Confusing the personal & political

As a right-wing provocateur, David Horowitz has few peers. Particularly on the issue of reparations for slavery, he has managed to take a relatively obscure academic debate and make it a topic of popular discussion in several colleges and universities. The problem with Horowitz, however, is that he fails to make his criticisms of liberal and mainstream thought in a focused manner. Instead, he prefers to use a sawed-off shotgun approach to political debate. In his columns for Salon magazine and various conservative journals, Horowitz does not simply discredit a particular set of ideas. He also rails against the "lynch mobs" of liberal academia, the "witch hunts" of college newspapers and "demagogic race hustlers" who, according to him, include not only Al Sharpton but also Jesse Jackson and NAACP President Kweisi Mfume.

Horowitz's indiscriminate style of political commentary is also evident in the advertisement against reparations that he sent to over 70 college newspapers. Instead of keeping his argument to a few incontrovertible points, he sprinkles his arguments with unpersuasive statements like "there is no single group clearly responsible for the crime of slavery" and the patently false claim that blacks played no significant role in overturning the institution of slavery. (The latter claim, as well as others that Horowitz makes, have been rejected in a cogent and detailed historical analysis by scholars at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. A copy of the report can be found at www.umass.edu/afroam/hor.html.)

In this column, I wish to focus on one question that Horowitz brings up in his arguments against reparations for slavery: Are immigrants responsible for slavery if they arrived in the United States after the Civil War? Or, to put the question more generally, to what extent do new entrants to a political system (immigrants, children, etc.) inherit the responsibility for injustices caused by their executive, legislative, judicial or constitutional systems?

To Horowitz, immigrants bear no responsibility whatsoever for slavery because they were not physically present in the United States before the Civil War. A deeper examination of the issue, however, reveals that the answer is not so clear-cut. First of all, the end of Reconstruction in 1876 allowed for the institution of Jim Crow laws and practices that grew directly out of the institutional legacy of slavery. So, while most immigrants may not have been in the United States during the time of slavery, hundreds of millions lived in the United States during the century when Jim Crow laws were instituted.

Horowitz may counter that most immigrants during this period lived outside the former Confederate states and could therefore not have been responsible for Jim Crow. Even this point, however, rests on shaky foundations because it relies on an excessively narrow definition of responsibility. While immigrants who lived outside the South may not have been the authors or enforcers of laws that promoted racial subjugation, they were nevertheless part of a political system that gave legislative and judicial backing to a set of practices that grew directly out of the experience of slavery. Thus, even if immigrants were not personally responsible for the implementation of racial segregation, they still share political responsibility for Jim Crow.

Even beyond the issue of slavery and Jim Crow, it is clear that immigrants and other new entrants to the political system take on responsibility for the past and present injustices of our country's political institutions. For instance, we all take responsibility for past injustices when we pay taxes to a government that, in turn, pays reparations to Native Americans. Even though this compensation may be paltry in comparison to the damage done, we recognize our continuing responsibility through reparations that are based on treaties between the United States and various indigenous nations. Slaves were never treated as a nation or set of nations and so were never governed by treaties with the United States. That does not mean, however, that our political institutions can or should forswear responsibility for their prior involvement in systems of racial subjugation.

Thus, when the matter turns from personal responsibility to political responsibility, it is not just the direct descendants of slaves who bear responsibility for slavery. We all do as citizens of the United States — the elderly as well as the newborn, descendants of Mayflower immigrants as well as recent arrivals. S. Karthick Ramakrishnan is a politics and Office of Population Research graduate student from Holden, Mass. He can be reached at karthick@princeton.edu.