The debt

Frank H. Wu

Robinson is respected for having brought the political influence of the black diaspora to bear on U.S. foreign policy toward Africa. He has met another challenge here: His book is easy to read....His style...is engaging and conveys his estrangement from the mainstream.....He continues an important conversation. Democratic deliberation helps create a society in which we are all equal stakeholders. The process is as valuable as the outcome. In that context, even if reparations are a lost cause, they are a noble cause.
— Washington Post Book World

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

As founder and president of TransAfrica, an organization aimed at influencing U.S. policies toward Africa and the Caribbean, Robinson can be said to have contributed to the antiapartheid movement and the restoration of democracy in Haiti. Having vividly outlined the pervasiveness of American racism in his previous work, Defending the Spirit, he now summons America to acknowledge what he casts as its financial obligation to blacks for centuries of slavery and continued subjugation. Substantiating his analysis of America's ignorance of African history and the agenda of the Clinton administration with personal stories that illustrate the impact of de facto discrimination, he reveals slavery's legacy not only in our social and political lives, but also in the American psyche. In Robinson's view, the incessant deification of the founding fathers (many of whom owned slaves) and the denial of the benefits gained from centuries of slave labor are, in effect, an attempt to pretend "that America's racial holocaust never occurred." Juxtaposing domestic racism with the sufferings of people abroad, he contends that America's dubious foreign policy initiatives in Cuba and throughout the black world should be mitigated through debt relief. Methodically tackling one issue at a time, Robinson suggests the creation of a trust to assist in the educational and economic empowerment of African-Americans. Whether readers agree or disagree with his views, Robinson has made a definitive step in presenting these controversial and still unresolved issues. Book club rights sold to Doubleday/Black Expressions; author tour. (Jan.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

"The problem of the twentieth-century," wrote W.E.B. DuBois in 1903, will be "the problem of the color line." At the close of that century, Randall Robinson, another eminent African American scholar/activist, suggests that the problem of the 21st century should be the problem of reparations to African Americans. Robinson, who went to segregated schools in the South before graduating from Harvard Law School, is the founder and president of TransAfrica, and was the single most influential person in organizing the movement that led the U.S. to impose economic sanctions on South Africa, resulting in the dismantling of apartheid. In The Debt, Robinson looks at the devastating consequences at home of centuries of slavery, segregation, and the refusal to acknowledge these wrongs. Reparations were paid to the Jews and Poles after the Holocaust, to the Japanese Americans after their internment during WW II, to Korean women forced into prostitution by Japan, to the Inuit in Canada and to the Aborigines in Australia, and they are due to the 32 million African Americans who continue to suffer from four centuries of institutional exploitation and disenfranchisement. Such reparations will finally remedy the psychological harm done to African Americans whose contributions to this country remain unacknowledged, and will lift them from the financial abyss they find themselves in today, as a result of multi-layered discrimination. Despite its title, which might suggest economic jargon, The Debt: What America Owes Blacks is highly readable, replete with pertinent anecdotes and accessible, convincing examples. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, andadults. 2000, Plume, 262p, bibliog, index, 21cm, 99-045728, $13.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Nada Elia, Visiting Assoc. Prof.; Afro-American Studies, Brown University, Providence, RI, March 2001 (Vol. 35 No. 2)

Library Journal

The title of this book shouldn't deter perspective readers: Robinson (founder and president of TransAfrica) dedicates only one of the ten chapters to a discussion of reparations. And his ideas about reparations are unconventional: it's true, he writes, that there is a precedent for paying reparations to the victims of history. But even just starting a national conversation about reparations, he suggests, would be useful--such a discussion would bring U.S. racial atrocities to the surface, make blacks aware that something has been taken from them through no fault of their own, and launch a critical mass of blacks "into a surge of black self-discovery." In the remainder of the book Robinson discusses his disappointment with the quantity and quality of black political participation and the long-term economic and psychic damage brought on by slavery, Jim Crow, blacks' lost African past, and unequal U.S. foreign and domestic policies. Robinson's political experience and readable prose should make the book appealing to a wide audience. For public and academic libraries. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/99.].--Sherri Barnes, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

Cornell West

Randall Robinson's powerful and poignant story of personal and political struggle is one of vision, courage, and sacrifice.
—Cornell West, Harvard University