At this time, where is the argument for reparations?

Randall Robinson: Congressman [John] Conyers introduced House Resolution 40, which doesn't ask for reparations, it simply asks for the establishment of a commission that would study the economic and social effects of slavery, and the century of de jure segregation and discrimination that followed, on contemporary African Americans.

How did you become involved with this issue?

Robinson: I was writing "The Debt" and it became apparent to me that this yawning economic gap that separates African Americans from the mainstream of America cannot be closed unless restitution is made for all that has happened to blacks in America. From our arrival in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619 until, at the very least, 1965, with passage of the Voting Rights Act--before which African Americans could not be said to have accomplished full citizenship--we had. a 346-year period of social and economic discrimination against blacks in America, in which the government was complicit. The government ordained it, embraced it, benefitted from it. And it came with great consequences for African Americans. We are victims of the longest running human rights crime-- 246 years of slavery, and following slavery, 100 years of de jure discrimination. We know that the capital of the United States was built by slaves. We know that the statue of Freedom that sits atop the capitol was cast in Bladensbur, Maryland, by slaves. We know that the early buildings of Georgetown University were built by slaves. We know we have done in America a massive wrong to a people from whom we have taken their languages, their religions, their mothers, their fathers, their children, their memory of who they were. Their very history we have stripped them of. We know all these things, but we've expressed almost an angry unwillingness in high places to do what we have urged others to do. After slavery, in 1865, those who benefitted from slavery were thought worthy of compensation by Lincoln, not those who were enslaved. Cotton produced more in financial resources for the U.S. Treasury and for private institutions in America than all other exports put together. Everybody became wealthy: People who built the slave ships, the people who made the rope to equip the slave ships, the people who repaired the ships, the people who ran the plantations, the Federal treasury, everybody benefitted. The Brown brothers, who endowed Brown University and began Providence Bank, which became Fleet Bank, made their original fortune building slave ships in the slave industry. Aetna [insurance company] insured the lives of slaves. The people who produced this wealth were never paid. In America, we now understand that both wealth and poverty are inter-generationally inherited.

Which element of America holds the largest weight of debt business or government?

It's a shared experience, a kind of collaborative effort. Whenever government participates in a crime against humanity, against its own people, under international law the government is responsible to make the victims whole. It's a responsibility the postwar German government faced for Nazi crimes, that Japan faced for the crimes against Korean women forced into prostitution. It's a responsibility that this government faced for the internment of Japanese Americans.

What form should reparations take, land, cash?

The first breakthrough that's important is breaking through the American denial. We live in a society [that is] a state in a state of denial, a country that doesn't want to talk about it. America wants to urge other countries to face up to their human rights crimes. We've urged Serbia to do the same. We've urged Rwanda. We've urged South Africa; we praised them for their Truth and Reconciliation commission. But we haven't been inclined to do that ourselves. I have suggested in "The Debt" that we should concentrate on Federal support for programs that go on inter-generationally, that from pre-school through college those blacks who are eligible should be able to go to any college of their choice free of charge, and there ought to be compensatory programs to make sure that we close the economic gap, that there should be massive infusions of cash into the black community for economic development. And that these programs should go on until this differential, until this disparity between blacks and white in America closed. This disparity can be directly attributed to slavery and the century that followed. At the same time, I think that those who believe that land ought to be a part of this, we should make that case too. These things are not mutually exclusive.

In what courts would your suits be brought?

These would be brought in Federal courts. But there could be suits brought in state courts as well, because states were involved in the same kind of human rights violations.

How does one go about calibrating the price tag?

That's difficult to do, using any kind of formula. We realize that there's an enormous economic gap. What happened was awful, nightmarish and was done with the complicity of the government. When we look at reparations as a term that means repair, we can get a handle on this thing. That's the way I see it. People like myself wouldn't be eligible for reparations. But people who would be eligible are African Americans who remain bottom-stuck in American society.

How is it possible to calibrate the trauma, the cost factor of the trauma that has been inflicted on us, much of which we can't recognize because we haven't really brought it to the surface?

I don't think you can adequately compensate people for this kind of suffering with money. But resources are a start. It's better than doing nothing. When one considers a state like South Carolina that became rich with the export of rice. Slaves were taken from Sierra Leone. Plantation owners didn't know anything about how to grow rice. And men who tried to run away had their penises cut off. Men were killed, women were raped. You can't compensate people for this sin. This was done on a massive scale. People lost everything, including what people need in the way of cultural memory to define themselves. You can't have a sense of self worth, a sense of validation and a sense of significance. All of this was done deliberately and done on a massive scale to accomplish the subjugation of one people by another.

What has been the reaction in African American quarters on the question of reparation?

I think it has received surprising support in mainstream black America. I have received no opposition from the black community on this issue. Across the board in the black professional community [there is] support for the principle of reparations and a righting of this unfairness done so long ago and for so long a period of time.

No US president ever made a statement apologizing declaratively to African Americans. Does that mean a lot to you?

I think the presidents, in all likelihood, have understood, as others do who don' t want to get into it, who want to stay cocooned in denial, that while some might intend an apology as the end of the issue, an apology is the beginning. Once one confesses, once one concedes that something massive and wrong and devastating happened, then one has to understand that all of these inequalities and all of these problems and pathologies and difficulties and hardships have to be seen as flowing from that massive wrong. And then one has to reach the question, necessarily, of what to do to make right that wrong.

I think that is the problem.

Is it proper to extend the quarrel to Africa, where the crime originated?

Absolutely. One standard argument against reparations is this: African Americans benefitted because they were better off here, even under slavery, than they were in Africa. Before slavery in the West, Africa was a very different place. Africa had civilizations equal to any in the world. The great Greek historian, Herodotus, wrote that Egypt, Ethiopia, and civilizations of the African interior were foundations of ancient Greece. The calendar, Greece's practice of carving figures from stone, its language, its math, its sciences, its mythology, its gods, were all derived from African civilizations. And Herodotus wrote 500 years before the birth of Christ. Africa had important economies in which gold became the foundation of the intercontinental trading system-- Malian gold, West African gold, all of which was destroyed during slavery. Slavery depopulated Africa and devastated its societies and economies in a way from which it has never recovered.

Slavery was followed by colonialism and the cold war and the exploitation continues. The latest expression is the Africa Growth and Opportunities Act, which Congress passed and President Clinton signed. This law, in the spirit of globalization, offers Africa as a source of cheap labor for global corporations. African countries have demanded reparations that could start with debt relief. Countries such as Tanzania and Ethiopia spend nine times as much on debt relief as they do on education. In contrast, at the end of World War II, Germany was not required to pay more than 3.5 percent of its foreign exchange earnings in debt service. African countries are now paying up to 20 percent of their foreign exchange earnings in debt service to Western creditors. We've done debt forgiveness before. We're just disinclined to do it for Africa. Race is still a driving force in American foreign policy. The Growth and Opportunities Act requires that African countries lower taxes for Western investors, allow for privatization, there are no labor protections, and so on. The rules of globalization mandated by the World Trade Organization and some countries bilaterally have undercut indigenous businesses, killing off these businesses. Haiti used to produce enormous amounts of rice, but under pressures of globalization, Haitians are now buying rice from American producers and producing almost none of their own. What we've done in the Caribbean recently is criminal. We've got democratic, steadfast friends of the US, stable literate Caribbean countries like Grenada and St. Vincent, countries that have done all that's asked of them, whose single export is bananas. Chiquita, the Ohio-based banana producing and exporting company wants these countries's markets in Europe. They make large contributions to the Democratic Party. And the U.S. gets the WTO to dismantle the trade relationship these countries have had with Europe, their only market in the world.

Does TransAfrica get much American corporate support?

Very little. What we get, we get because there are influential blacks in hose corporations who make that happen. We had no corporate support when we were doing South Africa work. No oil company would give us money because we opposed their relationship with the old military government in Nigeria. But there are others, Bill and Camille Cosby, Danny Glover, people who have been immensely generous in keeping this institution alive and have given us the capacity to begin to endow ourselves so that we can survive.