The end of the semester is approaching—my last semester of teaching before retiring from Brown. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t going to miss it. I’ve spent about fifty years teaching. That’s tens of thousands of hours lecturing, leading seminars, supervising dissertations and theses, designing courses, mentoring undergrads and grad students, and grading papers. I’m going to miss all of it—with the possible exception of grading.
I’ll definitely miss watching young people encounter new ideas. The classroom has a way of reinvigorating concepts and narratives I’ve spent decades exploring. It’s helped keep my own thinking fresh and sharp, preventing me from falling into mental ruts and becoming complacent. Now that I’m stepping away from teaching, I’m thinking about ways to keep myself engaged with other lively minds. Obviously the podcast helps with that. But there’s also this newsletter, and its very lively commenters.
In the spirit of keeping things fresh, I want to introduce a discussion prompt I used in the classroom just last week. It refers to a 2001 incident in which the infamous campus provocateur David Horowitz took out a full-page ad in Brown’s student newspaper arguing against reparations. This is well before Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” thrust the issue to the center of national discourse in 2014.
Check out the prompt, and if you feel so moved, write in below with your comments. Don’t hold back, this won’t affect your final grade!
This post is free and available to the public. To receive early access to TGS episodes, an ad-free podcast feed, Q&As, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.
We’ve been discussing the issue of reparations in recent weeks in this course, starting with the now-classic Atlantic Monthly article by Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” and including a number of counter arguments, particularly my own “The Case against Reparations.” I will not rehash those arguments here, but as we leave this topic, I would like to introduce a somewhat different theme. Coates writes about the “plunder” of black people—the taking without compensation of the fruits of their labor and the expropriation of their wealth. But one could argue, this is only one dimension of the complex historical process that was set into motion by the enslavement and importation of the Africans. It is easy to enumerate what was lost due to slavery, but not so easy to talk about what, in the fullness of time, has been gained. And yet, a full accounting would have to consider both, wouldn’t it?
This kind of thinking is treacherous ground. I want to declare as clearly as I can that, by raising these questions, I do not intend to justify enslavement in any way. I’m just trying to do a comprehensive accounting by looking at all sides of the ledger, so to speak.
That, by the way, is also what conservative provocateur David Horowitz claimed to be doing when he purchased an advertisement in the Brown Daily Herald in 2001 titled “Ten Reasons Why Reparations for Blacks is a Bad Idea for Blacks—and Racist, Too!” That ad provoked an enormous controversy that you can read about here. In a 2004 report on that controversy, the Herald summarized the earlier events as follows:
The ad appeared in the March 13 (2001) issue of the Herald. Some students found two of Horowitz's arguments particularly offensive.
The ad stated that slavery had existed worldwide for centuries, “but in the thousand years of its existence, there never was an anti-slavery movement until white Christians—Englishmen and Americans—created one.” It also concluded that “America's African-American citizens are the richest and most privileged black people alive.”
[…]
The following morning, coalition members took 4,000 copies of The Herald from 10 distribution points. In place of the newspapers they left a flier stating: “We are using this action as an opportunity to show our community at Brown that our newspaper is not accountable to its supposed constituents. It is a newspaper run by Brown-student opportunists and careerists who are completely unaccountable to the University's aims and its student body …”
Now, with more than two decades having passed, I want to defend Horowitz’s observation and invite your considered reactions. As it happens, next Monday I will deliver an address at Florida State University entitled, “The Case for Black Patriotism.” Here’s an excerpt from my prepared remarks for that speech:
So, for black Americans contemplating our patriotism, the narrative we settle upon—emphasizing “bias” or “development”; looking to “their” politics or to “our” culture; seeking to combat anti-black racism or striving to rebuild the black family; embracing victimization or accepting responsibility—is crucial. What is more, this choice of narrative governs how we blacks view our place within this great republic, the United States of America. This is worth arguing about. Is this a good country—one that affords boundless opportunity to all who are fortunate enough to enjoy the privileges and to bear the responsibilities of American citizenship? Or—as latter-day historical revisionists would have it—is this a venal, rapacious bandit-society full of plundering racists, founded in genocide and slavery, propelled by capitalist greed and unrepentant anti-black antipathy? (I regret to report that this latter narrative is being taught to young people in schools and universities across the land. And yet, the weight of the evidence overwhelmingly favors the former in my view.)
The founding of the United States of America was a world-historic event by means of which Enlightenment-era ideals about the rights and the dignity of persons, and the legitimacy of state power came to be instantiated in real institutions. True enough, the Founding entailed a compromise with slavery. And yet, now, some forty-million strong, we black Americans have become by far the richest and most powerful large population of African descent on this planet. The question, then, is this: are we blacks going to look through the dark lens of the United States as a racist, genocidal, white supremacist, illegitimate force? Or are we to see our nation for what it has become over the course of these last three centuries: the greatest force for human liberty in world history? I wish, fervently, to urge the latter course. As the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. well understood, that is the surest pathway for us to economic and political equality.
The Civil War left 600,000 dead in a country of thirty million. The consequence of that war, together with the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the Constitution that were enacted just afterward, was to make the enslaved Africans and their descendants into citizens. In the fullness of time, we have become equal citizens. That should not have taken another hundred years. Neither should my ancestors have been enslaved in the first place, for that matter.
But here’s the thing: while slavery was a commonplace human practice dating back to antiquity, Emancipation—the freeing of some four million enslaved persons as the result of a mass movement for abolition—that was a new idea, a Western idea, an American idea. It was the fruit of Enlightenment philosophy and Christian charity. It was an idea brought to fruition over a century-and-a-half ago in our own United States of America, with the liberation of my enslaved ancestors. Such an achievement would not have been possible without philosophical insights and moral commitments cultivated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in the West—ideas about the essential dignity, the God-given rights, and the infinite worth of all human persons.
That is, America’s Founding at the end of the eighteenth century brought something new into the world. Slavery was a holocaust out of which emerged an accomplishment that advanced the morality and the dignity of humankind—namely, Emancipation. The ultimate incorporation of African-descended people fully into the American body politic has been a monumental and an unprecedented achievement for human freedom. To whom much has been given, of him much shall be required.
And here's my question for our class today: Do you agree or disagree with the foregoing observations of Horowitz (and Loury!)? Is such a take on the history of enslavement in America factually accurate? Is the act of expressing it today morally reprehensible? Why or why not?
Glenn: You have enlightened me and challenged me with every post and I have been privileged to support you for years.. You are an essential voice. Please do not retire that voice . STAY!
I have looked for years to find a Black voice who who sees clearly and without (understandable but irrelevant and unproductive) resentment about truly Black and racist issues. STAY!
Your voice is important, deep, thoughtful, controversial, productive, broad, intelligent, provocative, generous and so much more vitally needed today, than any other - especially compared to your intelligent but intellectually shallower compatriot, Jon McWhorter.
STAY!
I agree almost entirely with your perspective, but as I am celebrating Passover and the freeing of the Hebrew slaves, I do think that the Jewish story played some role in thinking about emancipation. Certainly, the Reverend Martin Luther King and many of the nation's founders were influenced by this biblical story. See the work of Rabbi Meir Soleveichik, for example, on the influence on the founders https://meirsoloveichik.com/speeches-conversations/promised-lands-the-torah-and-the-american-founding/ and his course. Be well, Glenn.