Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations.

edited by Raymond A. Winbush Amistad Press, January 2003 $24.95, ISBN 0-060-08310-7

Not since the promise of "40 acres and a mule" has there been such heated debate about reparations for the transatlantic slave trade. To be sure, groups many considered "fringe" or "extremist" like the National Black United Front (NBUF) and the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA), have long waged this campaign on the national and international stage, even when the traditional civil rights establishment questioned their judgment. Today, those who have marched as singular drum majors are now leading the charge as reparations makes headlines stateside and abroad.

Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations, a collection that comes out of the historic 2001 UN Conference on World Racism held in Durban, South Africa, seeks to introduce the key players and ideas in this burgeoning social movement and create a global dialogue about the impact of slavery and colonialism on African descended peoples.

Reparations for government-sanctioned crimes against humanity--such as the displacement of Native Americans, the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, the Jewish Holocaust--are not only commonplace but also firmly rooted in international law. It is the "entrenchment of white supremacy in world politics," writes editor Raymond A. Winbush, which renders this basic legal and moral tenet somehow controversial when applied to the transatlantic slave trade.

With essays by proponents, such as Congressman John Conyers, Temple University professor Molefi Asante, activist Adjoa Aiyetoro, educator Yaa Asantewa Nzingha, antiracist activist and writer Tim Wise, and a Harper's roundtable discussion with lawyers Charles Ogletree and Johnnie Cochran, Should America Pay? details the movement to redress this indisputable crime against humanity, from the 1865 "forty acres and a mule" bill to the present-day lawsuits pending against corporations and governments who benefited from slavery.

Winbush, who also directs Fisk University's Race Relations Institute, aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the reparations debate, pro and con. But Should America Pay? has decided that America should pay. For instance, the one-note presentation of dissenting voices like conservative pundits Armstrong Williams, John McWhorter and Shelby Steele, who all posit some version of the argument that reparations will promote a perennial sense of black victimhood, makes their inclusion feel a bit tokenized. And it is Vanity Fair columnist Christopher Hitchen's rebuttal to David Horowitz's now-infamous racist ad against reparations, or journalist Molly Secour's debunking point-by-point white opposition ("My family didn't own slaves"; "I'm not racist"; "Slavery is over!") that's privileged in this volume.

But whatever your opinions on the issue, Should America Pay? is not only essential reading, it is an insightful study of how grassroots groups can move a so-called fringe agenda into a global social movement. After reading Should America Pay? it becomes clear why the network of scholars, lawyers, activists and legislators who are laying the conceptual framework for this movement, a network very similar to the one that provided the legal theory that propelled the Civil Rights Movement, see reparations as the human rights issue of the 21st century.

--Angela Ards is a freelance writer and scholar at Princeton University.