The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery - 9781893554443

The idea that taxpayers should pay reparations to African-Americans for the damages of slavery and segregation has won the backing of important black politicians like Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), distinguished black intellectuals like Henry Louis Gates, and activists like Randall Robinson, who led the successful boycott movement against South Africa a decade ago. Reparations played a central role in the fractious United Nations Conference on Racism in the fall of 2001.
In Uncivil Wars, David Horowitz carefully analyzes the case for reparations for slavery and concludes that it is "morally questionable and racially incendiary." He notes that only a tiny minority of Americans ever owned slaves and that most Americans living today (white and otherwise) are descended from post-Civil War immigrants who have no lineal connection to slavery at all. More intriguingly, he also points out that the GNP of black America is so large that it makes the African-American community the tenth most prosperous "nation" in the world. "Since American blacks on average enjoy per capita incomes 20 to 50 times those of blacks living in the African nations from which their ancestors were seized," he writes, "should the descendants of slaves pay themselves for benefiting from the fruits of their ancestors' servitude?" In answering this and other questions, Horowitz looks deeply into the question of race and the American enterprise and provides a stirring defense of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and other of our national heroes whom the partisans of reparations demean as mere slave-masters and hypocrites.