December 31, 2000
Political Provocateur: Randall Robinson on Cuba, black greatness and unpaid bills.
Interview by cheo tyehimba
The world itself is stolen goods. All property is theft, and those who have stolen most of it make the laws for the rest of us. - John Updike, Brazil
In this column of bluespeople, we talk with Randall Robinson, the founder and president of TransAfrica, the 22-year old human rights and social change organization. Robinson, 61, is probably best known for his early work to dismantle apartheid in South Africa. During the apartheid era, Robinson lobbied both houses of congress on anti-apartheid issues, directed massive protests in front of the South African Embassy (once for more than 400 days), and helped forge U.S. economic sanctions against South Africa. That country is now free of apartheid in large measure because of Robinson's efforts. He is also known for his 1994 27-day hunger strike in protest of U.S. foreign policy in Haiti, resulting in the return of democratically-elected president Jean Bertrand Aristide.
In 1998, Robinson's autobiography, Defending the Spirit: A Black Life in America, detailed his early experience as a Ford Foundation Fellow living in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania and his unparalleled political career as an advocate for human rights. A longtime civil rights activist, Robinson's latest book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (Dutton, 2000), examines the consequences of when a people's contribution to America is left unpaid.
The book makes a very cogent argument for pragmatic economic equity and reveals the glaring inequities like the fact that Brown University, founded by the Brown brothers, was funded by slave ship- building industry. The book is filled with many other little-known facts of inequity for which a true debt is owed. Robinson's most integral argument here is not whether or not we can, or will win reparations but the psychological coats we pay if we don't fight for them. He poses his argument in the most critical of human questions: Why do human beings have issues about asking, better yet, demanding to be compensated, both psychically, emotionally and materially? As any first-year psychology student learns, issues of self-worth are endemic to all human beings. Robinson, basic argument is that, protracted over centuries of slavery, black enthusiasm for economic retribution has waned and we've paid the costs.
Tyehimba: You've played many roles: husband, father, attorney, activist. But your leadership in the arena of human rights is how you are most widely known. Who have been your role models and what has been your motivation?
Robinson: My first role models were my parents. I've always believed it is wise to admire people you know. But there are other brave, principled people I admire like Paul Robeson and W.E.B. DuBois. Global interests have always motivated me. Early on, I was somewhat stunned to learn how deeply the U.S. was involved on the wrong side of these global social justice issues. I have always believed that we are indissolubly bound with Africa and the Caribbean, that there is no separate freedom for us, that we will pursue it and arrive at it together because we are very much connected to each other.
Tyehimba: Recently, several German companies paid 1.7 billion dollars in reparations to Jewish survivors of the Nazi holocaust who were forced into slave labor during the Nazi era. Are reparations for people of African descent a practical possibility?
Robinson: Absolutely but not checks to individuals. [It should be] based on need and economic empowerment, putting back the billions of dollars that were taken out. Even following slavery, there were restrictions built into mortgages that the federal government subsidized-whites built paper assets with home equity that blacks weren't allowed to build. We lost $80 billion a generation because of that. The government, because of its involvement, has a responsibility and blacks have to demand it This is not about affirmative action, we're talking about what we're owed.
Tyehimba: It is interesting that capitalism, being the basis of slavery in this country, never seems to get any critical analysis from black leaders these days. If it is discussed, folks tend to be marginalized and denied opportunities much in the same way that Paul Robeson and Kwame N'Krumah were. Will the burgeoning black economic clout net a kind of new black power?
Robinson: I don't think you want to overstate the success of that expanding black middle-class and that narrow layer of wealth, because at the bottom there is a myriad of exponentially-expanding black under-class and unless we have the kind of interventions I think are necessary, that will continue to worsen. Here's the question: How can we make blacks and whites in America equal economically? Until we come to grips with America's past and what slavery guaranteed, we're going to be stuck with this gap locked open. America continues to want to deny its past. This country was a slave nation and those citizens here [now] who are black and poorer are poorer because of that. But this country doesn't want to talk about it.
Tyehimba: Can you offer any practical solutions?
Robinson: First, if blacks have any chance of success here, we must make it clear to America that we will not allow ourselves to be ignored. I [should] launch what I will call, a Year of Black Presence. Every black church, organization, and institution would commit to choose one day of the 130-odd days that the Congress is in session and bring on that day one thousand African Americans to walk the halls of congress in support of compensation measures designed to close the econmonic and psychic gap between blacks and whites in America. In this way, for one year, Congress would never stop seeing our faces, hearing our demands. Also, it has been proposed by Robert Westley, in his book "Many Billions Gone," that a private trust be established for the benefit of all African Americans. The trust would be funded out of the general revenues of the U.S. to support programs designed to accomplish "the educational and ecomonic empowerment of the trust beneficiaries (African Americans) to be determined on the basis of need."
Tyehimba: In 1995, the government of South Africa took a bold step toward healing the pain of apartheid by forming theTruth and Reconciliation Commission. Could something like that work in America?
Robinson: I think it was a great idea. Nations can't heal unless they have a process of honesty. We can never have racial reconciliation until we're prepared to talk openly about slavery, its costs, and what's required to compensate for its continuing damage to such a large section of the American population.
Copyright © 2000 Cheo Taylor Tyehimba. All Rights Reserved.
[NOTE: This article is not to be reproduced, forwarded, or distributed in any form without *explicit* permission from the author.]
Posted at December 31, 2000 10:23 AM