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THE HYDRA OF HOROWITZIAN HISTORY

The Mobilization of Scholarship against Black Reparations

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2008

Paul Anthony Dottin
Paul Anthony Dottin*
Affiliation:
Culture/Language/Theory Program, Hunan Institute of Science and Technology
*
Paul Anthony Dottin, Director of the Culture/Language/Theory Program, Hunan Institute of Science and Technology, Hunan, Yueyang 414006, China. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

Whether to provide reparations to African Americans for the atrocities of slavery and segregation is arguably the most controversial public matter concerning race in the United States today. This debate, a clash over the economics and ethics of equality, is nothing less than a struggle over the future of racial identity, race relations, and racial progress in the current post–civil rights movement era.

With the stakes for African Americans so high, and the prospects for affirmative action dim, public intellectuals have weighed in heavily on each side of the issue. Randall Robinson—author of the best-known work advocating for reparations, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (2000)—and David Horowitz—the reparationist movement's most reviled nemesis and author of Uncivil Wars: The Controversy over Reparations for Slavery (2002)—have become the alpha and omega of almost any deliberation on Black reparations.

Not surprisingly, rancorous rhetoric has often overshadowed rigorous research on the veracity of antireparations and proreparations claims. This essay aims to correct this problem with an extensive analysis of David Horowitz's (2002) arguments, providing a synthesis of data, concepts, theories, and methodologies from the disciplines of sociology, history, economics, and anthropology. This essay finds that Horowitz's use of academic scholarship to discredit African American reparations fails to meet the “scientific” standards he demands of his opponents.

Keywords

ReparationsSlaveryRacial InequalityComparative Ethnic StudiesSocial Science Theory/MethodologyHistoriographyPublic Intellectualism
Type
STATE OF THE DISCOURSE
Information
Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , Spring 2008 , pp. 161 - 198
Copyright
Copyright © W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research 2008

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