Reparations+Neg+-+Case+Turns

1. Raising taxes targets poor families and weakens their financial standing.

(David Brady, Addy Family Professor, March 03, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_forces/v081/81.3brady.pdf)

One of the most persuasive critiques of the U.S. measure of poverty is that it neglects taxes, financial transfers, and in-kind benefits. Of course, taxes and transfers make a significant impact on a family’s finances. In fact, the deteriorating value of transfers is the main reason for the worsening of child poverty in recent decades in the U.S. Further, taxes on poor families in the U.S. have steadily risen, making their financial standing actually weaker than that of prior equivalent families. This neglect of taxes and transfers in configuring income violates A. Sen’s Transfer axiom, “Given other things, a pure transfer of income from a person below the poverty line to anyone who is richer must increase the poverty measure.” Ignoring these financial costs and benefits when measuring poverty is a fundamental theoretical and empirical problem. Thus, ideal poverty measures must incorporate taxes and transfers and measure poverty before and after taxes and transfers.

2. Reparations create new levels of racial resentment.

(David Horowittz, American writer and activist, 00, http://archive.salon.com/news/col/horo/2000/05/30/reparations/index.html)

Nor is it just in the realm of ideas that the payback demand is gaining ground. Last week, the Chicago City Council voted 46-1 in favor of a reparations resolution. The lopsided nature of the vote persuaded Mayor Richard Daley to apologize for slavery (in Chicago?), thus joining what has become a familiar and unseemly ritual of contrition for the Clinton-era left. The primary sponsor of the resolution, Alderwoman Dorothy Tillman, has announced she is going to organize a "national convention" to push the issue of reparations in the coming year. So what is wrong with the idea? In truth, just about everything. Examined closely, the claim for reparations is factually tendentious, morally incoherent and racially incendiary. Logically, it has about as much substance as the suggestion that O.J. Simpson should have been acquitted because of past racism by the criminal courts. Its impact on race relations and on the self-isolation of the African-American community is likely to be even worse. If the reparations idea continues to gain traction, its most obvious effect will be to intensify ethnic antagonisms and generate new levels of racial resentment. It will further alienate African-Americans from their American roots and further isolate them from all of America's other communities (including whites), who are themselves blameless in the grievance of slavery, who cannot be held culpable for racial segregation and who, in fact, have made significant contributions to ending discrimination and redressing any lingering injustice.

4. Reparations create hostilities toward America.

(Michael C. Dawson, Rovana Popoff, Departments of Government, African and African American Studies, Harvard University Department of Political Science, University of Chicago,2004,http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FDBR%2FDBR1_01%2FS1742058X04040056a.pdf&code=189f8a9a54655bd9d69390f92ddf4fcd [huynh])

Arguably the most visible and one of the most vociferous of the anti-reparations commentators is David Horowitz who launched a campaign in 2001 to place a strongly worded anti-reparations ad in seventy college newspapers. Besides listing “The Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks? is a Bad Idea for Blacks—and Racist Too,” this ad triggered a firestorm of protest across many college campuses and in the media. Many of the ten “reasons” were similar to those already advanced by other conservative opponents such as Swain and D’Souza. Two of Horowitz’s claims, however, deserve more attention. One is that Blacks are in debt to America. Distinguishing between the period that the English Crown ruled the slave territories and the period of “78 years” during which the U.S. sanctioned slavery, Horowitz argues that the U.S. did not start slavery, but in fact ended it for American Blacks. He asserts that the U.S. created a nation where Blacks thrive as nowhere else. Not included in his calculations of when Blacks suffered harm is the period of Jim Crow! Horowitz concludes by asking, “Where is the gratitude of Black America and its leaders for those gifts?”41 His argument is weakened however, if one links reparations to the phenomenon of Jim Crow era discrimination seriously. State-sponsored discrimination would last another century past the end of slavery, and the costs of that system to African Americans today are well documented by a number of sociologists, historians, and other social scientists. Most controversial, perhaps, is the claim that African American support for reparations is evidence in and of itself of hostility toward Whites, and of anti- Americanism as well. The reparations movement “is one more assault on America, conducted by racial separatists and the political left.” He elaborates on this point in a later article when he argues that linking contemporary disadvantage with the history of racism in the United States “qualif(ies) as hostility,” and “indicates instead an animus against all the non-Black inhabitants of this continent.” For Horowitz, support for reparations is prima facie evidence of disloyallty to the nation and Black racism.

6. Reparations create a violent backlash by not addressing everyone who has faced injustice. This isn’t a conservative response – political implications must be considered because no value can be placed on wasted life.

(John Torpey, University of British Columbia, June 2001, “Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: Reflections on Reparations”, The Journal of Modern History, Volume 73, pp. 333-358) [Ram]

77 At the same time, such politics seem preprogrammed to generate their own backlash, as with any politics that promises benefits for specific groups rather than “everyone” (though admittedly the latter is a rare bird). The likelihood of a backlash is not necessarily a reason not to pursue this avenue. Much politics provokes backlash of one sort or another, and, in the absence of a convincing universalist project, the forward-looking aspects of reparations politics may have much to offer in contemporary struggles to enhance equality both within countries and on a global scale. The fact that there are many who have suffered unjustly by no means insures, however, that everyone will regard compensation to specific groups as appropriate, no matter how demonstrable the injustices done them. The acrimony that can be generated by reparations politics found dramatic representation in a recent episode of the popular television show “The West Wing.” Josh Lyman, the White House Deputy Chief of Staff, is interviewing Jeff Breckinridge, a black lawyer whom the Bartlett administration wants to nominate as an Assistant Attorney General. There is one small problem, however; Breckinridge has written an enthusiastic blurb for the dust jacket of a book by “Otis Hastings” called The Unpaid Debt. After a “fascinating abstract discussion” of reparations for slavery that Josh clearly finds exasperating, he says, “You know, Jeff, I’d love to give you the money, I really would. But I’m a little short of cash right now. It seems the SS officer forgot to give my grandfather his wallet back when he let him out of Birkenau.”78 Troubling though it is, this fictional dramatization of the animosities that may be generated by reparations politics scarcely compares to the fears that the heightened attention to reparations payments for former slave laborers (many of whom were not Jews at all, but Slavic groups slated by the Nazis for a perpetual subaltern status) may be adding fuel to a resurgence of antisemitism in contemporary Germany.79 Indeed, it may be salutary to recall that, although the payment of war-related reparations long predates World War I, it is with that conflagration that we most associate the notion of reparations, and that the reparations obligations imposed on Germany were a decisive element in fostering the resentment that spurred the rise of the National Socialists in the 1920s. The inflation that followed upon German efforts to meet these obligations provoked a truculent sense of injury because of the perception that the reparations obligations were simply a matter of “victors’ justice” and had little to do with equity per se. After all, the historiographical debate otver blame for the war hardly yields any unambiguous conclusion of exclusively German culpability. The payment of enormous sums in reparations helped generate a backlash against those who exacted these payments. Large segments of post–World War I German society sought to be released from penury imposed for a war that had multiple causes, instigators, and evildoers. The Nazis’ rise to power is scarcely imaginable without this background. It is worth bearing this outcome in mind when considering the political implications of the worldwide demands for reparations for historical injustices. Finally, there are those who will simply insist on “letting bygones be bygones.” Although this may be a “conservative” response, implying that past injustices are “old history” for which the perpetrators should be absolved of responsibility, it need not be. Struggles for reparations may help to repair past damage (as opposed to transforming conditions for future generations), but most observers agree that such repair can only be symbolic. As many critics of reparations—including some potential recipients of such compensation—have pointed out, there can be no value set on wasted human life. Max Horkheimer once put the point succinctly in a letter to Walter Benjamin: “Past injustice is over and done with; the slain are truly slain.”80 No amount of compensation can bring the dead back from their graves, and the perverse political consequences of appearing to try to do so must be taken very seriously.81

7. Reparations provide a way to repudiate old forms of white supremacy and bury historical memories – this reinforces white supremacy.

(Sumi Cho, Civil Liberties Public Education Fund, Fall 98, “SYMPOSIUM: Redeeming Whiteness in the Shadow of Internment: Earl Warren, Brown, and a Theory of Racial Redemption”, 19 B.C. Third World L.J. 73, p. Lexis) [Ram]

Racial redemption is the process by which whiteness can be restored to its full material value by removing the encumbrances that the legacy of racism has placed upon it. Such a process reconciles the knowledge/desire tension by denouncing supremacy while permitting its continued operation. Specifically, there are three identifiable features that characterize the process of racial redemption: 1) the repudiation of old forms of white supremacy; 2) the burial of historical memories of racial subordination; and 3) the transformation of white supremacy into more sustainable forms. The repudiation of America's supremacist past may take various forms, such as the declaration of racial apologies or racial equality "covenants." A number of historical events merged in the mid-twentieth century to force the repudiation of white supremacist regimes, only two of which I will address. First, the discovery of the Nazi death camps was an epiphanal moment for the United States and began the final demise of the pseudo-scientific, biologically-based philosophy of white supremacy. 251 The Holocaust held a mirror to white Americans' violent [*123] exclusion and disfranchisement of people of color, particularly Black Americans in the South. In addition, the 1944 publication, An American Dilemma, removed the intellectual cover enjoyed by scientific racism. 252 In his thousand page work, Gunnar Myrdal argued that America's race problem was attributable not to the biological inferiority of the minority group, but to the irrational prejudices of members of the majority group. 253 The Holocaust, the public spectacle of the Nuremberg trials and the influence of An American Dilemma made it impossible to sustain old forms of white supremacy as a public rationale for the racial caste system in postwar America. 254 The burial feature of racial redemption makes use of censorship, historical amnesia, selective recall, euphemizing and revisionist historicizing in achieving its ends. This process obscures individual, institutional and cultural complicities with the old forms of white supremacy that would otherwise have left "blood on the hands" of those who participated in the repudiated regime, and even damaged the moral currency of those who passively benefited from it. In one sense, burial provides closure after a grieving period, granting permission to "move on" from the legacy of America's racist past. Such burials may manifest themselves as outright denials, glaring omissions, silences, absences and counter-factual or decontextualized assertions. Burial obscures the full extent to which white privilege has been consolidated and leveraged into material gain. 255 The third, and most important, feature of racial redemption involves the simultaneous transformation and reassertion of white supremacy. [*124] The process of racial redemption retires an outmoded form of white supremacy while introducing a new, more resilient form. What has been billed as revolutionary racial change in the repudiation phase reveals itself as a "mere change in the form of investment" in white supremacy. 256 Burial of racial historical context makes it analytically difficult for the public to evaluate comparatively the evolving form of subordination. Pre-Brown, white supremacy manifested itself in the system of segregation supported by an ideology of biological determinism. Post-Brown, white supremacy continued in the new form of formal legal equality abutted by the ideology of colorblind fundamentalism. Through the stages of repudiation, burial and transformation, the racial redemption process effects, and depends upon, a retrieval of innocent whiteness. This retrieval decouples whiteness from the stigma of white supremacy by imagining a kinder, gentler whiteness -- one that would never be seen cloaked in white sheets and hoods, one that has not benefited from centuries of a racial caste system, one that has not been constructed through belief in inherent biological differences between people of color and whites and one that has not been tolerant of outright violence and malign neglect. For Warren individually, the Supreme Court as an institution and the nation as a whole, the decoupling of whiteness from white supremacy occurred through Brown and its companion cases that invalidated the principle of separate-but-equal and the practice of segregation. 257 The jurisprudence that began with Brown has had the effect of restoring white innocence and relegitimating the state and its institutions through the embrace of colorblind ideology. 258

1. Reparations, in challenging the nation-state, undermine rights – they fail to recognize that the state is the only institution that guarantees rights.

(John Torpey, University of British Columbia, June 2001, “Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: Reflections on Reparations”, The Journal of Modern History, Volume 73, pp. 333-358) [Ram]

Contemporary campaigns for reparations for historical injustices breathe much the same spirit of opposition to “the state” that is currently sweeping the globe in the guise of neoliberalism—though for quite different reasons, to be sure. Charles Maier is correct to suggest that those who see colonialism rather than more specifically European disasters as the primary “moral narrative” of the twentieth century tend to be more enthusiastic about the possibilities of state regulation of eco- nomic and other kinds of activity.67 Yet the idea of human rights that lies at the core of reparations politics simultaneously represents a challenge to states tout court, despite the fact that the legal institutionalization of human rights was inaugurated with the American and French revolutions. The ambivalence inscribed in the heart of those revolutions—the U.S. Constitution’s reference to “persons” rather than “Americans,” and the intrinsically contradictory Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen—proclaimed the United States and France as guarantors of human rights, even as they proclaimed their national sovereignty. The catastrophes caused in the recently expired century by nationalism and related exclusionary projects have greatly dimmed the original connection between the nation-state and human rights.68 Indeed, it seems almost inconceivable at this point that a chapter of Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism was called “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.”69 Arendt argued that it was “the conquest of the state by the nation” that had deflected nation-states away from what had been their original “supreme task,” namely, “to protect and guarantee man his rights as man.” That it is still nation-states that provide that guarantee, despite the “perversion of the state into an instrument of the nation,”70 often gets lost in the enthusiasm for human rights and postnational citizenship, however warranted this enthusiasm may be in the defense of individual rights and freedoms.71

2. Reparations set off the recipient as a victim.

(Alfred L. Brophy, University of Alabama Professor of Law, 03, “SOME CONCEPTUAL AND LEGAL PROBLEMS IN REPARATIONS FOR SLAVERY”, 58 N.Y.U. Ann. Surv. Am. L. 497, p. Lexis) [Ram]

Most of David Horowitz's criticism of reparations, however, goes to the effect that reparations claims have on the African American community. He believes that "the reparations claim is one more attempt to turn African-Americans into victims ... [and] sends a damaging message to the African-American community" and that "the reparations claim is a separatist idea that sets African-Americans against the nation that gave them freedom." 215 These claims are part of Horowitz's opposition to discussion of the past and its effect on the present. It is part of an attack on the Great Society, in which its opponents seek to place blame on the welfare policies of the 1960s for the current state of African American society, rather than on the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. 216 Moreover, reparations opponents cite the animosity that reparations talk engenders in the majority community. It is an unfortunate reality that racial justice is in constant tension with the majority's attitude toward race-conscious affirmative action. 217 The connections between the past and the present are significant. The psychological harm, for example, is described vividly by Randall Robinson in The Debt: Like slavery, other human rights crimes have resulted in the loss of millions of lives. But only slavery, with its sadistic patience, asphyxiated memory, and smothered cultures, has hulled empty a whole race of people with inter-generational efficiency. Every artifact of the victims' past cultures, every custom, every ritual, every god, every language, every trace element of a people's whole hereditary identity, wrenched from them and ground into a sharp choking dust. It is a human rights crime without parallel in the modern world. For it produces victims ad infinitum, long after the active state of the crime has ended. 218

4. The aid provided by reparations operates within a dominant framework of development discourse that is grounded in U.S. self-interest.

(Marc Williams, University of Sussex School of African and Asian Studies, 7/98, “AID, SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS” The International Journal of Peace Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, http://www.gmu.edu/academic/ijps/vol3_2/Williams.htm) [Ram]

Escobar highlights four features of the emergence of sustainable development as discourse (1995: 194-196). First, "the emergence of sustainable development is part of a broader process of the problematisation of global survival that has resulted in a reworking of the relationship between nature and society" (1995: 194). International attention to the environment is the response to the twin forces of a development model which enhances environmental degradation and the emergence of environmental movements. However, the new environmentalism focuses on the global ecosystem rather than the sustainability of local societies. The definition of the global is made by the power brokers rather than the poor. The proposition that we are all citizens of the earth tends to lead to the conclusion that we are equally responsible for environmental degradation. It is important to recognise that there are great inequities in resource problems and consumption habits internationally and intra-nationally. Second, the discourse is at fault for the lack of vision it fosters of the role of local people in the management of their own environments. Although ecologists have discovered the degrading activities of the poor, they have seldom made the connection to the processes of capitalist growth which has engendered this degradation. Third, the idea of environmentally-friendly growth represented in mainstream sustainable development "reproduces the central aspects of developmentalism and economism" (1995: 195). Therefore the sustainable development discourse, instead of replacing the orthodox development discourse, has built upon and replicated many of its features. Key themes are in the growth/development debate are repeated. Fourth, the new environmentalism has rendered nature a passive object while the environment has been expanded. Sustainable development thus attempts to create conditions conducive to development and the elimination of environmental degradation. Within the discursive terrain of environmentalism, a number of critical foci, like ecofeminism and environmental ethics, interrupt the growth ethic and consumerist culture of contemporary capitalism. But as I have shown, the incorporation of environmentalism strategically replicates and elaborates a form of managerialism which neither disrupts nor displaces central themes in the conventional approach to development. Nevertheless, the articulation of sustainable development has initiated a focus on the transfer of capital by governments and international agencies. The generation of a new development paradigm requires changes in development policies. The financing of sustainable development is not located ab initio in the new paradigm but is negotiated within the pre-existing contours of the foreign aid regime. So, before turning to an analysis of development assistance in the context of the promotion of sustainability, I will examine key features of the aid regime. The Foreign Aid Regime Foreign aid has played a critical role in the elaboration of the development discourse. It stands firmly at the intersection of political and security interests and economic and social development. In developing the terrain of the aid regime, I will suggest that this regime contains a limited and limiting conception of development. The omissions or silences of liberal development theory-the discovery of the rural poor, the recognition of the salience of women in development, the importance of redistributivist strategies, and the crucial role played by open political institutions-all reappear periodically at the dawn of a new age. Tracing the connections between foreign aid and development choices in the world economy is a task central to understanding current development practices. In the post World War Two period, billions of dollars have been transferred from developed to developing countries in the form of economic aid. Foreign aid has long occupied a central place in international development policy. Despite the absence of a consensus on the effectiveness of aid, and a failure of the donor states to attain the norm of 0.7 per cent of GNP in development assistance, an international aid regime can be identified. The aid regime produces and maintains a distinct pattern of development and is itself the product of ideas and theories on development. Robert Wood has provided the most developed description of the aid regime. He outlines five components: the negotiating framework between donors and recipients; the identification of legitimate uses for aid; relations among donor institutions; the relationship between official development assistance and broader development policy; and relations between aid and debt (1986). Within each of these components can be found principles, rules, norms and decision-making procedures. The aid regime is predominantly structured around the interests of the donors. Given that 'he who has the gold makes the rule' the power of the purse is evident in the specific features of the regime. The negotiating framework places the recipients in the position of supplicants; decisions on the allocation of aid are reserved for the bilateral or multilateral donors. Procedures for the evaluating the success of aid remain with donor institutions. Aid is regarded as a supplement rather than a replacement for private capital. Official development assistance should not compete with private capital but should be allocated in cases where the private sector is unable or unwilling to provide funding. Moreover, aid can be withheld to force the recipient to seek out the private market. Burden sharing and co-ordination of policy is an important feature of the regime. The Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) is the key site for dialogue and co-operation among lenders. Much attention has been given in recent years to the conditionality in structural adjustment programmes, [Continued…]

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[Williams Continues…]

but conditionality has long existed as an important feature of the aid regime. Conditionality provides the means through which donors can exercise some influence over the policies followed by recipient governments. The management of debt by creditor clubs places the burden of adjustment on the debtor country. Debt relief is provided as long as the recipient agrees to fulfill obligations to both private and official creditors. The aid regime was developed after the Second World War and owes its origin to the Cold War and post imperial European politics (Wall, 1973: 9). During the colonial period technical assistance was provided by the metropolitan countries to the colonies but the scale of these programmes did not prefigure the post-war effort. A number of factors underlay the decisions by the industrialised world to develop aid policies after 1945. Political and strategic motives have been inextricably linked with the growth of foreign aid. In the Cold War context, aid was one of the foreign policy instruments used by both sides in the East-West confrontation. The phenomenal success of the Marshall Plan, under which massive grants from the United States provided the capital equipment and other resources to stimulate the rapid economic recovery of Western Europe (which was already in possession of the infrastructure of a self-sustaining economy), provided an early ideal model of the possibilities of foreign aid, despite the differences in material conditions between Europe and the developing world. Economic aid was frequently linked to military aid. Studies of the distribution of aid show a close correlation between strategic interests and aid flows. Western countries attempted to promote economic development in the South through foreign aid on the basis of the theory that a link existed between economic development and democracy. Hence the granting of aid would "contribute to the growth and strengthening of liberal democratic political systems in the Third World" (Packenham, 1973: 5). On both sides of the East-West divide communist and capitalist regimes saw aid to Third World regimes as a means of gaining influence with compliant regimes. The ex-colonial powers used aid as a means of maintaining commercial and political influence in their ex-colonies. Moreover, political stability in the newly independent countries was deemed to rest on the provision of external assistance. Clearly, the strongest rationale for the granting of foreign aid remained enlightened self-interest. Nevertheless, it should not be forgotten that aid was a response to the demands made by the newly independent African and Asian countries and a Latin America intent on industrialisation. Whether the arguments were based on the importance of reparations for past exploitation, international solidarity or mutual interests Third World countries demanded access to aid.

5. Reparations adhere solely to a logic of recognition – by ignoring socio-economic factors the plan fails to address injustice, instead entrenching it.

(Nancy Fraser, Professor of Political and Social Science at the New School for Social Research, 7/95, “From Redistribution to Recognition? Dilemmas of Justice in a ‘Post-Socialist’ Age”, New Left Review I/212, http://newleftreview.org/?view=1810) [Ram]

Neither of those two stances is adequate, in my view. Both are too wholesale and un-nuanced. Instead of simply endorsing or rejecting all of identity politics simpliciter, we should see ourselves as presented with a new intellectual and practical task: that of developing a critical theory of recognition, one which identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be coherently combined with the social politics of equality. In formulating this project, I assume that justice today requires both redistribution and recognition. And I propose to examine the relation between them. In part, this means figuring out how to conceptualize cultural recognition and social equality in forms that support rather than undermine one another. (For there are many competing conceptions of both!) It also means theorizing the ways in which economic disadvantage and cultural disrespect are currently entwined with and support one another. Then, too, it requires clarifying the political dilemmas that arise when we try to combat both those injustices simultaneously. My larger aim is to connect two political problematics that are currently dissociated from one other. For only by articulating recognition and redistribution can we arrive at a critical-theoretical framework that is adequate to the demands of our age. That, however, is far too much to take on here. In what follows, I shall consider only one aspect of the problem. Under what circumstances can a politics of recognition help support a politics of redistribution? And when is it more likely to undermine it? Which of the many varieties of identity politics best synergize with struggles for social equality? And which tend to interfere with the latter?

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6. The US legal system is grounded in white supremacy – reparations will engender racism – this means they can’t access their internal link to colonialism.

(Rhonda V. Magee, University of San Francisco Law Professor, 5/93, Virginia Law Review, Vol. 79, No. 4, pp. 863-916, “The Master's Tools, from the Bottom up: Responses to African-American Reparations Theory in Mainstream and Outsider Remedies Discourse”) [Ram]

The insight of Critical Legal Theorists and macro-sociologists is crucial to understanding the failure of African-American reparations proposals. These theorists conclude that the court system and the legislature are inseverable from the racially hyperconscious social structure in which they are embed- ded.257 They are "mutually constitutive."It would thus be impossible, literally, to fashion a legal remedy for racism from within a white supremacy-based system.259 The central point is that "the system" of American law and politics merely consists of the aggregate actions of racially hyperconscious individual participants. As long as whites continue to predominate in positions of power over Blacks within the system, they bring their subconscious beliefs in white supremacy to bear on the processes at hand. This done by tens of thousands of individuals every minute of every day creates a system by which racism continues to operate in institutions-so-called institutionalized racism, or rather, institutionalized white supremacy. Institutionalized white supremacy is driven by the internalized white-over-Black world views of millions of individual participants acting daily in their individual offices and ranges of responsibility. There simply is no public-private distinction when it comes to the white supremacist world view. One believes it, more or less. To argue that it is possible to remedy the manifestations of white supremacy in America presumes an American remedial system itself insulated from the principle of white supremacy. Such a system remains a utopian The court system and Congress can no more operate outside American culture and its prevailing social relations than an individual can step outside of her own skin. So long as the courts and Congress consist of individuals unconsciously steeped in white supremacy, discussion of legal and legislative "responses" to racial injustice are exercises in "societal conceit."261

1. Reparations reinforce discrimination through the stigma of the handout and don’t create lasting change in Africa.

(Rodney D. Coates, Professor of Sociology and Black World Studies, December 04, The University of North Carolina Press http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/social_forces/v083/83.2coates.pdf)

Anything short of full remediation, full restoration, and full reparations will continue the process of applying Band-Aids to hemorrhaging wounds. Any program, policy, executive decision, or concerted efforts, history being our guide, will punish the victim with the stigma of a handout, the perception that blacks are getting something underserved, or the jealousy of whites that this benefit is "reverse discrimination." Such practices ultimately become excuses for system failure, societal inadequacies, and political weakness. Such practices, during times of economic necessity or political complacency, quickly are reversed, reduced, or reconsidered as the failures, inadequacies, and weaknesses are transferred upon the backs of the victims. As a new generation, now politically astute and correct, learn how to "talk nasty" about blacks politely, we self-righteously turn our backs on the plight of the poor, urban underclass. Reparations are not about placing guilt at the feet of whites, nor is it about claiming victim status for blacks. Blacks have experienced America as victims. Whites have benefited from their whiteness, and they have experienced American guilt. Reparations, however, are not about blacks feeling better about their blackness, or whites wincing with the weight of 500 years of collective guilt. Guilt and victimhood politics, practices, and solutions rarely lead to anything but embarrassed reluctance on the part of the guilty and frustration and anxiety on the part of the victim. The guilty, attempting to seek absolution, are encouraged to make some gesture of atonement. Such gestures, rarely anything but tokens of attrition and contrition, always delivered with great fanfare, encourage the victim to believe that finally their remedies are forthcoming. Alas, as the guilt subsides, typically with the passage of time or the press of economic realities, resolve is weakened, programs are reduced or eliminated, and another cycle of unmet promises is recorded. Each cycle of guilt and victim identification, with its resultant policies and practices of appeasements producing even more anxieties and frustrations, culminates in another generation on both sides who loose faith in the capacity of the other to appropriately respond. These cycles, being repeated several times over the course of the American experience, have produced waves of guilt, victim identification, and frustration. This cyclic process has produced, within the white community, what Kozel has described as compassion fatigue, and, within the black community, what West describes (but mistakenly explains) as nihilism. The guilt cycle, producing at both extreme compassion fatigue and nihilism, can only be broken by a complete solution, a real attempt to restore people of African descent to their proper place in our global universe. We must repair the damage, we must remedy the harm, and we must reclaim that which was stolen. Put simply, social justice calls for reparations.

5. Reparations are a retreat from the transformative politics that try to create change – by only looking back on the past they destroy future-oriented projects.

(John Torpey, University of British Columbia, June 2001, “Making Whole What Has Been Smashed: Reflections on Reparations”, The Journal of Modern History, Volume 73, pp. 333-358) [Ram]

Beyond its antistatist implications, reparations politics also has a curiously apolitical quality about it. The notion of gaining compensation for those who have suffered injustice in the past seems at first glance inherently uncontroversial—of course, why not? The decline of the nation-state as a legitimate force promoting social and political integration, the widely prevalent “consciousness of catastrophe,” and the more or less simultaneous decline of the socialist project have made it difficult to generate enthusiasm for a transformative politics that speaks to the vast majority, as socialism once attempted to do. Ju¨rgen Habermas may have been too dire in suggesting that we have entered a “postpolitical world” in which “the multinational corporation becomes the model for all conduct,”72 but the difficulty of mounting political projects with broad appeal to populations tends to favor a politics of legal disputation rather than of mass mobilization. In this climate, reparations politics presents itself as a useful tactic for progressive politics in a transitional, “postsocialist” period. The recent flowering of “rights talk” and the pursuit of damages for historica injustices both reflect and promote the “juridification” of politics. Reparations politics— a response to what has aptly been called “the widespread contemporary mood of enlightened bewilderment”73—is typically a politics of courtrooms and legal briefs, not street demonstrations. It is consistent with an era of individualization, in which the expansive solidarities of the Fordist age of mass production increasingly seem a thing of the past and even mildly ameliorative responses to racial inequality encounter strong political headwinds. Thus legal scholar Robert Westley begins his recent analysis of reparations for black Americans by noting that affirmative action is “almost dead” and that therefore “mapping a legal path to enforcement of Black reparations. . . remains a challenge for legal theorists and policymakers attempting to pursue alternative routes to social justice.”74 There is, accordingly, no overlooking the prominence of lawyers in discussions of reparations. Reparations politics, which takes its cue from the German response to the Holocaust, often have a backward-looking dimension, promoting the cultivation of victimhood and cultural parochialism. Yet the more forward-looking type of reparations seeks to harness the prevalence of “human rights” to political projects oriented both to coming to terms with brutal pasts and to equalizing the imbalance between rich and poor. Hence the Organization for African Unity’s demand that the United States, the United Nations, and other states and international entities pay reparations for failing to stop the genocide in Rwanda was accompanied by calls for cancellation of the country’s debts. This approach has also been used by activists seeking “reparations” and debt relief for the disastrous consequences of apartheid and, more generally, for the inequalities suffered by those in the global “South” at the hands of the Euro-American “North.”75 Here the historicist preoccupation with the identity-bolstering cultivation of the past is joined to future-oriented projects aimed at narrowing the growing gap in standards of living between the well-off few of the postcolonial metropoles and the vast nonwhite majority of the world’s population outside the comfortable bastions of the “North.” In these cases, the demand for “reparations” involves not so much a potentially resentment-laden preoccupation with past suffering but rather the politicization of atrocious histories that one can plausibly argue are the cause of contemporary inequalities. The matters of “how Europe underdeveloped Africa,” its diaspora, and analogous groups and regions of the world lie at the heart of such interpretations.76 Campaigns for reparations coupled with demands for debt relief waged by social movements in the “South” bear witness to the potentially valuable tactical uses of the Holocaust metaphor without being “a sign. . . of a retreat from transformative politics.”

6. Public health assistance to Africa fails because it doesn’t reach the poor – this turns case because it reinforces the rich’s position.

(F. Castro-Leal et. al., World Bank, 2K, Bulletin of the World Health Organization 78 (1), “Public Spending on Health Care in Africa: Do the Poor Benefit?”, http://siteresources.worldbank.org/INTPAH/Resources/Publications/Seminars/bu0201.pdf) [Ram]