At the dawn of the twenty-first century African Americans lag the American mainstream in virtually every area of statistical measure. Neither blacks nor whites know accurately why. (Page 7)

Racism was literally postulated as a belief system to justify slavery, which in turn deconstructed families, languages, cultures, and the general social health of the black race, while spawning a vast new impoverished class of people roughly coterminous with the entire community of blacks in America. (Page 74.)

On a mother living in poverty

Anna was very tired. Her weainess was tinged in no small measure with guilt. She wanted her children, above all, to get an “education,” though for her the word was little more than a mantra. Her supervisor was unsympathetic to her appeals for time off to visit her children’s schools for meetings with their teachers. She so seldom got to go that she felt ill at ease with the school officials on the few occasions she encountered them.

The simple truth was that she had no idea what was going on in her children’s schools (and if one could believe Jonathan Kozol, author of Death at an Early Age and Savage Inequalities, very little was). She was just so tired. She thought for a moment that she should check to see if the children had clean clothes for school before dozing off. But she could not pull herself back from the edge of sleep.

Anna did not own a car. She did not own a clothes washer or a dryer or a vacuum cleaner or a dishwasher. The only “luxuries,” to be found in her small apartment were the telephone in the living room, a clock-radio in her bedroom, and a small black-and-white television with a bent clothes hanger for an antenna. Her lack of belongings rendered her life not so much unpleasant—well, that too—but unmanageable to an extent that drove her to the verge of panic. Every necessary ordinary little task required a trip. A trip required a bus. A bus took time. Time she didn’t have. Her building had no washing machines, so she had to take a bus to the Laundromat. This chore alone claimed a large part of her Saturdays. Grocery shopping was much the same, except that she could not transport five to seven bags of groceries on a bus. She had to take a taxi home which she could not afford. The shopping routinely claimed the balance of her Saturdays. Even the small task of getting enough exact change in dollars and coins on Sundays for a week’s worth of bus fares and school lunches seemed a large matter when added to a to-do list already too long. Or getting to the check-cashing store (with its exorbitant service charges) on payday Fridays before closing time. Or buying clothing at discount stores. Indeed, she saw this job as particularly thankless. Her children wanted designer clothes they had seen advertised on television. Robert had once become disagreeable in a store where she had refused to buy him a pair of basketball shoes that would have cost her a week’s salary. In that same store, she had seen another spent mother yell at her four-year-old son and raise her hand as if to strike the boy. Anna did not approve, but she understood as others may not have.

My daughter Khalea, who began attending Beauvoir, a private school in Washington, D.C., at age four, was reading somewhere above the sixth-grade level when she was in th third grade. (The reading proficiency tests administered to her age group measure only to the sixth grade.) On national standardized tests, she has scored in every tested area in the ninety-ninth percentile. I tell this not to brag, thoug I am vastly proud, but to make a point.

The state of Maryland has twenty-four counties. Every year the state administers to its public school students reading, writing, language usage, math, science, and social studies tests. Blacks in Maryland are concentrated in Prince Georges County and the City of Baltimore. In 1998, these two counties placed twenty-third and twenty-fourth in the test score standings.

These two predominately black counties did not score behind the predominately white counties because they are black any more than Khalea scored ahead of whites because she is black. Blacks scored behind in the two counties because of slavery’s lasting legacy to them. Khalea scored ahead of the vast majority of whites because of the stimulating intellectual environment of her home generally and, more specifically, because her mother taught her the rudiments of reading before she had set foot in kindergarten. Khalea is an exception, and there are perhaps tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of blacks like her across the country. In broad terms, however, given the history of America’s treatment of blacks, it is unsurprising that there are not more.

Race is and is not the problem. Certainly racism caused the gap we see now. The discriminatory attitudes spawned to justify slavery ultimately guaranteed that, even after emancipation, blacks would be concentrated at the bottom of American society indefinately. Blacks like Anna are not at the bottom because they are black individually but rather because of what they and their forebears have collectively had to endure because they were black. This important distinction, however, appears lost on many contemporary commentators who, being content to cite black failure without examining the causes, do more harm than good.

It would be fair to compare my daughter Khalea to the highest achievers in schools like hers where the annual tuition is $15,000 and virtually every parent has both an advanced college degree and the luxury of spending large blocks of time in the school, days or evenings[.][. . .] She has competed there very favorably. But her success is explained by her socioeconomic profile, not by her race.

Give a black or white child the tools (nurture, nutrition, material necessities, a home/school milieu of intellectual stimulation, high expectation, pride of self) that a child needs to learn and the child will learn. Race, at least in this regard, is irrelevant.

It would not be fair, then, to compare Khalea and those who attend her school to Sarah. Sarah was failing. She was failing when she should not have been. Again, race is not directly relevant. Sarah was not failing because she was black. She was failing for the same reasons that Appalachian white children fail. Grinding, disabling poverty. Unfortunately, blacks are heavily overrepresented among the ranks of America's desperately poor. Owing to race and only to race, it was American slavery that created this bottom-rung disproportion, consigning en masse a whole people to unending penury and social debilitation.

On Racism, Prejudice, Ethnic slurs

I go to some length here embroidering on racism expressed against Native Americans for a reason. As inclined as blacks understandably are by painful experience to believe the contrary, racism is not black-specific. It is like the Hydra, the lethal many-headed mythological snake whose heads regenerated as fast as they were severed. Racism is a social disease that exemptes no race from either of its two rosters: victims and victimizers.

[. . .] A slur against any group by a member of another cannot go unremarked if our society is to have any long-term future.

And then, of course, for African Americans there is a particular relevance in all this. While African Americans have won from America scarcely a fraction of their due, they have at least achievd a measure of recognition as victims of racism. Native Americans have yet to become so broadly noticed as contemporary victims, apparently not even by many African Americans.

On black behavior, racism, and cause and effect

In response to my memoir, I received what amounts to the same letter from twenty or so white Americans—self-described earnest liberals from whom blacks had commanded attention by assaulting them. One such victim wrote:

On equality, or something

There will always be differences in the abilities and achievements of individuals, but achivement differences that correlate with race must never be tolerated. That gap must be fully closed.

But how many share this objective? Clearly not everyone. Clearly not most. I would argue: not even most blacks. The endless gauntlet exacts its price in lowered expectation.

To do what is necessary, of course, will require a virtual Marshall Plan of federal resources, far in excess of anything contemplated between the nearly touching poles of conventional palliatives.

On what renaissance blacks must do

They must find our voice and implacably demand our whole due. They must propagate an intellectual storm of self-discovery among blacks tantamount to a secular religion. They must make us whole again where our secrets fester, so as not to squander our due. They must bring us to the table, confident, self-knowing, imbued with all the requisite values, equal in every measure save the material. For these are the things only we can do for ourselves. Until we do, no Marshall plan for our material renovation can work. Until we do, no call for a broad American racial policy reconsideration will be heeded. (Page 108)

Later, in the 1960s and early 1970s [. . .] black elites had chosen to see integration as a panacea for virtually all of our problems. Those who tried to warn that there could be more had little chance of being listened to. [. . .]

Looking back on it, the elites were right, but only partially so. The voices of dissent were every bit as right, but woefully bereft of tools. (Page 109.)

Robinson gives his impressions of Cuba, including that Castro is trying to deal with race and doing as well as can be expected. (Chapter 6.)

On democracy

The growing problem of student school-building killings cuts directly to the heart of white middle-class suburban America. But to it, the president responds with an abject absence of initiative, citing the forces arrayed against him and us. The gun lobby. Organized interests. Money.

Democracy neutered. Checkmate.

Now, it would seem to go without saying that, if our political leaders show little inclination or capacity to solve a problem that the majority of white Americans want desperately to solve, one cannot realistically be very optimistic about the chances that the same leaders would confront forcefully racial problems they have not yet even discomforted themselves to see.

[. . .]

Without fundamental campaign finance reform, almost no social restructuring is possible in our country on virtually any issue of consequence, from gun control to health care. Politicians will no more act against the interests of their funders than I will act against the interests of mine. It is human nature. Self-preservation comes first of all, save a handful of true democrats like Senator Russel Feingold who risked his political career by refusing PAC money for his 1998 reelection bid.

(Pages 172-173.)

On solving our racial problems

Our whole society must first be brought to a consensus that it wants to close the socioeconomic gap between the races. It must accept that the gap derives from the social depredations of slavery. Once and for all, America must face its past, open itself to a fair telling of all of its peoples’ histories, and accept full responsibility for the hardships it has occasioned for so many. It must come to grips with the increasingly indisputable reality that it is not a white nation. Therefore it must dramatically reconfigure its symbolized picture of itself, to itself. Its national parks, museums, monuments, statues, artworks must be recast in a way to include all Americans—Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, African Americans as well as European Americans. White people do not own the idea of America, and should they continue to deny others a place in the idea’s iconograph, those others, who fifty years from now will form the majority of America’s citizens, will be inspired to punish them for it. (Pages 173-174.)

----Thoughts---- Randall here says that the races are equal so we must close the gap. Others claim the races are not equal. I say we give equal opportunity so we can see-- but remember how strict the meaning of equal opportunity is. As for that threatening last part, unfortunately the problem of history is a minority imposing its way on the majority. And I don't know that our oppressed minorities will be spiteful when they COLLECTIVELY form the majority.

On memory and social progress

[. . .] memory was an essential ingredient for social progress and blacks had none. Only memory would tip them off that their poverty was not fixed in nature as a condition that was meant to be. Not what had always been. Not normal. (Page 175.)

The global black community badly needs implacable black voices for its interests and causes whether they are validated by American Establishment institutions or not. We as a community must be centered enough, self-confident enough to prepare our own agendas of policy concerns and then be prepared to advocate tirelessly for those above all others, no matter where the American Establishment sun is shining. For there is nothing in the entire history of American public and private sector behavior toward Africa, the Caribbean, or black America to encourage a conviction that the United States has ever had the black world's interests at heart. Our community never gets more from the U.S. than it is willing to fight for. Often less. Never more. What we fight for must be decided by us and only us. (Pages 190-191)

Those—nations, individuals, whites as a racial entity—who enjoy the privileges of disproportionate power and wealth will seldom voluntarily do more than render to the disadvantaged an appearance of helpfulness. It is not in their interests to school the disadvantaged in the origins of their dilemma. Nor would they ever be likely to take unforced measures to level the playing field, if you'll forgive the tired metaphor. Never, in the march of human relations, has power behaved thus. Intrinsic to advantage is the drive to maintain itself. Aah, the advantaged. Careful, now, not to deify them. For such undeserved admiration, in and of itself, is for the disadvantaged a debilitating condition. (Page 198.)

Clearly, how blacks respond to the challenge surrounding the simple demand for restitution will say a lot more about us and do a lot more for us than the demand itself would suggest. We would show ourselves to be responding as any normal people would to victimization were we to assert collectively in our demands for restitution that, for 246 years and with the complicity of the United States government, hundreds of millions of black people endured unimaginable cruelties—kidnapping, sale as livestock, deaths in the millions during terror-filled sea voyage, backbreaking toil, beatings, rapes, castrations, maimings, murders. We would begin a healing of our psyches were the most public case made that whole peoples lost religions, languages, customs, histories, cultures, children, mothers, fathers. It would make us more forgiving of ourselves, more self-approving, more self-understanding to see, really see, that on three continents and a string of islands, survivors had little choice but to piece together whole new cultures from the rubble shards of what theirs had once been. And they were never made whole. And never compensated. Not one red cent. (Page 208)

(You can see here what worries people who think that blacks have an inferior 'culture.')

The black male is far more likely than his white counterpart to be in prison, to be murdered, to have no job, to fail in school, to become seriously ill. His life will be shorter by seven years, his chances of finishing high school smaller—74 percent as opposed to 86 percent for his white counterpart. Exacerbating an already crushing legacy of slavery-based social disabilities, he faces fresh discrimination daily in modern America. In the courts of ten states and the District of Columbia, he is ten times more likely to be imprisoned than his white male counterpart for the same offense. If convicted on a drug charge, he will likely serve a year more in prison than his white male counterpart will for the same charge. While he and his fellow black males constitute 15 percent of the nation’s drug users, they make up 33 percent of those arrested for drug use and 57% of those convicted. And then they die sooner, and at higher rates of chronic illnesses like aids, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, stroke, and Father’s killer, heart disease.

Saddest of all, they have no clear understanding of why such debilitating fates have befallen them. There were no clues in their public school education. No guideposts in the popular culture. Theirs was the “now” culture. They felt no impulse to look behind for causes.

(Page 214.)

Well before the birth of our country, Europe and the eventual United States perpetrated a heinous wrong against the peoples of Africa—and sustained and benefited from the wron for centuries. Europe followed the grab of Africa’s people with the rape, through colonial occupation, of Africa’s material resources. America followed slavery with more than a hundred combined years of legal racial segregation and legal racial discrimination of one variety or another. In 1965, after nearly 350 years of legal racial suppression, the United States enacted the Voting Rights Act and, virtually simutaneously, began to walk away from the social wreckage that centuries of white hegemony had wrought. The country then began to rub itself with the memory-emptying salve of contemporaneousness. (If the wrong did not just occur, it did not occur at all in a way that would render the living responsible.)

But when the black living suffer real and current consequences as a result of wrongs committed by a younger America, then contemporary America must be caused to shoulder responsibility for those wrongs until such wrongs have been adequately compensated and righted.

(Page 230.)

American capitalism, which starts each child where its parents left off is not a fair system. This is particularly the case for African Americans, whose general economic starting poins have been rearmost in our society because of slavery and its long racialist aftermath. (Page 231.)

On the private side, a study funded by the trust would be undertaken to determine the extent to which American and foreign companies, or the existing successors to such companies, or individuals, families, and public institutions, were unjustly enriched by the uncompensated labor of slavery or by the de jure racial discrimination that succeeded slavery. [. . .]

Proceeds of a recovery from private interests on behalf of the descendants of black American slaves would go into the trust fund.

(Page 245.)

The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks

Randall Robinson