Black middle class to seek slavery reparation

In awarding the dying smoker, Richard Boeken, $3 billion in punitive damages against Philip Morris ten days ago, a Los Angeles jury was doing more than redressing his grievance.

These 12 good people were living out the American belief that litigation can be an answer to all problems.

And so, some 138 eight years after the Emancipation Proclamation ended slavery, the idea of litigation to demand reparations for the African-American community has begun to take on mainstream support in that community's middle class. In the past it only had support in the fringes of Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam movement.

A Harvard law professor, Charles Ogletree, has put together a coalition of lawyers to table a major class action early next year. "It's important because a lot of nations worldwide are looking back on a lot of harm that has been done, and they have decided that it's time to do something about that harm," Prof Ogletree told the Harvard Crimson.

And a respected foreign policy lobbyist, a star of the antiapartheid movement, Randall Robinson, has produced a bestseller, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, which has added considerable fuel to the debate. It calls for massive federal reparations on the grounds that "No race, no ethnic or religious group, has suffered so much over so long a span as blacks have, and do still, at the hands of those who benefitted, with the connivance of the United States government, from slavery and the century of legalised American racial hostility that followed it".

In Congress, Representative John Conyers from Michigan has tabled legislation every year since 1989 calling for the establishment of a commission to consider reparations. Today he has the backing of 48 members of the House. That such demands should gain credence in the black middle class is hardly surprising.

African-Americans who have managed to stake a claim in American prosperity find it easier to blame slavery for the persistence of deep inequalities and racism than to look either to structural causes in the nature of the capitalist system they are embracing or to cultural problems rooted in their own community and which feed a debilitating culture of victimhood.

But litigation normally re quires both clearly identifiable victims, or their immediate survivors, and a culprit against whom to complain and who is capable of paying up.

In this case the legacy of slavery is such, proponents of reparations argue, that its effects are still being felt today in the deeply unequal society that is the US and they propose to target both municipalities and companies which in the past benefitted - insurance companies who insured slaves as property, for example.

And, rather than individual compensation the talk is of establishing trust funds. "People seem to me to be moving away from the position of financial remuneration," Mr Conyers says. "People are thinking of more permanent things that can be done: education, health care, job opportunities, housing - things that are less tangible but in the long run might really help make us whole."

It is an idea that many whites find deeply uncomfortable. Ask a recently-arrived Polish taxi driver, a Mexican migrant worker, or even the grandchild of an Irish garment worker whose parents fled the Famine, about reparations for African-Americans and they will ask: "Why should I pay?"

"For many white Americans, 30 years of affirmative action was reparations for slavery, and they now feel preferences should be gradually scaled back," Michael Crowley wrote recently in the New Republic magazine.

But reparations for wrongs to ethnic groups have precedents which range from payments to Jewish victims of the holocaust, and in the US, compensation to American Indians and Japanese-Americans interned during the second World War.

Historical research has also made it easier for the descendants of slaves to trace their heritage and thus determine what their families might be owed and by whom. And the recent political and legal attacks on affirmative action have forced black politicians and activists to link racial preferences more explicitly to slavery, thus forming the intellectual foundation for reparations.

In 1994, Florida allocated $2 million to be paid to descendants of a deadly 1923 race riot in the town of Rosewood. Last February an official commission in Oklahoma recommended that the state pay reparation to survivors of a 1921 race riot in which a white mob decimated a black section of Tulsa, killing hundreds and injuring thousands.

Rosewood and Tulsa are just two of many race riots that erupted in the US after Reconstruction and Oklahoma state Representative, Don Ross, a prime mover of the legislation that created the Tulsa commission, argues that documenting those other riots would help build the strongest possible argument for reparations.

The issue has also taken on a significant international dimension. In the discussions ahead of a UN conference on racism to be held in South Africa in September a number of African nations have been seeking a specific affirmation by the conference "that the slave trade is a unique tragedy in the story of humanity, particularly against Africans".

The move to give slavery a special status is seen by Western diplomats as the first step in an attempt to make an international case for reparations.

Britain, on behalf of the EU, is proposing a different wording, merely affirming "that slavery and the slave trade are an appalling tragedy in the history of humanity".

"We are not prepared to link the question of development aid with past history," a British official said.

Officials said the amended wording is not intended to devalue the enormity of what happened in previous centuries, but is based on legal opinion that slavery and slave trading were not against "customary international law" at the time.

The US government has gone further by threatening to withdraw aid to African countries if the conference decides to debate the issue of reparations.

psmyth@irish-times.ie