The "R" Word

Brown's Slavery and Justice Committee Considers Reparations in its Final Semester

BY DANA GOLDSTEIN

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Illustration by Hilary Falb
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Since the spring of 2004, the Brown University Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice has succeeded where most academic ventures resolutely fail: it has attracted passionate interest from the world outside the ivy-covered walls.

Brown President Ruth Simmons inaugurated the Steering Committee, a group of faculty members and students, in the fall of 2003, charging it with the task of studying the University's historical relationship to the slave trade and, more controversially, recommending how Brown might appropriately respond to that history today. But even as the national media, Rhode Island residents, and Brown alumni jumped at the opportunity to take part in a public conversation about race, class, and responsibility in American history, the majority of current students and faculty members seemed to respond with a collective shrug, choosing not to attend Committee events.

This semester, all that may change. Having begun by focusing on the 18th century triangle trade and how other nations have dealt with the aftermath of traumas such as the Holocaust and apartheid, the Committee's public events will now address the politically volatile question of reparations for American slavery. The Committee's work will conclude by early spring, when it publishes its final report recounting the history of Brown's ties to slavery and recommending concrete steps the University should take to account for its past.

"Since 2003, we've been setting the groundwork to have this conversation on reparations," says committee chairman James Campbell, a white professor of Africana Studies. "The problem was that people wanted to race to it at the outset."

Off To The Races

The Committee first drew the national media to Brown's campus in March of 2004, after a New York Times article left many—including panicked, pre-1960s-era alumni—with the impression that Simmons, the great-great-granddaughter of slaves, planned for the University to pay direct monetary reparations to descendents of slaves. In the wake of the Times article, which Committee members felt distorted the academic nature of their work, alumni expressed outrage, reparations advocates lauded Brown as a leader, and skeptics charged the University with looking out for its financial interests in a legal climate that appeared— at least fleetingly—to be hospitable to reparations claims from descendents of slaves. In April 2004, Simmons responded in a Boston Globe editorial, writing, "The Committee's work is not about whether or how we should pay reparations. That was never the intent nor will the payment of reparations be the outcome."

In the year-and-a-half since, hundreds of Rhode Islanders have attended Committee lectures exploring the state's and University's historical relationship with the slave trade. A potentially greater number will see an affiliated museum exhibition currently at the Rhode Island Historical Society, which will travel to a dozen libraries across the state over the next year. Every high school history classroom in Rhode Island has received lesson plans on New England's ties to slavery, prepared by undergraduates who participated in a Group Independent Study Project affiliated with the Committee, under Campbell's guidance.

And media interest in the Committee continues: Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Frances Fitzgerald published a September 5 feature story for the New Yorker focusing on the Brown family's complicated relationship with the institution of slavery. The article explains that the University is named after Nicholas Brown, who in 1804 donated $5,000 for construction projects to what was then called Rhode Island College. University Hall and, most likely, other buildings on Brown's campus, were built partly with slave labor. The entire Brown family had deep financial links to the University. Nicholas's brother, John, was a notorious slave trader, while another brother, Moses, became a Quaker abolitionist.

What that all means for Brown today is an open question, but one that Committee members promise to address in their final report. They are mum, though, on what specific recommendations for action they are likely to make. "It's a self-study, but the audience for the report in many ways is other colleges with these complex pasts," says Arlene Keizer, an English professor and Committee member who is part of a team of four faculty members drafting the report. "There have always been polarizing discussions about reparations. We're trying to get people to think again about how to address this history."

Fitzgerald's article presented a mostly positive view of Brown's attempt to grapple with the history of one of its founding families; she portrayed the Committee as a unique and almost ideal academic exercise in exploring the past and opening up public discourse in the present. What the article did not do is report from any of the Committee's public events, which often reveal the tense politics underlying the ideal of rational, academic discourse.

On The Ground With Slavery And Justice

Tuesday, October 18, 7:30 pm: A conservative, black, anti-reparations academic has come to Brown, and a hundred people have turned out to hear him speak. Over half of them are students. It's the biggest student turnout out at a Committee event since the spring of 2004, when the spectacle of reporters, photographers, and cameramen descending on campus lured students to the Committee's first public events.

James McWhorter—a former University of California at Berkeley linguistics professor who left academia for a fellowship at the conservative Manhattan Institute—blames African American poverty today on 1966 welfare reforms, which were crafted by white, Columbia University economists who McWhorter says wanted to bankrupt the federal government in order to hasten the development of a socialist state. Because of liberal welfare policies active from 1966 until the reforms of 1996, reparations for slavery is a bad idea, McWhorter argues, since today's black poverty cannot be directly linked to African Americans' history of enslavement. Inner-city poverty is an outcome of low incentives to find employment, he says.

Throughout the question-and-answer session following the lecture, the mostly white audience is polite, seemingly charmed by McWhorter's jokes and authoritative speaking style, if not completely convinced by his rhetoric. But just as the event seems to wind down, a young woman in the front row raises her hand to speak. Instead of addressing a question to McWhorter, she turns around in her seat to face the audience.

"The fact that there hasn't been a debate in this room means we should have been given more than a minute to speak," she says, gesturing in pointing movements with her right hand. "When you hear somebody blame poverty on a bunch of economists at Columbia, your ears need to perk up. What about the 1980s? What about Reagan? What about the deindustrialization of our cities?"

There's an awkward silence, and then a smattering of applause. McWhorter smiles tersely and responds by saying that yes, he does indeed blame ghetto conditions on those Columbia economists and that no, the loss the factory jobs did not cause unemployment and poverty. Welfare did.

Public Intellectualism?

McWhorter's argument is not the kind of thing Brown students are used to hearing from a predominantly liberal faculty. Indeed, the novelty and drama of immersing a conservative into the University's usually one-dimensional political climate might have been what drew crowds to the event. Future speakers, however, are predominantly left-of-center, including Congressman John Conyers (D-Mich.), the author of HR40, the so-called "Reparations Bill," and William "Sandy" Darity, a University of North Carolina economist whose work focuses on economic stratification as correlated with race, class, and ethnicity.

But despite the appeal of speakers specializing in contemporary questions of race and class, events continue to fit the Committee's established template: an expert stands behind a podium, gives a lecture, and takes questions. That format, in addition to the Committee's poor efforts at publicity, have contributed to keeping students away from events and limiting the range of views Committee members consider while drafting their report, some undergraduates involved with the Committee say.

"The speakers we brought were great and had a range of opinions, but they didn't come from a range of walks of life. Almost all of them had Ph.Ds," says Seth Magaziner B'06, one of two undergraduate Committee members.

Indeed, at the semester's first Committee event on September 30, Professor Lisa Woolfork of the University of Virginia made a powerful argument for including non-academics in debates about slavery's aftermath in contemporary America. In an engaging lecture and slideshow presentation focusing on slavery "reenactment" performances throughout the country, Woolfork noted the "vernacular intellectualism" occurring around the issues of slavery and historical memory. "People from outside the academy aren't waiting for invitations to talk about these things," she said.

Still, there's been a consensus among the professors on the Committee that other academics were the most appropriate and qualified participants to speak at Committee events, Magaziner says.

Campbell doesn't dispute that. He's excited about a possible scholarly anthology compiling writing of the over 50 speakers the Committee has invited to Brown since 2004. "I believe ideas matter," Campbell says, expressing his reluctance to give airtime to politically motivated "pundits." As a historian, Campbell is deeply committed to tying contemporary debates to historical reality. He names Hurricane Katrina as an example of an event that has pushed America's racial history to the forefront of public consciousness. "It has revealed an unacknowledged historical legacy that all Americans now are compelled to understand and explain," he says.

But in the absence of natural disasters, the most accessible interpretations of slavery's legacy often enter public discourse through popular forms such as music, literature, movies, and art: think of Toni Morrison's Beloved, Spike Lee's Bamboozled, hip hop music, or even the work of Brown alumni damali ayo '94, who as a celebrated performance artist panhandled for reparations on the streets of Seattle and created the website www.rent-a-negro.com. Nevertheless, musicians, artists, and novelists (with the exception of Brown Professor John Edgar Wideman) were absent from the Committee's lists of experts.

Will the broader public—and Brown's student body—take the time to parse the Committee's final report? Magaziner is optimistic. "I think when the report comes out there will be another surge of media attention, as big as the first one or bigger" he says. But it's not the history of the University or even the Committee's recommendations on how to respond to it that will be controversial, Magaziner predicts. Rather, he believes people will debate the very idea that the history of slavery requires attention and action in 2005. The larger question they should ask, he says, is, "Can responsibility be handed down through the generations?"

DANA GOLDSTEIN B'06 fought aboard the Battleship Potemkin.

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