The Return of Reparations

President Ruth Simmons has exhumed the most divisive subject in the recent history of Brown: slavery reparations. The new committee on “slavery and justice” is in a sense a good-faith attempt to engage in the dialogue that never happened in the spring of 2001 when conservative theorist David Horowitz published an antireparations ad in the Brown Daily Herald. A coalition of second-generation hippies and “victimized” minority students reacted by seizing the entire press run of the Herald. Thus, what began as a dialogue imploded into a post-modern debate about debate.

Yet there is nothing in the composition of the University Steering Committee on slavery and Justice, the public statements of President Simmons, or the inaugural event-”Unearthing the Past”-to suggest that this will actually be a dialogue. The chair of the committee, Professor James Campbell, was also the panelist on the faculty forum convened in the wake of the mass-theft of the Herald who denounced one of the editors as a “cynical opportunist.” Professor Evelyn Hu-DeHart is the Director for the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. And one of the students on the committee is even the leader of Brown’s Young Communist League.

President Simmons in her comments to the press has amplified the ambiguities swirling around the.controversial committee. In an interview with the New York Times, President Simmons declared that “[iJf the committee comes back and says, ‘Oh it’s been lovely and we’ve leamed a lot,’ but there’s nothing in particular that they think Brown can do or should do, I will be vety disappointed.” There is no possible interpretation of that statement that is not favorable to some version of reparations.

Professor Campbell insisted in his opening lecture for the “Unearthing the Past” symposium that the committee will not be confined to the “narrow terrain of the question of monetary reparations.” But what will happen when it does cross that “narrow terrain”? As one angry alum observed at the forum, it seems that President Simmons has issued “marching orders” to the committee.

The inherent radicalism of reparations for slavery cannot be ignored. Two factors make this form of reparations inevitably race-based. First, since slavery ended more than a century ago, reparations would be indirect. Second, and more importantly, any socio-economic disadvantages that have persisted as a consequence of slavery theoretically have been ameliorated through welfare programs and affirmative action. The possibility of reparations is a public-relations ticking time bomb. With the commencement of a capital campaign to finance the Initiative for Academic Enrichment, now is not the time to be flirting with the fantasies of the far Left.

It is indeed ironic that this investigation of an episode more than two centuries past may overlook events that happened little more than two years ago. There is no doubt that the present cannot be understood without a sense of the past, but such a pathological obsession with the past makes the study of history an exercise in group therapy. The past should be liberating, not limiting. If this exploration into the prehistory of Brown is not to degenerate into a convention of the NAACP, President Simmons must act quickly to ensure that contrarian voices are represented on the committee and in the series of lectures, forums, and debates that are planned for the next two years.