African Americans--Reparations

This is a study of one of the most controversial public matters concerning race in America today: the African American reparations movement for slavery and segregation. This issue is hotly contested because racial identity and the relative status and well-being of ethnic groups in America, a configuration I refer to as "race as we know it," is inextricably linked to matters of prejudice, pride, property, and public policy both presently and historically. Any substantial shift in the relative position of blacks and whites, America's most iconically opposed groups, promises to alter fundamental dynamics between these two populations, effectively ending "race as we know it," if not racism and racial hierarchy per se. Randall Robinson, author of The Debt, the most important work advocating reparations for African Americans, sees reparations as the means by which to break the historical "habit" of American society of locking most blacks and whites into positions of inferiority and superiority respectively. David Horowitz, author of Uncivil Wars , the most famous refutation of Robinson's argument, sees reparations as an all-out attack on America's "heritage" of racial progress because it threatens today's allegedly "color-blind consensus" with "reverse-racism." So put, these opposed positions express the fundamental fears of many whites and the highest hopes of many blacks. Hence, the conflict over reparations, a struggle over the economics and ethics of equality, is simultaneously and inseparably no less a struggle over the future of race in America. With the societal stake so high, the present study constitutes a much-needed critical scholarly attempt to "save" this public matter from the ideological excesses of these powerfully opposed manifestos. This study will analyze their respective arguments by using a multidisciplinary and comparative framework employing data, concepts, and theories from the disciplines of anthropology, economics, cultural studies, history, political science, and sociology. Its comparative orientation juxtaposes different forms of human bondage, class composition, racial identity and community formation, and political movements. A critical analysis of primary and secondary sources using qualitative and quantitative methods will also be employed.