his anti-reparations advertisement, for example, Ernest Allen, Jr., and RobertChrisman introduce actors who do not fit into the liberator/slave dichotomy:

[B]lack abolitionists such as Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Richard Allen, Sojourner

Truth, Martin Delany, David Walker, and Henry Highland Garnet waged an incessant

struggle against slavery through agencies such as the press … the Underground Railroad, the

Negro Convention Movement … anti-slavery societies, and the slave narrative. Black Amer-

icans were in no ways the passive recipients of freedom from anyone.43

For reparations supporters, African Americans cannot easily be classified as objects inU.S. history, submissive recipients of national largesse. Instead, they are subjects, active

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participants in the ongoing struggle for freedom. The comforting categories supportinghistory as innocence are complicated in this account, and the notion that enough hasalready been done for African Americans is challenged.Similarly, the narrative of the Civil War offered by Allen and Chrisman undermines

the liberator/slave dichotomy. They emphasize “the role that blacks themselves playedin their own liberation”: “Some 170,000 blacks served in the Civil War, representingnearly one-third of the free black population.” White soldiers, in their account, cannotsimply be portrayed as antislavery emancipators. Although “it is certainly true thatthere … existed principled white commanders and troops who were committed aboli-tionists,” they assert, “the federal government initially defined [the Civil War] as a ‘warto preserve the union.’ … Too many instances can be cited where white northern troopsplundered the personal property of slaves … as they swept through the South.”44 In thisaccount, the Civil War does not represent a national denial of racism; rather, even thosewhose actions may have helped end slavery were often implicated in the ideologicalfoundations of racist oppression, demonstrating the complexities of the nation’s histori-cal relationship to racial questions.The historical accounts of the antislavery movement and the Civil War favored by

reparations supporters undermine the notion that whites gave freedom to AfricanAmericans; they also challenge histories viewed through the lens of whiteness. Hugginsasserts that we need to do more than “work for inclusion and appreciation of the blackcontribution to American history”; we must challenge master narratives that separatewhite history and black history and recognize that “slavery and freedom, white andblack, are joined at the hip.” In other words, Huggins calls for the implicature describedby McPhail to be brought to bear on historical study. This process demands that wereconsider—and often redefine—notions of guilt and injustice. If we are to “create acritical space for complicating the interpretive and ethical dimensions of how weapproach racial injury,” Gutierrez-Jones maintains, we must engage in “a rethinking ofthe roles assigned to bystanders, collaborators, and resistors” and work toward “new,more nuanced notions of responsibility.”45

The ways in which historical events and actors are related to one another in theaccounts of reparations supporters depend on a perspective based on implicature andthe rethinking of responsibility for which Gutierrez-Jones calls. Advocates of reparationshighlight large, complex economic and power relationships while downplaying discreteconnections such as ownership of slaves or direct financial benefit. Economist JulianneMalveaux maintains that the recent identification of insurance companies that“collected profits generated by slavery” is significant because “it rounds out ourknowledge about the many sectors of our society that profited from slavery.” Supportersargue that the benefits of slavery extend through white privilege to present-day whiteAmericans whose ancestors never owned slaves. “Most living Americans do have aconnection with slavery,” John Hope Franklin asserts. “They have inherited thepreferential advantage if they are white, or the disadvantage if they are black, and thosepositions are virtually as alive today as they were in the 19th century.”46 In thesearguments, history cannot be boiled down to categories such as slaveholder and slave,proslavery and antislavery, even past and present. These narratives challenge theprivatized racial view Gresson describes, used by many contemporary Americans toseparate themselves from the nation’s racial history. Americans, past and present, areimplicated in and affected by racial power and privilege, which complicate concretenotions of guilt, profit, and responsibility.

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Reparations supporters also challenge simplistic notions of culpability when theydiscuss slavery in Africa. Their overarching perspective might be seen as implicature ina global sense, or the assumption that events in any region cannot be understood inisolation from the larger, global context. To borrow again from Hayden White, the“prefigurative act” through which they constitute the “structure that will subsequentlybe imaged” in their accounts assumes that the histories of Africa and the West areinterconnected.47 Reparations supporters do not deny African involvement in the slavetrade, but they insist that it should not be isolated from the larger context of Westernpower and oppression. Randall Robinson asserts:

Hundreds of years ago slavers held forth to Africans, whose cooperation they needed, on the

specious benefits of the slave trade to (at least some) Africans … . [T]he Europeans who

colonized Africa did so by combining raw power with unscrupulous economic deal-making.

The victim, already reduced to deference by brute power, is hard put to realize he is being

conned.48

The power differential between Africans and Western traders that is erased from thenarratives of reparations opponents is highlighted in Robinson’s account; from thisperspective, the personal choices of historical actors cannot be separated from theircontext.Other supporters of reparations use the relationship between Africa and the West to

call for the rethinking of guilt and responsibility advocated by Gutierrez-Jones. Notingthe acknowledgment of various African leaders of their ancestors’ culpability in the slavetrade, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., explains why it is nonetheless justified to focus the issueof reparations on the West:

[M]any Western nations reaped large and lasting benefits from African slavery, while African

nations did not. African regrets, profound indeed, do not have to be other than regrets, because

the results of African slave trading have, in Africa, been negative, an economic curse. The

results in many parts of the West, and spectacularly in the English North American colonies,

later the United States, have been economically positive. So Western regrets about slavery

have a different character because here the responsibility for slavery is carried forward from

past to present in the form of wealth. Slavery is embedded in American prosperity. That will

not go away.49

We must look beyond connections during the actual era of the slave trade, Gates argues,and consider larger effects. The notion of benefit must not be limited historically to oneperiod or to direct actors but must be seen as part of the intricate relationship, past andpresent, of the West to Africa.

The Uses and Politics of History

Reparations supporters and opponents do not just disagree about how to rememberslavery and U.S. racial history. The attitudes of innocence and implicature that informthe specific narratives featured in reparations rhetoric compete for dominance atanother level as the two sides argue about what history should be. Consider, forexample, the following exchange from the Fox News Network debate program Hannity& Colmes between conservative host Sean Hannity and Julianne Malveaux:

HANNITY: You know, we—we all learned in school about Harriet Tubman and the

underground railroad, and we know that a large number of white—white Americans, both

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in the North and in the South, were there assisting and fighting and risking their lives to help

free some slaves … . And how do you judge that?

MALVEAUX: They were very honorable people. We’re very glad that they had their role

in American history. But guess what? We’re not talking about individuals. We’re talking about

structural institutions.50

Hannity’s and Malveaux’s perspectives illustrate a crucial divide. If history is aboutindividuals and personal actions, as Hannity’s comments suggest, then innocence canbe maintained. This perspective implies that if we can remember good people just aseasily as bad, how can the nation as a whole be implicated in racial oppression?Malveaux proposes, by contrast, that history is not primarily about individuals butabout the larger context of communities and societal forces. If structural institutionstake their power from and depend upon the society that creates them, the responsibilityfor the harm they inflict is communal. These contrasting views of the past clearlysuggest divergent views of present-day responsibilities. Kammen notes that“societies … reconstruct their pasts … with the needs of the contemporary culture inmind” and that this process “is, inevitably, a political phenomenon.”51 For reparationsopponents, basing history on personal choices and actions reinforces the politics ofinnocence, suggesting that the story of the nation is fundamentally about individualrather than collective relationships and responsibilities.The perspective that history is about individual and personal choices underlies the

often-repeated historical challenges of reparations opponents: what about whites whoseancestors never owned slaves, what about those descended from immigrants whoarrived after Emancipation?52 For reparations advocates, by contrast, who argue thathistory is not about a solely individual connection to the past, that our links to thepast cannot be merely personal, these questions are misguided. Americans would notbe asked to pay as individuals, Jon Van Dyke argues, but as citizens of a “countrythat authorized and sustained, through laws, courts, and police enforcement, anoppressive system that continues to stain our communities with discriminatory percep-tions, beliefs, and practices.”53

Also at issue is what history should do. In the view of reparations opponents, historyshould emphasize positive aspects of the past; they even suggest that to do otherwiseis to be unpatriotic. Calling the reparations movement an “assault on America,”Horowitz maintains that it is based on “an irrational fear and hatred of America.”Opponents of reparations do not deny the sins in the nation’s past, but they suggestthat they should be left behind. “No one can argue that slavery wasn’t a brutal, uglypart of this nation’s past,” a Boston Herald editorial maintains. “But to focus on thatpast, to emphasize the ancient victimization, is to divide this nation once again alongracial lines.” The charge of fostering division encodes a deeper concern. Debating withattorney Alexander Pires of the Reparations Coordinating Committee on Fox NewsNetwork’s The O’Reilly Factor, Bill O’Reilly declared, “You’ve got to move ahead. You’veacknowledged the wrong, get rid of this. This is dividing the races.” O’Reilly’sperspective is a popular one in U.S. cultural memory; as Kammen observes, Americansare “inclin[ed] to depoliticize the past in order to minimize memories (and causes) ofconflict.”54 O’Reilly’s exhortation to “get rid of this” reveals that historical narrativesthat promote unity are necessary if reparations opponents are to preserve whiteinnocence.In this celebratory mode, reparations opponents suggest the uses of history for

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individuals as well. Those aspects of history that inspire are valuable, even if they arenegative, because they can be used to underscore the importance of personal choiceand to downplay the influence of larger societal factors. In other words, oppression canbe remembered, as long as it is overcome. This perspective explains a common critiqueraised by opponents of reparations that, in the histories of reparations supporters,African Americans are portrayed as victims. “Surely black people in all walks of lifeare increasingly realizing that pity has never gotten a race anywhere,” conservativeAfrican American linguist John McWhorter argues in the New Republic, “and that manygroups in history have risen despite the power of prejudice.” Similarly, Shelby Steeleasserts in an article in Newsweek:

There is a profound esteem that comes to us from having overcome four centuries of

oppression … . [W]hen you trade on the past victimization of your own people, you trade

honor for dollars. And this trading is only uglier when you are a mere descendent of those

who suffered but nonetheless prevailed.55

Applying the rhetoric of personal choice to racial history, reparations opponents arguethat because it is possible to rise above one’s circumstances, to acknowledge that societalforces impinge on the lives of the oppressed is to play the victim.Supporters of reparations, in contrast, believe that an individual’s relationship with

the past can be complex, that one does not need to deny the lingering effects of racialinjury in order to take pride in history, and that to acknowledge oppression does notmean that one cannot assert agency. In a letter to the editor of Newsweek responding toSteele’s article, Claudia Owens Shields illustrates this viewpoint:

Unlike Shelby Steele, I can, with one hand, maintain hold of my “birthright” as the

great-granddaughter of a slave, while receiving reparations for the injustice of slavery with

the other. I don’t believe that acceptance of a long-overdue payment of a debt will suddenly

dismantle the rich cultural heritage and character that have been indelibly woven into our

people … . The view that social programs discourage excellence and hard work on the part

of African Americans seems to ignore our history of success and the numerous contributions

we make to this society on a daily basis.56

The past is not monolithic, Shields argues, nor are its uses. One can simultaneously beproud of aspects of one’s history and call attention to the nation’s wrongs and seekredress.Similarly, supporters of reparations challenge the equation of patriotism with celebra-

tory history. Poet and activist Askia Toure asserts that genuine patriotism would lead toan acknowledgment that a debt is owed for the past: “African Americans have been themost patriotic people in this country … . We fought in every war … . We worked in thiscountry for [hundreds of years] without receiving pay. What about America’s patriotismtoward us?” Reparations, he argues, would bring African Americans “onto a par withwhite America” and show that Americans truly “believe in patriotism applied to thepoor and oppressed in this country.” Indeed, for many African Americans, patriotismis complex, based on a fundamental tension between loyalty to the promise of freedomand democracy and commitment to push the nation to live up to its ideals. RogerWilkins describes this perspective and its implications for his view of history: “I considermyself to be enthusiastically patriotic … . I don’t need for this nation to be perfect inorder for me to love it; I love it because it is home … . More than anything, though,I suppose I love the opportunity this nation affords me to engage in struggles for

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decency.”57 Many supporters of reparations place their efforts in this context, arguingthat calling for the U.S. to make restitution for past faults and continuing oppression isa patriotic use of the past. This attitude represents, in a sense, a reclaiming of theoppositional nature of the traditions of radicalism and protest in the U.S. As we haveseen in the rewriting of the history of the abolitionists, remembrances of agitators inU.S. history are often co-opted; yet, as Wilkins suggests, this process can be contested.Perhaps fundamentally, opponents and supporters of reparations disagree about what

history represents. Reparations opponents reject the notion that there is more than oneway to view the past and that all histories are based on interests and ideologies. In hisnegative review of Robinson’s The Debt, David Tucker argues that Robinson’s book isbased on “historical misrepresentation.” Tucker charges:

[Robinson] wants to help legitimize a particular narrative of black history … . If blacks come

to believe this narrative, they will recover their identity and self-worth and thus their psychic

and social health … . Robinson feels as strongly as it could be felt the injustice of slavery,

but he has no way to talk about it except by inventing a self-serving narrative.

Similarly, Horowitz declares that arguments for reparations are a product of academichistorical revisionism that “reinterprets the narrative of American freedom as a chron-icle of race and class oppression.”58 For Tucker and Horowitz, history that is rhetoricaland ideological is suspect. They imply that valid arguments can only be made based onhistory that is ostensibly objective and disinterested.Historians and rhetoricians contend that the ideal that Tucker and Horowitz support

is illusory. All history is rhetorical and inextricably linked to the values and interests ofthose who write it.59 This is hardly a new idea—the ancient Greeks presumed thatrhetoric and historiography were interconnected.60 Yet the reparations debate, likeother battles over history in recent years, demonstrates that many Americans areuncomfortable with this notion and believe valid history is a nonideological, presumablyobjective version of the past. Historian Lawrence Levine calls this perspective the “trapof the Assumed Truth”—those ideas that are deeply ingrained and taken for grantedattain the status of “part of the Natural Order,” while any “challenges, no matter howscholarly and carefully rooted in the sources and the normal rules of historicaldiscourses” are dismissed as “assaults on rationality.” The reparations debate illustratesLevine’s assertion that many Americans are reluctant to replace “the inexorable ‘truths’we have grown used to and have drawn much comfort from” with “paradoxes andrelativities” that open new questions about our national identity and past. When thenation’s racial history is involved, white Americans are particularly hesitant to examinethe ideological bases for their received views because, as Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt,and Margaret Jacob assert, conventional narratives fill “the psychological needs of awhite citizenry deeply conflicted by its persistent racial history.”61 If arguments forreparations necessarily reveal the rhetorical and ideological aspects of traditionalaccounts of U.S. history, it is no wonder that many Americans are angered by them.Reparations advocates, on the other hand, acknowledge that history is inherently

rhetorical and that it reflects the ideologies of those who write it. Randall Robinsonidentifies the interests that underlie traditional historical accounts:

In every competitive society, instruction in history and the humanities is a valuable instrument

with which the dominant group, consciously or unconsciously, attempts to sustain its pri-

macy … . in America, whites have caused all Americans to read, see, hear, learn and select

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from a diet of their own ideas … . For the rest of us, the price of our inability to place ourselves

in the fullness of world history has been crippling.

The remedy, Robinson proposes, is to “democratiz[e] access to a trove of histories, nearand ancient, to which blacks contributed seminally and prominently” and to “rearrangethe furniture of [U.S.] national myths, monuments, lores, symbols, iconography,legends, and arts to reflect the contributions and sensibilities of all Americans.” ClarenceMunford explicitly asserts that reparations supporters should use history rhetorically:

For our project, history is necessarily selective and utilitarian. We study African and Middle

Passage history in order to contend with white supremacy today … . History has its utilitarian

uses. The value of Black Studies is that it is mainly didactic, and not an idle ivory-tower pursuit.62

Rules of (Racial) Engagement

Gutierrez-Jones notes that it is not enough to incorporate minority voices in debatesabout race; we also need to investigate “what happens when inclusion is achieved.”Following this counsel, we might ask how discussions about race and history unfold withthe involvement of those offering dissenting perspectives. Although an illusion of fairnessand free play of ideas is created, powerful but invisible norms tend to privilege certainways of discussing race. The media and dominant voices in U.S. society set the termsfor debate and the definitions of what will be accepted and reinforce various ideas ofwhat should and should not be said. As Gresson notes, in understanding how popularracial discourses and beliefs have taken root, “we must examine the way in which themedia and powerful white interest groups have manipulated the images, beliefs, andmessages about who has attained what in the past three decades and at a cost to whom.”“[E]ven the most inclusive and humanistic discourse,” McPhail explains, “has littletransformative potential if it cannot, or will not, be heard.”63 Examining the rhetoric ofthe reparations debate provides insight into contemporary influences on what can andcannot be said about the nation’s racial history.It is notable, for example, that in the controversy over Horowitz’s advertisement

against reparations, the racial dimensions of his position often escaped criticism as manycommentators, both liberal and conservative, focused on the abstract notion of freespeech. Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post accused minority groups on collegecampuses of “attempting to abridge … free-speech protections.” Discussing the oppo-sition to Horowitz on CNN, conservative columnist John Leo of U.S. News & World

Report noted:

The problem as I see it is the campus is not a place where much dissent is tolerated on anything

to do with race and gender. The culture is pretty adamant about what you say and what

you should think. So when someone comes from the outside and says, “No, I’m suggesting

the opposite,” a great intolerance is forced to the surface and that’s what David Horowitz

did.

Matthew Rothschild, editor of the Progressive, similarly disapproved of newspaper editorswho refused to run the advertisement, calling their position “censorship” that demon-strates “what little respect there is for the free exchange of ideas on campus.”64

Of course, freedom of expression is highly valued in the U.S. Yet the invocation ofthis ideal in the debate over Horowitz’s advertisement is inaccurate since, as anadvertisement, Horowitz’s anti-reparations argument does not fall under First Amend-

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ment provisions. By inaccurately focusing on Horowitz’s rights, commentators deflectedattention from his power and privilege in the media sphere. Horowitz’s access to themedia and ability to pay for advertising space in college newspapers were, in most cases,left hidden and unexamined.65 This phenomenon was exacerbated by those whouncritically made the claim that the answer to demeaning or offensive speech is simplymore speech, a notion that hides the power differential between the dominant and themarginalized, who often have neither the financial capital nor the connections to thosein positions of influence that their opponents enjoy.66

The notion that Horowitz’s advertisement was protected free speech also allowedcommentators to reframe the controversy in terms of free expression versus censorshiprather than to address seriously and critically arguments for or against reparations. AsAdolph Reed, Jr., and Lee Hubbard pointed out, this shifting of the terms of debateoften shielded Horowitz’s claims from criticism.67 That the First Amendment wasinvoked in Horowitz’s case, albeit inaccurately, suggests another aspect of contemporaryracial discourse that silences some voices while empowering others. When it comes todemeaning or offensive expressions, Patricia Williams remarks, “some speechis … automatically put beyond comment, consigned to the free market of ideas, whileother expressions remain invisibly regulated.” Particularly when minority voices areincorporated into debates about race, she points out, they “are called ‘PC’ and accusedof forcing [their] opinions down the throats of others” or portrayed as “militant‘terrorists’ of the meek and moderate middle.”68

Williams’s point is strikingly illustrated by the accusations leveled by Horowitz andothers at his opponents. “[T]he hate speech is … coming from the left,” Horowitzremarked of those who criticized his advertisement. “[T]hey’re the people who arecalling names because they can’t handle ideas and they can’t handle an argument.” Hisopponents’ expression of their disagreement with him was “moral intimidation,” henoted, adding that “[t]he word ‘racist’ is thrown around extravagantly in our culture.”69

There is an irony here, considering the title of Horowitz’s advertisement, whichbranded reparations supporters racist. It is telling that Horowitz, who frequently invokesthe notion of free speech to claim legitimacy for his own arguments, casts his opponents’speech as unreasonable and presumably beyond the limits of what should be given a fairhearing, boundaries defined by those who have power in society and access to the mediasphere.As Horowitz’s indictments of his critics illustrate, reparations advocates are frequently

charged with fostering division and distracting attention from matters presumed to beof common concern. Proponents’ arguments are improper, various commentatorssuggest, because reparations are not supported by most (white) Americans and because,presumably, consensus on the issue will never be reached. “The main reason I opposereparations,” asserts PBS’s Bonnie Erbe, “is the divisions it has created. It has openeda chasm between some African Americans and other Americans as wide as the GrandCanyon.” Horace Cooper of the conservative Center for New Black Leadershipsimilarly argued on the television program Fox News Edge that the reparations issue is “away to nurse resentment and … to make sure that we can’t get along in this country.”On Fox News Channel’s Hannity & Colmes, Alan Colmes remarked to David Horowitz,“I don’t think [reparations is] a good place to put energy in terms of—because it’s notgoing to happen in this country.”70

Colmes’s comment is ironic because Fox News Channel has devoted numerous hoursto the reparations debate, and Horowitz has frequently publicized the issue for over two

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years,71 yet beneath the irony lies a notable disparity. Discussions of reparations, whichare presumed to be unreasonable when engaged in by reparations supporters, are notquestioned if undertaken by reparations opponents. Because they do not disturb whites’power and privilege, their discourse is presumed to be judicious and not divisive andthey are deemed to be acting in society’s best interests. Thomas Sowell, for example,argues, “Most people seem to have responded to the demands for reparations for slaveryeither by supporting the demands or maintaining a discreet silence. One of the fewpeople to treat these demands as a serious subject requiring a serious answer has beenDavid Horowitz.” Those who support the demands of reparations supporters—itself acharged formulation—do not share the serious, judicious tone of those who opposethem. As Steven Goldzwig and Patricia Sullivan’s study of newspaper coverage ofMilwaukee alderman Michael McGee suggests, African American leaders who chal-lenge the status quo are subject to charges by media commentators that they are“intemperate,” “irrational,” “unreasonable,” or “untrustworthy.” Left unexamined isthe way in which definitions of reasonableness, unity, and the collective good areinfluenced by power and whiteness. Those in power, Jamie Owen Daniel notes,particularly white men, are assumed to have a “mask of universality” that allows them“to speak for everyone in general but no one in particular.”72

This mask of universality, Daniel asserts, also privileges those in power in publicdeliberation by allowing them to appear disinterested. In other words, dominantparticipants in the public sphere can “control the terms of public discussion of [their]interests without ever having to acknowledge them as interests.” At the same time, thosewithout cultural authority are positioned so that they seem too personally involved and,thus, “improper, excessive, and merely subjective.” In the reparations debate, mediacommentators and reparations opponents frequently suggest that African Americanswho support reparations are motivated by inappropriate, personal interests. Note, forexample, the language used by Deborah Simmons of the Washington Times to describereparations advocate John Conyers. Discussing Conyers’s opposition to the baseballantitrust exemption, Simmons remarks, “While the nerve of this joker is simplyremarkable, his take … is hardly surprising. This is, after all, the same JohnConyers … who has vowed to reintroduce legislation on reparations for U.S. slaveryuntil he gets his personally desired results.” Often the terms used to describe reparationssupporters conjure up striking and demeaning images. On ABC’s newsmagazine 20/20,Walter Williams declared, “Black people can make it without handouts.” ReporterChris Cuomo noted that reparations supporters “would say it is justice, not begging.”“Yeah, well, I think any—any bum would say, ‘It’s justice that you give me a dime,’ ”Williams responded. A letter to the editor of Newsweek charges, “[I]t seems that someAfrican-Americans favor placing their forefathers on the auction block one more timeto see how much they will bring in today’s market.”73 Those who oppose reparationshave accused supporters of “want[ing] black people to walk around with their handsout” and described African American activists for reparations as “exhibiting sheer andugly greed.”74

It is hard to ignore the intrusion of troubling racial stereotypes into the charges that,in Simmon’s terms, reparations supporters have too much nerve, or that, in Williams’sdepiction, they are bums. Such portrayals are linked to the popularization of rhetoricsthat propose that whites not only are free from guilt but also have become victims incontemporary race relations, a perspective that, as we have seen, influences thehistorical accounts of reparations opponents. As Gresson suggests, the notion that

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African Americans are “perpetrators rather than victims of oppression” is often trans-lated into the charge that they are “less than they appear to be” and “just opportunistswho want a better position in the current pecking order.”75

The mask of invisibility, by contrast, hides the interests of reparations opponents. Itis striking, for example, that although reparations supporters are often accused ofwanting money, power, or attention, these charges are rarely leveled at Horowitz, whohas gained financially from the controversy and has admitted enjoying the mediaattention.76 Horowitz, in fact, has been portrayed as selfless. Fox News Channel’s SeanHannity, for example, noted obsequiously to Horowitz that “[a] lot of people would doeverything they could to avoid” the negative reaction to his advertisement, suggestinghe was brave, in Hannity’s words, to try to “stir a debate on a college campus.”77

Commentators pointed out that Horowitz sought to reveal that university campuses areintolerant, a formulation that removes his interests from view and suggests that he issomehow doing a service for his fellow citizens.78

While African Americans are challenged when they speak about reparations, variouswhite reparations opponents assume that they can define what subjects are appropriatefor African American leaders to address. Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly remarked toCornel West:

Professor, look, we’re in the year 2001. We all have problems we have to deal with now.

I don’t believe it helps us to deal with the problems that you’ve got to deal with—and when

I say you, the African American community in the inner cities—in getting people educated,

in getting discipline into neighborhoods that don’t have any. I don’t think this slavery stuff

helps you out!

Horowitz takes a similar tone, describing his anti-reparations advertisement as “afriendly attempt to warn the African American community about its leadership” andasserting that his “criticisms of African American leaders come from a genuine concernfor African Americans themselves.” At an appearance at the University of Texas, lawstudent Nailah I. Sankofa challenged Horowitz on his ostensible right to define AfricanAmericans’ concerns: “A lot of the things I’ve found that you have said to be veryinsulting. Who asked you to help us?”79

Unlike Sankofa, most commentators have failed to challenge Horowitz about hisclaim to speak for African Americans while calling into question the legitimacy ofstatements by advocates by suggesting that they are motivated by improper personalbiases. In the public sphere, it seems, minority voices that dissent from the mainstreamare not qualified to speak on matters that affect them, yet those with power can presumeto define their concerns. Even when the perspectives of those such as Horowitz clashwith those on whose behalf he claims to speak, it is automatically assumed, in keepingwith a long tradition of Americans’ paternalistic treatment of African Americanleaders,80 that whites know what is best for others.Casting reparations supporters as too militant or radical, commentators have also

suggested the boundaries of Americans’ views of what constitutes reasonable or validforms of protest, particularly for African Americans. Reparations opponents illustratethe racial and historical dimensions of this bifurcation by referring to an ostensibledichotomy between the rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Theformer, those who oppose reparations suggest, would side with them in the debate andthe latter with supporters of reparations. Armstrong Williams asserts:

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Men like Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr advocated not for special treatment but merely for

those basic human rights that we associate with happiness: equality and individual freedom … .

Thirty years later, the civil rights movements have shifted from Dr. King’s quest for individual

equality to a sniveling cry for collective retribution.

Similarly, an editorial in the Augusta Chronicle suggests that if King were alive today hewould draw attention to “real problems” rather than “push lost but headline-grabbingcauses such as slavery reparations.” McWhorter describes Randall Robinson’s The Debtas devoted “almost entirely to the rhetoric of inflamed identity, to the revival ofMalcolm X’s bared teeth and upraised fist.”81

These arguments are flawed on two counts. King addressed the issue of reparations,and his position supports the pro-reparations side. In a 1965 interview, King arguedthat the U.S. should implement economic aid and social programs that would assistAfrican Americans as a form of recompense for slavery and oppression:

Few people reflect that for two centuries the Negro was enslaved, and robbed of any

wages—potential accrued wealth which would have been the legacy of his descendants. All

of America’s wealth today could not adequately compensate its Negroes for his centuries of

exploitation and humiliation … . Within common law, we have ample precedents for special

compensatory programs … . American Indians are still being paid for land in a settlement

manner. Is not two centuries of labor, which helped to build this country, as real a commodity?

Indeed, the general portrayal of King as opposed to radical interests is inaccurate, asHouston Baker, Jr. maintains: “Only a colossal act of historical forgetting allowsenvisioning the King of 1967 as anything but a black political radical of the first order.”82 Yetrewriting King’s agenda serves those who want to define African American leadershipin ways that maintain the status quo, allowing them to celebrate him as a hero withoutacknowledging the ways in which he challenged hegemony. Like the co-opting andderadicalizing of the legacy of the abolitionists in anti-reparations rhetoric, the appropri-ation of King by reparations opponents suggests that cultural heroes may be remem-bered in ways that advance present interests.The purported dichotomy between acceptable and too radical protest (Martin versus

Malcolm) also has an important function for reparations opponents and for Americansin general. Americans are wedded to the notion that they are a people dedicated to theright to protest, yet they also fear challenges to the societal order with which they arecomfortable. Michael Kammen notes that, although “[w]e assume that loyal oppositionis not merely tolerated but valued in this country,” episodes throughout the nation’shistory have demonstrated that there are limits to what types of dissent are respected.83

To acknowledge these limits is to uncover the way privilege and power function in thepublic sphere and the way that only certain interests are validated. It is far morecomforting to believe that historically the public sphere in the U.S. has accommodatedprotest provided it was reasonable or valid (according to the definitions of the domi-nant), a perspective that precludes any examination of the forces that continue tomarginalize many minority and dissenting voices.

Conclusion: “To Keep Fresh a Memory of the Past”

My analysis suggests that various forces are arrayed against those who argue forreparations. The vision of history and what it should do offered by reparations

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opponents draws on the powerful rhetorics of innocence, personal choice, and priva-tization that are deeply entrenched in contemporary racial discourse. In contrast, thehistorical narratives of reparations supporters feature implicature, a rhetorical frame-work to which, McPhail reminds us, many Americans are extremely resistant.84 Inaddition, as we have seen, what we might call the rules of engagement in contemporarypublic deliberation marginalize and silence minority and dissenting voices on questionsof race, limiting the potential for new racial histories and perspectives to be discussed.Why, then, do reparations supporters have so much faith in debate itself, even

contending that a central aspect of what they seek is to bring the issue into the publicarena and provoke debate? Recall Randall Robinson’s assertion that one of the goals ofthe reparations movement can be accomplished by “simply raising the issue andprovoking public discussion.” Manning Marable similarly notes, “I would argue that thedemand for reparations is fundamentally not about the money. The money is second-ary. The primary reason is for the truth to be told.” In a letter to the editor of Newsday,the Reverend John Magisano explains, “I do not see the concept of reparations as beingabout a placing a dollar figure on the lives stolen for slavery, though that is usefulinformation in quantifying the damage done. I feel that it is about finally getting whiteAmerica to take responsibility for the institution of slavery.”85

Various commentators have echoed these views, arguing that the reparations debatewill be productive for racial discourse in this country. Mark Brown, who acknowledgesthat the reparations issue “stirs a negative reaction” in him, nonetheless believes that“what we really need is some sort of national sensitivity training, which the reparationsdebate could provide.” Journalism professor Vivian Martin argues, “As the discussionevolves, people’s views about the issue will too. Anyone who encounters pieces of thedebate and doesn’t walk away a little more educated about the past or see the issue asmore complex than he [or she] originally thought isn’t thinking.”86 Yet if, as we haveseen, the debate has produced entrenched anti-reparations rhetoric on the part of manyopponents and powerful voices have devalued the discourse of supporters, why thisapparent faith in the possibilities of public deliberation on the issue?The answer is twofold. First, that voices advocating reparations are dismissed in

mainstream discourse about race does not mean that they are going away or that theywill not have an effect. If, following Gutierrez-Jones, we should be skeptical aboutinclusion in and of itself, we also need to acknowledge that incorporating new voicesinto public discourse fundamentally changes its nature. The boundaries of the publicsphere are, as Nancy Fraser contends, neither naturally given nor a priori, but “decidedprecisely through discursive contestation.” Even if an issue or perspective is trivialized,even if it is presumed not to be a matter of common concern, Fraser argues, bringingforward claims is productive. Fraser points to the success of the feminist project ofurging the public to take seriously the issue of domestic violence, once not considereda legitimate topic of public discourse. “Eventually, after sustained discursive contesta-tion,” she notes, “we succeeded in making it a common concern.” This process isalready at work in the reparations debate, supporters suggest. Nontombi Tutu, daughterof Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Program Director at Fisk University’s Race Rela-tions Institute, maintains, “The very fact that right-wing commentator David Horowitzpublished ‘Ten Reasons Why African Americans Should Not Be Paid Reparations’speaks not to the weakness of the claim but to the need for the right to respondconcretely to a legitimate demand.”87 Fraser’s and Tutu’s comments suggest thatbringing forth alternatives to traditional perspectives about race in the public sphere is

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valuable, even when they are initially subjected to harsh criticism, because the processhas the potential to enhance the national conversation about race.In addition, the aspect of the reparations debate that makes it so contentious—its

position at the intersection of discussions about race and history—also suggests thepower of arguments about reparations ultimately to further discourse about race andracial relations in the U.S. Many who disagree with reparations do not want to hearchallenges to historical narratives that are comforting and that reinforce and validateexisting power relations. Yet the very arguments that reparations opponents produce toreject alternative historical narratives undermine traditional views of history. If youargue about history, you admit that history is rhetorical. If you criticize the historicalnarratives of others for not promoting unity, you demonstrate that memory is notvalue-free. If you are confronted in a debate with stories, evidence, or historical actorsthat do not fit the frameworks on which you rely, the hegemony of the structures ofmemory is undermined.If those who offer these different historical narratives continue to bring them forward,

you cannot forget the past, no matter how much you want to. “Well may it be said thatAmericans have no memories,” Frederick Douglass declared in his aforementioned1888 speech. “Well, the nation may forget; it may shut its eyes to the past and frownupon any who may do otherwise, but the colored people of this country are bound tokeep fresh a memory of the past till justice shall be done them in the present.” Thechanging contours of U.S. memory about race demonstrate that Douglass is right, thatcontinual challenges to forgetfulness, nostalgia, or innocence eventually yield results.There can be no denying that Americans remember many aspects of racial history—slavery, lynching, Reconstruction—differently today to how they did 50 years ago, 100years ago. The efforts of African American and white American scholars to challengetraditional narratives has changed the way Americans remember their past. Thereparations debate can further this process, Robinson suggests:

I think a part of what this movement will accomplish is … access to information—not just

for African Americans, not just for African people throughout the world, but for white

Americans who badly need to know the story, the history expunged during the long years

of slavery.88

Of course, we still have a long way to go to achieve the justice that Douglass invokesand to begin to replace antagonistic arguments with healthy dialogue. As anti-repara-tions rhetoric and other discourse about the nation’s racial history demonstrates, thereis resistance to historical narratives based on the implicature McPhail describes, butadvocates have faith that, just as views of racial history have changed in the past, therecan be further transformation as the reparations debate continues. When new viewsof history are engaged, new views of justice, equality, and freedom will follow. “It willtake time,” Clarence Munford argues. “But history is patient and bows to determi-nation.”89

Notes

Jacqueline Bacon, an independent scholar living in San Diego, California, is the author of The Humblest May Stand Forth:Rhetoric, Empowerment and Abolition (University of South Carolina Press, 2002). She thanks the Editor and three anonymousreviewers for their valuable assistance.

1 The reparations debate involves two questions: whether reparations should be paid to African Americansfor the suffering and uncompensated labor of their ancestors and whether reparations should be paid to African

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nations by the West for the effects of the slave trade. For the most part, the U.S. media have focused on theformer issue; thus, most of the examples in this essay are related to that. Although the concrete issues differ,the ways in which race and history are constructed in both debates are connected; thus, for my purposes theexamples can be considered together.

2. “Reparations and a Clash of Realities.” Buffalo News, 11 April 2002; James Cox, “Special Report: ActivistsChallenge Corporations That They Say Are Tied to Slavery,” USA Today, 21 February 2002.

3 Mark Brown, “Reparations May Spur Needed Debate,” Chicago Sun-Times, 5 February 2001; On the Line,WNYC, New York, 27 March 2002; Ronald Roach, “Fighting the Good Fight” [interview with RandallRobinson], Black Issues in Higher Education, 8 November 2001, 28.

4 Mark Lawrence McPhail, The Rhetoric of Racism Revisited: Reparations or Separation? (Lanham, MD: Rowman& Littlefield Publishers, 2002); Aaron David Gresson III, The Recovery of Race in America (Minneapolis: Universityof Minnesota Press, 1995); Carl Gutierrez-Jones, Critical Race Narratives: A Study of Race, Rhetoric, and Injury (NewYork: New York University Press, 2001).

5 On these controversies, see Gary B. Nash, Charlotte Crabtree, and Rosa E. Dunn, History on Trial: CultureWars and the Teaching of the Past (1997; New York: Vintage-Random, 2000); Joyce Appleby, Lynn Hunt, andMargaret Jacob, Telling the Truth About History (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1994), Rosalind Miles,“Historical Battles: Who Knows What Really Happened?” Ottawa Citizen, 22 February 1998; Lawrence W. Levine,“The Unpredictable Past: Reflections on Recent American Historiography,” American Historical Review 94 (1989):671–79; Lawrence W. Levine, The Opening of the American Mind: Canons, Culture, and History (Boston: Beacon Press,1996); Joan Wallach Scott, “History in Crisis? The Others’ Side of the Story,” American Historical Review 94 (1989):680–92; John Patrick Diggins, “Can the Social Historians Get It Right?” Society 34 (1997): 9–19; John PatrickDiggins, On Hallowed Ground: Abraham Lincoln and the Foundations of American History (New Haven: Yale UniversityPress, 2000); Keith Windschuttle, The Killing of History: How Literary Critics and Social Theorists Are Murdering OurPast (New York: Free Press, 1996).

6 I use the word explicit because it is of course true that cultural memory is implicitly part of most discussionsof race in the U.S., yet constructions of the past enter public conversation about reparations in overt andinescapable ways that often remain hidden in other racial debates, such as those about the O. J. Simpson trials.

7 Paolo Carpignano and others, “Chatter in the Age of Electronic Reproduction: Talk Television and the‘Public Mind,’ ” in The Phantom Public Sphere, ed. Bruce Robbins (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press,1993), 93; Benjamin I. Page, Who Deliberates? Mass Media in Modern Democracy (Chicago: University of ChicagoPress, 1996), 1.

8 Marouf Hasian, Jr., and Robert E. Frank, “Rhetoric, History, and Collective Memory: Decoding theGoldhagen Debates,” Western Journal of Communication 63 (1999): 106.

9 McPhail, Rhetoric of Racism, 189, ix.10 Belinda, “Petition to Legislature of Massachusetts, February 1782,” in Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black

Authors in the English-Speaking World in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Vincent Caretta (Lexington: University Press ofKentucky, 1996), 143; Shaw quoted in Helene Ragovin, “The Untold Story of the Royall House Slaves,” TuftsJournal, April 2002 �http://tuftsjournal.tufts.edu/archive/2002/april/calendar/royall.shtml� (Retrieved 2February 2003); John S. Rock, “We Ask for Our Rights,” in Lift Every Voice: African American Oratory, 1787–1900,ed. Philip S. Foner and Robert James Branham (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 371.

11 Claude F. Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen’s Bureau and Black Land Ownership (Baton Rouge:Louisiana State University Press, 1978); A Bill Relative to Damages Done to Loyal Men, and for Other Purposes, 40thCong., 1st sess, H. R. 29; Mary Frances Berry and John W. Blassingame, Long Memory: The Black Experience inAmerica (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 405–06; Queen Mother Audley Moore, “Queen MotherAudley Moore,” in I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America, interviews by Brian Lanker,ed. Yvonne Easton (New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang, 1999), 107.

12 Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, 107th Cong., 1st sess., H. R. 40.13 Robert F. Worth, “Companies Are Sued for Slave Reparations,” New York Times, 27 March 2002; Darryl

Fears, “Aging Sons of Slaves Join Reparations Battle; Financial Corporations Targeted by Lawsuits,” WashingtonPost, 30 September 2002; Mark Donald, “Slave Wages: The Fight for Slavery Reparations Takes on a LocalTwist,” Dallas Observer, 13 February 2003.

14 Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns HopkinsUniversity Press, 1973); Hayden White, “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact,” in The Writing of History: LiteraryForm and Historical Understanding, ed. Robert H. Canary and Henry Kozicki (Madison: University of WisconsinPress, 1978), 41–62; Ronald H. Carpenter, History as Rhetoric: Style, Narrative, and Persuasion (Columbia: Universityof South Carolina Press, 1995), 143–44, 231–43; Walter R. Fisher, “The Narrative Paradigm and the Assessmentof Historical Texts,” Argumentation and Advocacy 25 (1988): 49–50; E. Culpepper Clark, “Argument and HistoricalAnalysis,” in Advances in Argumentation Theory and Research, ed. J. Robert Cox and Charles Arthur Willard(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982), 313–15; E. Culpepper Clark and Raymie E. McKerrow,“The Rhetorical Construction of History,” in Doing Rhetorical History: Concepts and Cases, ed. Kathleen J. Turner(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1998), 44; Robert O’Meally and Genevieve Fabre, introduction toHistory and Memory in African American Culture, ed. Genevieve Fabre and Robert O’Meally (New York: OxfordUniversity Press, 1994), 6; Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth, 231–32.

15 White, Metahistory, 7; Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought (New York:

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Viking Press, 1968), 6; Hasian and Frank, “Rhetoric, History, and Collective Memory,” 98; Stephen H. Browne,“Reading, Rhetoric, and the Texture of Public Memory,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 243. See also MichaelKammen, Mystic Chords of Memory: The Transformation of Tradition in American Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,1991), 3; Agnes Heller, “A Tentative Answer to the Question: Has Civil Society Cultural Memory?” Social Research68 (2001): 1031.

16 McPhail, Rhetoric of Racism, xii, 186–90; David Horowitz, Uncivil Wars: The Controversy Over Reparations for Slavery(San Francisco: Encounter Books, 2002), 15; Jeff Jacoby, “The Hefty Bill for Slavery–And Freedom,” Boston Globe,8 February 2001.

17 On the work of African American abolitionists and their influence on white reformers, see John HopeFranklin and Alfred Moss, Jr, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans, 8th ed. (New York: AlfredA. Knopf, 2000), 199–204; Jacqueline Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition(Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 15–50; Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation ofPhiladelphia’s Black Community, 1720—1840 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988); Donald M. Jacobs,“David Walker and William Lloyd Garrison: Racial Cooperation in the Shaping of Boston Abolition,” in Courageand Conscience: Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,1993), 1–20; Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York: Oxford University Press, 1969); Shirley J. Yee, BlackWomen Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828—1860 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); WendellPhillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805—1879: The Story of His Life Told byHis Children, vol. 1 (New York: The Century Co., 1885), 147–48; Communipaw [James McCune Smith], letterto editor, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 26 January 1855.

18 Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., Beyond the Great Story: History as Text and Discourse (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1995),213; Carpenter, History as Rhetoric, 207. On statues featuring slaves and white liberators, see Michael Kammen,“Democratizing American Commemorative Monuments,” Virginia Quarterly Review 77 (2001): 283. On MississippiBurning, see Susan L. Brinson, “The Myth of White Superiority in Mississippi Burning,” Southern Communication Journal60 (1995): 211–21.

19 As scholars have noted, until recently even professional historians have tended to write history from thehegemonic view that casts white men as the subjects and all others as objects of history. See Robert F. Berkhofer,Jr, “A Point of View on Viewpoints in Historical Practice,” in A New Philosophy of History, ed. Frank Ankersmitand Hans Kellner (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 178–79; Nash, Forging Freedom, 7; Clark,“Argument,” 305–06.

20 Michael Leff, “Hermeneutical Rhetoric,” in Rhetoric and Hermeneutics in Our Time: A Reader, ed. Walter Jostand Michael J. Hyde (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), 203.

21 Gresson, Recovery of Race, 9, 167; White, “Historical Text,” 60.22 Hardball, MSNBC, 4 September 2001; James Moyssiadis, letter to editor, Newsday (Long Island, NY), 3 May

2001; Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 15; Gutierrez-Jones, Critical Race Narratives, 25; Gresson, Recovery of Race, ix.23 Franklin and Moss, From Slavery to Freedom, 238, 243.24 Hasian and Frank, “Rhetoric, History, and Collective Memory,” 99.25 See, for example, Thomas K. Nakayama and Robert L. Krizek, “Whiteness: A Strategic Rhetoric,” Quarterly

Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 293; Carrie Crenshaw, “Resisting Whiteness’ Rhetorical Silence,” Western Journal ofCommunication 61 (1997): 254; Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 6.

26 Nathan I. Huggins, “The Deforming Mirror of Truth: Slavery and the Master Narrative of AmericanHistory,” Radical History Review 49 (Winter 1991): 37.

27 See Liliane Weissberg, introduction to Cultural Memory and the Construction of Identity, ed. Dan Ben-Amos andLiliane Weissberg (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999), 15; Ronald F. Reid, The American Revolution andthe Rhetoric of History (Falls Church, Va: Speech Communication Association, 1978), 2, 23; Carpenter, History asRhetoric, 233; White, Metahistory, 4; White, “Historical Text,” 44–51; Fisher, “Narrative Paradigm,” 50; Clark,“Argument,” 302; Chaim Perelman, The New Rhetoric and the Humanities: Essays on Rhetoric and its Applications(Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1979), 147; Clark and McKerrow; “Rhetorical Construc-tion,” 44; Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 56.

28 McPhail, Rhetoric of Racism, 27.29 Ernest Allen, Jr., and Robert Chrisman, “Ten Reasons: A Response to David Horowitz,” Black Scholar 31

(Summer 2001): 53–54.30 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 58.31 J. W. Loguen, letter to editor, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 6 April 1855; W. [William J. Watkins], “One Thing

Thou Lackest,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 10 February 1854; Frederick Douglass, “I Denounce the So-CalledEmancipation as a Stupendous Fraud,” in Lift Every Voice, 698.

32 White, Metahistory, 31; see also Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 31–36.33 David Horowitz, “Stuck on Oprah,” Salon.com, 12 June 2000 �http://dir.salon.com/news/col/horo/2000/

06/12/hutchinson/index.html� (Retrieved 29 May 2003); Hannity & Colmes, Fox News Network, 10 April 2001.34 Gresson, Recovery of Race, 98; McPhail, Rhetoric of Racism, 136; Lauren Berlant, The Queen of America Goes to

Washington City: Essays on Sex and Citizenship (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 4.35 Dick Snider, “Should U.S. Pay Reparations to Slave Descendents?” Topeka Capital Journal, 10 September

2001.

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36 The Edge With Paula Zahn, Fox News Network, 19 February 2001; Stephen H. Browne, “RememberingCrispus Attucks: Race, Rhetoric, and the Politics of Commemoration,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 85 (1999): 183.

37 Frank K. Vita, letter to editor, Washington Times, 23 September 2001; On the Line, WNYC, New York, 27March 2002.

38 Huggins, “Deforming Mirror,” 25, 38.39 McPhail, Rhetoric of Racism, ix.40 Although they generally share certain assumptions about race and history, those favoring reparations do

not form a monolithic group. I use the term reparations supporters broadly to include those who offer concreteand definite proposals as well as those generally supportive of discussion and study of the issue.

41 TransAfrica Forum, “The Case for Black Reparations–Transcript,” 11 January 2000 �http://www.transafricaforum.org/reports/roundtable011100 transcript.shtml� (Retrieved 29 May 2003).

42 White, “Historical Text,” 60; Huggins, “Deforming Mirror,” 25.43 Allen and Chrisman, “Ten Reasons,” 54.44 Allen and Chrisman, “Ten Reasons,” 51.45 Huggins, “Deforming Mirror,” 37–38; Gutierrez-Jones, Critical Race Narratives, 47.46 Julianne Malveaux, “Juneteenth Reflects Delayed Justice,” USA Today, 14 June 2002; John Hope Franklin,

“Diatribe on Reparations Contains Historical Inaccuracies,” Michigan Chronicle, 24 April 2001.47 White, Metahistory, 31; see also Berkhofer, Beyond the Great Story, 31–36.48 Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Dutton-Penguin, 2000), 186.49 Henry Louis Gates, Jr., “The Future of Slavery’s Past,” New York Times, 29 July 2001.50 Hannity & Colmes, Fox News Network, 28 May 2001.51 Kammen, Mystic Chords, 3–5.52 For examples of these challenges, see Wayne R. Gradl, letter to editor, Buffalo News, 16 July 2001; Bonnie

Erbe, “Another Risky Notion,” Cincinnati Post, 11 September 2001; Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 12; Edward Achorn,“The Reparations Already Paid,” Providence Journal, 2 April 2002.

53 Jon M. Van Dyke, “Reparations for the Descendants of American Slaves Under International Law,” inShould America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations, ed. Raymond A. Winbush (New York: Amistad-HarperCollins Publishers, 2003), 75.

54 Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 85; “Racism’s Past Vs. Present,” Boston Herald, 31 July 2001; The O’Reilly Factor,Fox News Network, 21 February 2002; Kammen, Mystic Chords, 701.

55 John McWhorter, “Against Reparations: Why African Americans Can Believe in America,” The New Republic,23 July 2001; Shelby Steele, “… Or a Childish Illusion of Justice?” Newsweek, 27 August 2001.

56 Claudia Owens Shields, letter to editor, Newsweek, 17 September 2001.57 Toure quoted in Ellen Steinbaum, “Oh Say, Can You See the Danger?” Boston Globe, 12 May 2002; Roger

Wilkins, Jefferson’s Pillow: The Founding Fathers and the Dilemma of Black Patriotism (Boston: Beacon Press, 2001), 142.On the complexities of African American patriotism, see also Marcia Davis, “Made in the U.S.A.,” Crisis 108(November/December 2001): 28–32.

58 David Tucker, “Settling Up,” Claremont Review of Books 1 (Winter 2001): 6; Horowitz, Uncivil Wars, 105–06.59 On this point, see Kathleen J. Turner, “Introduction: Rhetorical History as Social Construction: The

Challenge and the Promise,” in Doing Rhetorical History, 8; Clark and McKerrow, “Rhetorical Construction,” 33;Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth, 10.

60 Reid, American Revolution, 5; Moya Ann Ball, “Theoretical Implications of Doing Rhetorical History:Groupthink, Foreign Policy Making, and Vietnam,” in Doing Rhetorical History, 62.

61 Levine, Opening, 167–69; Appleby, Hunt, and Jacob, Telling the Truth, 295–96.62 Robinson, Debt, 85–86, 107–08; Clarence J. Munford, Race and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the 21stt

Century (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1996), 209–10.63 Gutierrez-Jones, Critical Race Narratives, 13; Gresson, Recovery of Race, 211; McPhail, Rhetoric of Racism, 154.64 Jonathan Yardley, “Politically Corrected, Cont’d,” Washington Post, 2 April 2001; John Leo on TalkBack Live,

CNN, 26 March 2001; Matthew Rothschild, “Don’t Censor Horowitz,” Progressive 65 (May 2001): 4.65 Horowitz noted that he paid $600 per paper on the The Point With Greta Van Susteren, CNN, 27 March

2001; a search of the University Wire reveals that Horowitz was charged $693 by the University of Connecticut’snewspaper and $725 by Brown University’s. Baylor University’s conservative campus newspaper the Bear Review(not the official student paper the Lariat) charged him $300. For discussion of how, as paid speech, Horowitz’sadvertisement differs from other forms of speech, see Allen and Chrisman, “Ten Reasons,” 49; “Free Speech,Newsprint, and David Horowitz,” Daily Nexus (University of California, Santa Barbara), 29 May 2001. Horowitzhas conceded that his advertisement was paid speech; see Hubbard, “Reparations.”

66 See, for example, John Leo on TalkBack Live, 26 March 2001; Matthew Rothschild, “Don’t CensorHorowitz.” On the problems with the “more speech” answer to offensive discourse, see Downing, “Hate Speech,”182–83.

67 Adolph L. Reed, Jr., “Horowitz’s Provocation,” Progressive 65 (May 2001): 14; Lee Hubbard, “Reparations:A White Conservative’s Biggest Act,” Africana.com, 18 April 2002 �http://www.africana.com/articles/daily/in-dex 20010418.asp� (Retrieved 29 May 2003).

68 Patricia J. Williams, The Rooster’s Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,1995), 30, 40. On the inconsistent use by the mainstream media of the notion of free speech to disparage and

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trivialize the arguments of progressive African American leaders, see also Jacqueline Bacon, “Disrespect, Distortionand Double Binds: Media Treatment of Progressive Black Leaders,” Extra! 16 (March/April 2003): 29.

69 The Edge With Paula Zahn, Fox News Network, 19 March 2001.70 Erbe, “Another Risky Notion”; Fox News Edge, Fox News Network, 7 September 2001; Hannity & Colmes,

Fox News Network, 5 February 2002.71 Horowitz’s first anti-reparations article appeared in Salon.com on May 30, 2000. “The Latest Civil Rights

Disaster: Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Slavery Are a Bad Idea for Black People–and Racist Too,” Salon.com,30 May 2000 �http://dir.salon.com/news/col/horo/2000/05/30/reparations/index.html� (Retrieved 29 May2003).

72 Thomas Sowell, “A World Shielded Inside a Bubble Bursts,” Times Union (Albany, NY), 5 January 2002;Steven R. Goldzwig and Patricia A. Sullivan, “Narrative and Counternarrative in Print-Mediated Coverage ofMilwaukee Alderman Michael McGee,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (2000): 222, 224; Jamie Owen Daniel, “Ritualsof Disqualification: Competing Publics and Public Housing in Contemporary Chicago,” in Masses, Classes, andthe Public Sphere, ed. Mike Hill and Warren Montag (New York: Verso Books), 73.

73 Daniel, “Rituals,” 73; Deborah Simmons, “Down Boys, Down: The Men of Major League Baseball HaveSpoken,” Washington Times; 9 November 2001; 20/20, ABC, 23 March 2001; Terrell Bowers, letter to editor,Newsweek, 17 September 2001.

74 James Golden on Hannity & Colmes, Fox News Network, 25 April 2001; John Graham, letter to editor,USA Today, 26 February 2002. On the media’s frequent questioning of the motives of reparations supporters,see also Jacqueline Bacon, “Reparations and the Media,” Extra! 15 (May/June 2002): 21–22.

75 Gresson, Recovery of Race, 8.76 David Horowitz, “I’m Not a Racial Provocateur,” Salon.com, 13 March 2001 �http://dir.salon.com/news/

feature/2001/03/13/horowitz/index.html� (Retrieved 29 May 2003); David Horowitz, “My 15 Minutes,”Salon.com, 2 April 2001 �http://dir.salon.com/news/col/horo/2001/04/02/reparations/index.html� (Retrieved29 May 2003).

77 Hannity & Colmes, Fox News Network, 27 April 2001.78 See, for example, John Leo, “Behold the Hostile Power of Provocative Campus Ads,” Seattle Times, 29 May

2001; Fred Dickey, “An Uncivil Discourse,” Los Angeles Times, 6 May 2001.79 The O’Reilly Factor, Fox News Network, 29 August 2001; Horowitz quoted in Hubbard, “Reparations”;

Horowitz, “I’m Not a Racial Provocateur”; Sankofa quoted in Sharon Jayfson, “Author Speaks AgainstReparations for Slavery,” Austin American-Statesman, 22 March 2001.

80 For example, white abolitionists often presumed to speak for their African American colleagues andfrequently gave them patronizing advice about their rhetoric; see Bacon, Humblest, 3, 27–33.

81 Armstrong Williams, “A Black Man’s Stand Against Reparations,” Washington Afro-American, 26 January 2001;“Which Priorities?” Augusta Chronicle, 21 January 2002; McWhorter, “Against Reparations.”

82 A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings of Martin Luther King, Jr., ed. James Melvin Washington (SanFrancisco: Harper & Row, 1986), 367; Houston A. Baker, Jr., “Critical Memory and the Black Public Sphere,”in The Black Public Sphere: A Public Culture Book, ed. the Black Public Sphere Collective (Chicago: University ofChicago Press, 1995), 35. On the rewriting of King’s legacy in ways that deradicalize him, see also Berlant, Queenof America, 187.

83 Kammen, Mystic Chords, 5.84 McPhail, Rhetoric of Racism, 145.85 Roach, “Fighting the Good Fight,” 28; Marable quoted in Ronald Roach, “Moving Toward Reparations,”

Black Issues in Higher Education, 8 November 2001, 21; John Magisano, letter to editor, Newsday, 3 May 2001.86 Brown, “Reparations May Spur Needed Debate”; Vivian B. Martin, “Everyone Stands to Gain from

Reparations Debate,” Hartford Courant, 7 November 2002.87 Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing

Democracy,” in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992), 129; NontombiTutu, afterword to Should America Pay? 322.

88 Douglass, “I Denounce the So-Called Emancipation,” 697; Roach, “Fighting the Good Fight,” 28.89 C. J. Munford, “Reparations: Strategic Considerations for Black Americans,” in When Sorry Isn’t Enough:

The Controversy over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: New York UniversityPress, 1999), 425.

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