The idea that the United States should pay reparations to African Americans, which for many years was considered extremist, has suddenly gone mainstream. A host of Democratic Presidential candidates and even Republican commentator David Brooks are now advocating for it.

The fact that a national discussion on reparations is now taking place is itself interesting. For two centuries, African American organizations or, in the past 25 years, a few Black members of Congress have issued calls for reparations without sparking much notice outside the black community. Now, HR 40 (as the bill to study reparations is called) has 35 co-sponsors. It has become a requirement for Democratic Presidential candidates to stake out a position on this issue. There can be little doubt that the reason for this is the growing recognition of societal racism by a majority of Americans, as well as the growing influence of progressives within the Democratic Party.

Those who support reparations have made a compelling case about the history of state-sponsored and private racism in the United States. The role of enslaved people in the creation of the national wealth is now better understood. The perversion of democracy, both in the slave and Jim Crow eras, is now well established. Many scholars have shown that the current housing and school segregation, often treated by courts as just a “fact of life” (de facto segregation) actually resulted from continuous purposeful action by government, banks and millions of whites throughout the second half of the 20^th Century. Still others have detailed the ways banks foisted sub-prime mortgages on African Americans and Latinx homebuyers in the 2000s, paving the way for a massive stripping of Black and Latinx wealth after the 2008 financial crisis.  Based on the historical record, it is undeniable that African Americans (and, in other specific ways, Latinx, Native Americans and Asian Americans) have been systematically and intentionally denied access to the opportunities afforded white Americans throughout American history , resulting in the well-known statistics of the present: the black poverty rate is three time that of whites, and the black/white wealth gap is 12-1.

The case for reparations, however, cannot solely be based on proving that African Americans and other people of color have been systematically denied the opportunities given to whites and have been subject to the government and capitalists stealing whatever wealth they had accumulated. Having established this grim reality, we have to address the other side of the question: what is the purpose of reparations?

To some, the purpose of reparations is to level the playing field between blacks and whites by redistributing wealth, education, housing and other social resources, “balancing the scales” as Elizabeth Warren puts it. If African Americans are given, say, preferential admission to selective colleges, or easier access to bank loans and investment capital, then they are closer to equal opportunity. For many years, the principle demand for reparations was for a cash payment sufficient to enable a Black family descended from enslaved people to invest in buying a home or starting a business. (An updated version of the original 40 acres and a mule promised by the Freedman’s Bureau in 1867). In this version, if African Americans are given enough capital to participate in the market economy then America has repaid its debt.

Giving Black people greater opportunity to participate in the existing society will not achieve social justice.

But will giving Black people greater opportunity to participate in the existing society achieve social justice? I don’t think so. If the social order remains wedded to racism, these efforts will be to little purpose. We already know that when Black people achieve their family’s hard-won dream of graduating from college, they earn less than white high school graduates. We already know that when people of color were able to finally scrape together the funds to buy a house, fully half of Black (and 65% of Latinx) homeowners (as compared to 15% of whites) lost their homes in the aftermath of the 2008 meltdown.  “Balancing the economic scales” with one-time interventions simply won’t end systemic white privilege. Far more is needed than that!

If we are to be serious about reparations, we need to do more than give people a stake in a system rigged against them. Reparations must make those who are dehumanized and exploited feel that this country has actually made a significant step away from America’s embrace of white supremacy and towards being a society that truly values all people. At its core, the importance of reparations is that it gives the United States as a whole the opportunity to understand the enormity of the harm that has been done in its name to individuals, families, whole communities, to the economy and to democracy itself.  In this sense, the most significant goal of reparations is to create a situation in which whites feel the need to issue a sincere apology for the damage done to benefit them, a spiritual change of heart towards people of color. Of course, an apology without efforts to improve the material well-being of those harmed is not a sincere one. But what makes reparations impactful is the extent to which they compel a re-thinking of the relationships between people, a real recognition that black lives matter as much as white lives.

We don’t have to look far for an example of successful reparations. In the 1980s, Japanese Americans succeeded in their long campaign to convince the country that Franklin Roosevelt’s EO 9066 (which in 1942 ordered 120,000 Japanese Americans into concentration camps in the U.S.) was mistaken and racist. In 1988, President Reagan issued a formal apology that included reparation payments of $20,000 for each survivor. The payments were nominal given that internees had been forced to sell many billions of dollars of property to whites at 1/10^th their value. But the Presidential apology, coupled with a Congressional apology and a Supreme Court decision restoring internees’ voting rights, was real. The significance of this apology was underscored shortly after 9/11/2001, when right wing extremists advocated the internment of Muslim Americans. But America had indeed turned a corner on mass internment of U.S. citizens because of the apology. This nation was no longer the America of 1942. The proposal to round up Muslims was dead on arrival.

To be meaningful, reparations for African Americans must be transformative of the United States as a whole. That is, reparations must be driven by a sincere acknowledgement of the history of white supremacy both past and present, and a real desire to get beyond its long and deadly grip on this nation’s economy, politics and culture. While the primary purpose of reparations must be to make whole those harmed, whatever is done to provide African Americans with opportunity will be short-lived unless it is closely coupled to efforts to come to terms with who America has been, who we are, and who we want to be. As Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in his influential 2014 Atlantic article, “We must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely.”

Here, then, is the crux of the matter: the demand for reparations for African Americans addresses one particular group’s grievances against America, but in so doing it allows us to look at our history and future in a new way. Again, we are brought face to face with the powerful insight of intersectionality: there is no fatal contradiction between the interests a specific group and the needs of all people. By centering and addressing the needs of one group, we get closer to be a nation that can embrace everyone’s needs and interests.

Predictably, many—including Bernie Sanders– have pushed back against the demand for reparations, calling instead for universal programs like improving public education that don’t single out any “special interest group.” Sanders misses the point. If we are serious about creating a society committed to everyone’s well-being, we must start by first addressing the needs of those who have been singled out for unequal treatment throughout America’s history. To do so does not detract from the needs of others; to the contrary, acknowledging the nation’s responsibility to remedy the wrongs done to Black people makes it far likelier that everyone else will also be included. Sanders’ argument is similar to those who upon hearing the slogan “Black Lives Matter” push back by saying “No, everyone’s life matters.” The problem with this position is that we know that white lives now matter far too much, and black lives far too little. Until we say black lives matter, we can never say everyone’s life matters.

Coates puts it this way:

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations”

This is the most effective argument for reparations. Yes, Black people are owed for what was taken from them. But if they are to mean anything, reparations must be based on the argument that such an apology and payment will provide everyone in this nation—indeed, in the world—with a powerful opportunity to step away from this country’s history of racism and enter into a new age in which everyone’s humanity is valued.

Once again, we see the importance of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s idea that social justice is the creation of the beloved community. We cannot settle for the idea that equal opportunity is social justice (Elizabeth Warren) or that equality is social justice (Bernie Sanders). Let us insist on a far more radical proposition: that social justice exists when we people acknowledge one another’s humanity, and desire to live as a beloved community. Reparations to African Americans can be an important step towards that end.

The Democrats are engaged in an important debate about the direction the party should take discussing race and racism in 2020. The debate pits so-called ‘centrists’ seeking to win back white industrial workers in the midwest against progressives with a far more radical strategy in mind.

The starting place for the debate is over how the Democrats lost in 2016. According to ‘centrist’ Democrats, Trump won by peeling off disaffected white workers in the upper Midwest and Pennsylvania. To the ‘centrists’, the strategy for 2020 is based on winning these voters back, and not alienating them by appealing to ‘identity politics.’

But Trump did not win the votes of white workers: he won the votes of a majority of whites at every income level. Clinton won far more votes of poor and working-class Americans than did Trump. Trump barely broke through the “blue wall” of the upper Midwest and did so by getting a larger white turnout at every income level than had Bush, McCain or Romney. Certainly, the racial gerrymandering of Wisconsin and Michigan by the Republicans played a role as well. Class had nothing to do with Trump’s victory.

Understanding that Trump’s appeal was entirely based on white supremacy (and national chauvinism, misogyny and homophobia) and not on class is important for the Democrats looking to 2020. Trump cannot be defeated by appealing to a small group of white male industrial workers in the Midwest. Democrats are going to have to directly take on his toxic appeals to white people. And when they do this, they will show us something important: it is possible to take on racism while at the same time winning the majority of all voters. To win in 2020, the Democrats will have to mobilize women of all races, people of color, immigrants, queer and straight folks, workers and young voters. They will have to talk about universal themes that bind us together (such as remedying environmental crises, providing access to health care, improving public education, and raising wages) while articulating the specific needs of different communities for these things. As Stacy Abrams puts it, we want universal health care, but the health care needs of black women and Appalachian whites are not the same.

The new progressive politics challenge whites to discover that they are not just white: they are also women, workers, immigrants, queer, and young. White people can and need to find their place in the story of the emerging American majority. They just cannot so by holding on to their whiteness. Whites need to learn to welcome the seemingly threatening idea that their own experiences and opinions should not center every conversation. When they let go of their fantasies of their superiority, and learn to listen to and value the experiences and opinions of people of color, whites too can find their places in a diverse society as women, as workers, as young or old, as queer or straight, as immigrants or indigenous, or just as humans who want to live in a rich and multi-centered world. When white people give up their defense of whiteness, their personhood becomes far richer and more complex. (Indeed, many will find their ancestors include people of color). When whites give up their defensiveness, they can live in the world with hope instead of fear.

We cannot let the tired putdown of “identity politics” deter us from discussing our different needs.

Stacy Abrams and others are teaching us that we can talk about our differences and commonality at the same time. We cannot let the tired putdown of “identity politics” deter us from discussing our different needs. For, it only through an embrace of our differences that unity is possible. We need a candidate who can articulate this vision, not just to win the Presidency, but to set this country towards a new humane future.

On November 8, 2016 the world learned that a kleptocratic white supremacist and misogynist had just been elected President of the United States. There were three reactions: those who had supported Trump (and Trump himself) couldn’t believe he had won; those who had opposed him couldn’t believe he had won; and a few people who understood the history of this country were not surprised at all. These folks, most of whom in my experience are black, reminded us that Trump was by no means the first white supremacist or misogynist to occupy the White House, and that this was what was to be expected from the majority of white people after eight years of Barack Obama.

As the new reality sank in, it became popular for progressives to say “He’s is not MY President.” But the fact was that Trump was going to hold state power and the world’s most powerful country. For people to pretend that they would’t have to deal with his actions by denying that he was their President was, to me, irresponsible, naive and self-defeating. Like it or not, the fact that Trump was President was going to be a major fact of life for us all. And it was going to be dangerous, ugly and psychologically damaging. All the wishing in the world could not change this fact.

Now, more than half way through Trump’s term as President, we have indeed been deeply hurt by his words and deeds. In the face of this painful reality, many progressives have always dreamt of impeaching Trump. Indeed, the groundwork for impeachment was laid in December 2016 (a month before Trump was sworn in) when Senators Elizabeth Warren, Dick Durbin, Jeff Merkley and Ben Cardin introduced a bill requiring the President to divest any assets that would be a conflict of interest or face impeachment under the Constitution’s Emoluments clause. Once the Mueller investigation of Trump collusion with Russia began, many progressives clung to the hope that the Mueller report would provide the basis for Trump’s impeachment. My favorite protest sign of 2018 was a banner hung over a freeway simply saying “its Mueller time.”

Well, now it IS Mueller time. The investigation is completed. Thirty-seven people have been indicted, and eight of Trump’s cronies have been convicted of serious crimes. And the ongoing investigations in several states indicate that there will be more charges to come. But none of these convictions directly tie Trump to a plot to collude with Putin to interfere in the 2016 election. We are already learning that Mueller did not recommend any criminal charges be brought against the President for collusion with Russia. Of course, many of us are incredulous: over the last two years, enough facts have been brought to light to strongly suggest such collusion certainly did take place with Trump’s direct knowledge. But the cold fact seems to be that the Mueller Report is unlikely to be a game-changer capable to getting twenty Republican Senators to vote for Trump’s removal from office.

So, as of right now, impeachment remains a fantasy. But there might well be a silver lining in the dismal fact that Trump now appears likely to actually have another year and eight months to wreak his proto-fascist politics on the world. And that is that progressives need the time to build the political movement that will repudiate Trump and his supporters in such a way that they cannot ever again hope to have the kind of power they now do. As the current debate among Democrats shows, doing this will not be easy. The grip of the Clinton-era “centrists” with their fixation on winning back the white workers who abandoned Hillary for Trump is still to be broken. The Democrats still have not developed the confidence that a progressive candidate can speak to many different constituencies, including whites, without alienating any of them.

While waving a magic wand to rid the world of Trump is a beautiful fantasy, it will actually take a lot of hard work to achieve this end. Impeaching Trump would not by itself guarantee the creation of a center-left coalition capable of winning the 2020 election. Whether or not Trump remains in office, this is the task ahead.

While the thought of another 18 months of Trump is indeed wearying and painful, progressives don’t need to suffer as we do our work. All we need to remember, as Michelle Alexander so beautifully told us, is that progressives need to stop thinking of themselves as the resistance to Trump.https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/21/opinion/sunday/resistance-kavanaugh-trump-protest.html The fact is that Trump and his supporters are the resistance. They are the ones on the wrong side of history who fear the unstoppable emergent reality of a multi-cultural, majority non-white America. So, as hard as it is, let’s welcome this moment as a real opportunity to usher in a new era. Of course, while we are working, let’s continue to try to impeach Trump. But really, folks, the change we seek is not about him. Let’s dedicate ourselves to the long game, so that in the 2020 election we don’t just elect a Democrat, but someone who represents the new America we are trying to become.

Latest news: Rich white people pay millions in bribes to get their children into prestigious colleges. Outrage ensues!

The trouble is that this latest “scandal” is just a more direct and crass way of doing what has always been done: the “best” schools have always been for the children of the upper classes, and their student body, like their faculty and administrators, have always been overwhelmingly white.

Rich people buy their way in to colleges in other ways than just bribery. For example, completely ‘legitimate’ college counseling services charge up to $1.5 million to prep a child from 8^th grade so that they will be “ready” when they apply to college.

It’s not just that rich people will do whatever it takes to get their kids into elite colleges: selective colleges also want to admit the children of the rich. Most selective schools take into account whether the candidates are the children of alumni, whether they are children of donors, and whether they are children of just….rich people. At a recent trial over bias in admissions (unfortunately brought by a right-wing billionaire attempting to end affirmative action), Harvard officials revealed that some 33% of its admissions  were “legacy” students (i.e. children of alumni, faculty and donors), and that legacy candidates were admitted at five times the rate of the rest of the applicants. The Harvard Dean of Admissions also revealed that he maintains a “Z-list” of students who would not otherwise be admitted who were from wealthy or famous families.

College admissions officers have been particularly self-righteous about the current scandal and have gone to lengths to assure the public that the selection process is fair and guided by objective standards. Colleges do select students based on grades, SAT scores, extra-curricular activities and interviews, they point out. Those they admit, they claim, are “the best and the brightest,” not the richest and whitest.

The problem is that these so-called “objective” measures of hard work and intelligence are actually very good measures of race and class privileges. And those with the highest grades and test scores and “interesting” extracurricular activities are most often the richest and whitest.

The SATs, in particular, do not predict in any way the likelihood of a high school senior succeeding in college. (The most common definition of success is graduating college within six years). In fact, students with SAT scores of 1500 are no more likely to succeed than students with SAT scores of 850. So, why are they used? Well, SATs are very sensitive to three factors: parents’ income, parents’ education and race. If colleges want a device to filter out poor and non-white candidates, the SAT is as good as it gets.

What about extra-curricular activities? Students with prestigious internships have a real leg up on the competition. But how does one get such an internship? Well, having connections is the best way in, since the large majority of these internships have no formal acceptance criteria. And those with connections are likeliest to be from privileged families. Yet colleges treat internships as measures of “interest” and “experience” as if they had nothing to do with privilege.

And what about grades? Grades allegedly measure how much a student has learned in a given course, and the cumulative GPA is supposed to be a good measure of how hard the student has worked and how intelligent they are. But grades are also a measure of something else: how much the student’s cultural understandings correspond with the culture of the teacher, the course content, and the school. Given the history of racism in education, white and wealthy students with parents who went to college have a much higher chance of sharing the same culture as the school teaches. And, of course, students who are not distracted from school by their family’s struggles with poverty, racism and immigration status (and who, conversely, have small class sizes, highly trained and motivated teachers, extracurricular activities at their beck and call) have a far greater likelihood of achieving higher grades.

And of course, there are interviews. Students who are successful often impress the interviewer (usually white and privileged themselves) with their personal characteristics that “fit in” with the college’s ethos. In colleges with majority white and upper-class student bodies, the interview often becomes a powerful filter for privilege.

Most selective colleges, responding to decades of pressure from civil rights activists, now pride themselves on the growing diversity of their student body. But far too often, this diversity is achieved by admitting upper class students of color, many of whom are international students. And, only a very few selective colleges are willing to admit enough students of color to be more than a small percentage of their overall student body.

In 2019, fifty years after the civil rights movement, many selective colleges are talking about the need to do more than admit more students of color. They regularly hire ‘consultants’ who tell them that they the need to diversify their curriculum, to hire faculty of color, to create an inclusive environment, etc. Yet somehow these changes don’t happen. Schools don’t want to “lower their standards,” be “politically correct,” hire “less qualified” instructors, etc. Most faculty in particular refuse to look at their own teaching styles and academic content to see if they are creating barriers to learning for their own students. (And, if they refuse to be self-aware, they most certainly are creating those barriers).

So, why do colleges and universities resist the changes that would make them more diverse, equitable and just?  Part of the answer lies in the race for college rankings by U.S. News. This ranking system primarily rewards schools for having the most successful (i.e. highest paid) alumni. The best way of assuring that alumni are high-income earners is simple:  admit the children of high-income earners! Colleges are terrified that if they turn away the children of the privileged, they will lose their standing. And, the college ranking system assures that the content of higher education and the delivery of it to students continues to be tailored to the most privileged people in society.

The real issue is not the advantages the rich have getting their kids into college. It is that colleges don’t want to confront racism and class privilege and want to welcome privileged students at the expense of everyone else.

The irony is that the claim that selective colleges admit the “best” students or produce the “best” graduates cannot stand scrutiny. Institutional practices of race and class privilege reject highly motivated and brilliant students of color and working-class whites, confine intellectual inquiry and the production of new ideas, and greatly limit the pool of people qualified to do important work. The real harm done by racism in higher education is to us all: we land up poorly equipped to deal with the world because we do everything in our power to keep the world out. And not just in admissions. These practices of exclusion have kept the ideas of the world out of higher education and have made them into self-referential temples of Western (i.e. white and upper class) thought. Now that is a scandal worth getting mad about!

The recent furor over Congresswoman Ilhan Omar’s comments about AIPAC’s influence in Washington offer an early insight into the challenges and opportunities progressives face in forging a left-center coalition within the Democratic Party. First, the opportunities. The 2018 election brought a new “class” into the House of Representatives. Much has been made of the record number of women who were first elected in 2018, and their racial and ethnic diversity. The changing demographics of the House of Representatives is in part due to the political activation of women in the Women’s Marches held across the U.S. in response to Trump’s ascendancy to power in January 2016. It is also due to the slow but real progress Democrats have made organizing communities of color into the electoral process over the last decade.

The challenge of this moment is whether and how these new voices will be welcomed into the Democratic Party. And now, with Ilhan Omar’s comments, the Democrats face their first real test. Because the issue now is no longer whether these voices will be allowed. The new and young Democratic Representatives, exemplified by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s bold leadership, have made it clear that they will be heard. The issue now is whether the Democrats will redefine their political goals and methods in a way that recognizes the importance of those who have until now have been genuinely included, especially women of color.

Rep. Omar has been attacked because she criticized AIPAC’s outsized influence over American foreign policy in the Mideast, which it has achieved in part by its enormous lobbying coffers. Omar was called out for anti-Semitism because she worried that Zionists had too much influence and that some American Jews were blindly supportive of Israeli policies no matter what.

You can read a full transcript of her remarks here: https://ips-dc.org/what-did-ilhan-omar-say-heres-the-full-transcript-of-her–to-a-question-about-anti-semitism/.

Many in Congress, some of whom have made anti-Semitic comments themselves, loudly proclaimed that Omar owes Jews an apology for having accused them of wielding money for influence and having a dual allegiance to another nation. But Omar and her defenders, including Ocasio-Cortez and members of the Congressional Black Caucus, responded by asking when would those offended by her remarks condemn Israel’s expansionist ambitions and the violent oppression of Palestinians. By holding her ground, Omar broke open the silence in Washington, the almost universal unwillingness to confront Israeli policies, that AIPAC had enabled. Because Ilhan Omar spoke her truth as a Muslim woman and could not be silenced, the Democrats were forced to change the wording of a resolution condemning anti-Semitism into a resolution specifically condemning anti-Muslim and white supremacist hate speech as well. While the House has condemned anti-Semitism many times, this was the first time it has ever condemned anti-Muslim hate speech and violence.

HERE is the text of the Resolution:https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/house-resolution/257/text?r=56

The debate over Ilhan Omar’s remarks became a moment for women of color to claim their place in the Democratic Party in a new way. In the 2018 elections, Stacey Abrams proved that a Black woman could run a viable campaign that centered women of color’s experiences without alienating white men and women. In this debate, Omar provided the Democrats with an opportunity to become more inclusive of Muslims without alienating Jews. Many Jews who had demanded an apology supported the House Resolution. And Omar did apologize for inadvertently making comments that echoed anti-Semitic tropes. Indeed, many Republicans, who had been licking their chops at the opportunity to vilify a Muslim, voted for the resolution , which passed 403-27. This debate showed that it is possible to center the concerns of Muslims and Jews, of Blacks and whites, calling out their specific issues in a way that brought people together. In so doing, this Resolution offers a road map for the Democrats. Now that women of color have a seat at the table, they have put the Democratic Party on notice that their interests can no longer be ignored or swept over. And, by compelling the Party leadership to listen to their concerns, these new voices are advancing social justice by showing us how to embrace multiple interests with the firm understanding that our common humanity gives us the capacity to face difference without fear.