Paying for Racism: Seattle Conference Takes Up Reparations
by Manny Frishberg
In less than six weeks the nation will decide whether America is ready to elect its first African-American president. Between now and then, some 200 to 300 Seattleites will come together to look beyond the election to explore issues of race relations that will not evaporate, regardless of how audacious Barack Obama’s hope may be.
The sixth annual Seattle Race Conference will take up the contentious issue of reparations, more than 140 years after William Tecumseh Sherman’s grants of 40 acres and a mule to newly freed slaves was revoked by Andrew Johnson. 
The topic of this year’s conference is significant because this year marks the 20th anniversary of the government’s decision to pay $20,000 to Japanese Americans who were incarcerated during WWII. That the conference is taking place in Seattle is particularly appropriate because the cause was championed for so long by the local chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League, who first proposed a monetary payment for individuals who were swept up and incarcerated under Roosevelt’s notorious 1942 Executive Order No. 9066.
L. Charles Jones, who is chiefly in charge of organizing the conference has been helping put the annual event on since its beginning. He says the idea of focusing on reparations goes back to the second year they put the conference on, when Tim Wise, who was the first year’s keynote speaker, gave him a copy of a book that had just been published that week – “Should America Pay?” – a collection of essays on the subject edited by this year’s featured speaker, Dr. Raymond Winbush, the director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University.
Reparations for the descendants of enslaved people has been debated for decades, as payback for the labor provided for free over several centuries. By some estimates, the combined debt for nearly 500 years of the capture and forced labor from Africa, colonization and discrimination towards Africans and their descendants could total close to $800 trillion, owed collectively by the United States and the major European powers. A variety of forms of compensation have been proposed — from individual monetary payments to community-based improvement schemes related to health and education. Yet the idea remains contentious and no broad consensus on how it might be implemented has emerged.
“I just feel it is something that we should really look at,” says Jones. “The issue of reparations isn’t as new as most people think it is. Not only did the Japanese receive some reparations for the things that happened to them in World War II, but in countries all over the world, there have been cries for reparations because of various racism-related issues, including the Koreans seeking reparations from the Japanese for atrocities committed during World War II as well.”
While Jones and other conference organizers point to the reparations to Japanese Americans and to the predominantly Jewish survivors of Nazi slave labor programs during World War II as examples of the reparations principle in practice, they acknowledge that the situation is not exactly parallel, since there are no surviving slaves and even the records of their descendants would be exceedingly hard to assemble.
On the other hand, Jones says, that perspective does not take into account all the lingering effects of the legacy of slavery into the current day.
“There are manifestations even today that are dealing with that are directly affected by the fact that our ancestors were enslaved,” he says. “There is some research that indicated there is some association even between gang activity and the fact that we have never grieved and recovered from the damage of the slavery. I’m told there is some research out of Atlanta that there is a particular vein of hypertension that can be directly traced back to the fact that our ancestors toiled in the hot sun.”
The conference offers a chance to continue a dialogue around reparations and open a window into one of the issues that continue to divide the nation.
John Lovchik, another organizer who has been with the conference from the beginning cites the original vision statement to explain what they hope to achieve:
“The Seattle Race Conference was born out of the vision of its organizers: to begin to create a shared understanding and language about the nature of racism, refine definitions of its modern day forms and identify the tools that can be used to end it. Using this as a foundation, the objective was to cultivate a ‘movement’ for racial justice in Seattle that includes components of sustainable action.”
Lovchik says one of the significant aspects of the conference is that, while it continues to attract significant numbers of Euro-American participants, it is led and directed by the communities of color.
“Any meaningful effort to address racism must have at its core the leadership and guidance of people of color,” he says. “As a white man, I could ignore the problem of racism if I chose to do so, and I have in the past. Unless we white people challenge ourselves to be a part of the solution, we effectively support the continuation of racism. It’s uncomfortable for white people to deal with racism in a deep and meaningful way.
“Racism is so deeply ingrained in our country and in our institutions that people of color, who have to deal with it on a daily basis, have a much greater awareness of the nature of the problem than people of European descent who rarely have to think about racism,” he adds. “The Seattle Race Conference is a means to challenge white people to examine the ways that racism exists, to recognize our role in perpetuating racism, and to find ways that we can take constructive action to help eliminate racism.”
This year’s conference, subtitled “Movements for Reparations: Restoring Racial Justice, Building Unity, and Healing Our Diverse Communities,” will be held in the Northwest Rooms at Seattle Center from 8 a.m-4 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 11. Along with the keynote address by Dr. Winbush and the afternoon workshops, it includes the featured American History exhibit, “The “Unspoken Truths,” chronicling the rich history of Africans in Africa prior to chattel slavery, the experience and the impact of chattel slavery, Jim Crow Era, and the contributions African Americans have had on scientific, cultural and technological innovations in the U.S.
Tags: Manny Frishberg, Ray Winbush, reparations, Seattle Race Conference
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