Essay Database

Randall Robinson's The Debt: What America Owes to is a passionate dispute that argues the U.S. government must pay economic reparations to the descendants of enslaved Africans and their African-American ancestors. Reconstruction-era Radical Republicans first provoked the discussion of reparations with their proposal to award freed men with property, to help give them a stake in a country steeped in white supremacy. But throughout most of the 20th century, the issue withered on the …

…that I've described here. To some extent, I suspect their involvement stems from an old reflex of attempting to locate a progressive kernel in the nationalist sensibility. It certainly is an expression of a generally admirable commitment to go where people seem to be moving. But we must ask: What people? And where can this motion go? And we must be prepared to recognize what can be only a political dead end -- or worse.