#ignorance of american history of wage and labor theft is not an excuse

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TheGrio: Republican Mark Robinson says Black people owe reparations

Mark Robinson, lieutenant governor of North Carolina, is seen during a Save America rally for former President Donald Trump at the Aero Center Wilmington on September 23, 2022 in Wilmington, North Carolina. (Photo by Allison Joyce/Getty Images)

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

Meet Mark Robinson a Republican running for governor in North Carolina who thinks Black people should be paying reparations. It’s bizarre even for the bizarre modern GOP, but here we are. Robinson, 54, is North Carolina’s lieutenant governor, and he seems like a lefty’s caricature of a modern right wing politician. He’s what we would dream up to make fun of the right.

He thinks Covid wasn’t a real threat, systemic racism doesn’t exist and the movie, “Black Panther,” was, buckle up, “created by an agnostic Jew and put to film by satanic Marxists.” The right loves to say the left is filled with Marxists. It’s a weird obsession. Robinson also said President Obama was “a worthless, anti-American atheist who wanted to bring America to its knees and then raise it back to its feet as a European style socialist hell hole.” He also called Michelle Obama “a man.” So, yeah, he’s another Black Republican who’s willing to say racist things. He’s like a grimier version of Candace Owens. And he could be North Carolina’s next governor.

Robinson captured my attention when a speech he gave in 2021 began bubbling up on Black social media. In the speech he said he opposed reparations because no one owes Black people anything. Typical right wing stuff until … he took a turn.

“Nobody owes you anything for slavery. If you want to tell the truth about it, it is you who owes,” he said as if he was speaking to Black people en masse. “Why do you owe? Because somebody in those fields took strikes for you. After those fields were ended and slavery was ended, somebody had to walk through Jim Crow for you. Somebody fought wars and died for you. Somebody lived less than because they didn’t have what you have, and they did it for you. There are people in their graves right now, and they are there because they were willing to stand up and fight for you.” He concluded, “Nobody owes you anything. If anybody owes, it’s you. Because you’ve been the benefactor of freedom, you are the one that owes.” If you want to hear him say this himself you can go here but, you know, it could be triggering to deal with so much internalized racism and tap dancing for white folks all at once.

That said, I don’t totally disagree with Robinson in this speech. He’s actually touching on a feeling I have long had about our ancestors. From those who were enslaved in the early years of this country to those who marched more recently, they have paved the way for us to have the opportunities we have. Our freedoms were bought through battles in the streets and the legislatures. I definitely feel like we owe a debt to the ancestors, and that’s a big part of what he’s saying.

But, I have always believed that my debt to the ancestors meant I had to do something with my life that honored their work, courage and sacrifice. I know many of you feel the same. There are Black revolutionaries who preceded me, and I know my life is better because of their work. I feel like I owe them something. On that, I agree with Robinson. But, typical of right wingers, he’s taken a good idea and leapt to a strange conclusion. 

Where Robinson and I part ways is that I understand that debt is spiritual. It’s something I need to pay forward in my community and my family rather than an actual bill that I should pay. When Robinson combines this very real and beautiful notion of what we owe the ancestors with the idea of reparations, it becomes strange and even gross. And the idea we owe the ancestors something does not eliminate the moral right to reparations.

Just the mere mention of reparations turns Republican brains to mush. They’re supposed to be the party of business. They present themselves as the party that understands economic reality. If you deal in the realm of economic reality, the case for reparations isn’t that hard. Millions of Black people were trapped on slave labor camps for entire lifetimes, and those enslaved people created extraordinary wealth for the people who enslaved them.

Slavery was a major economic driver for the South, the History Channel says. “Slavery was so profitable, it sprouted more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation.” They say if the confederacy had been its own nation, at the start of the Civil War it would have have been the fourth richest nation in the world.  

The wealth derived from slavery was a major driver of the US economy for many Americans.

“By 1840, the South grew 60% of the world’s cotton and provided some 70% of the cotton consumed by the British textile industry. Thus slavery paid for a substantial share of the capital, iron, and manufactured goods that laid the basis for American economic growth. In addition, precisely because the South specialized in cotton production, the North developed a variety of businesses that provided services for the slave South, including textile factories, a meat processing industry, insurance companies, shippers, and cotton brokers.”

The entire U.S. economy grew because of slavery. A lot of people profited from the enslavement of Black Americans. Slave-built infrastructure creates wealth to this day. 

So, let’s put it together slowly. During the period of enslavement, millions of Americans worked without receiving payment. Millions of other Americans benefitted from that unpaid labor and from selling enslaved people. Does anyone see a debt there? This country and its government owe the families of enslaved people. This isn’t a far-fetched idea. This country paid slaveowners reparations for having lost people they enslaved. If we owed slaveowners reparations, then how can anyone argue that we don’t owe reparations to the enslaved people and their families? 

Robinson is as crazy as they come on the right. But unlike right wing loons like Candace Owens and Jason Whitlock, this one has a chance at amassing real power. Stay tuned. 

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WEB Du Bois, ‘Marxism and the Negro Problem’

[What follows is excerpted from WEB Du Bois’ ‘Marxism and the Negro Problem’, published in The Crisis, 1933, and elucidates Du Bois’ thought regarding the vicious tactics of the aristocracy of labor among the whites, and his rejection of false consciousness as a throwaway excuse for what is actually the interest of the settler working classes, who have become contributors and beneficiaries of imperial capital. As always this piece is provided for the purposes of study and discussion.]

…Revolution seems bound to come.

Perhaps nothing illustrates this better than recent actions in the United States; our re-examination of the whole concept of Property; our banking moratorium; the extraordinary new agriculture bill; the plans to attack unemployment, and similar measures. Labor rather than gambling is the sure foundation of value and whatever we call it — exploitation, theft or business acumen — there is something radically wrong with an industrial system that turns out simultaneously paupers and millionaires and sets a world starving because it has too much food.

What now has all this to do with the Negro problem? First of all, it is manifest that the mass of Negroes in the United States belong distinctly to the working proletariat. Of every thousand working Negroes less than a hundred and fifty belong to any class that could possibly be considered bourgeois. And even this more educated and prosperous class has but small connection with the exploiters of wage and labor. Nevertheless, this black proletariat is not a part of the white proletariat. Black and white work together in many cases, and influence each other’s rates of wages. They have similar complaints against capitalists, save that the grievances of the Negro worker are more fundamental and indefensible, ranging as they do, since the day of Karl Marx, from chattel slavery, to the worst paid, sweated, mobbed and cheated labor in any civilized land.

And while Negro labor in America suffers because of the fundamental inequities of the whole capitalistic system, the lowest and most fatal degree of its suffering comes not from the capitalists but from fellow white laborers. It is white labor that deprives the Negro of his right to vote, denies him education, denies him affiliation with trade unions, expels him from decent houses and neighborhoods, and heaps upon him the public insults of open color discrimination.

It is no sufficient answer to say that capital encourages this oppression and uses it for its own ends. This may have excused the ignorant and superstitious Russian peasants in the past and some of the poor whites of the South today. But the bulk of American white labor is neither ignorant nor fanatical. It knows exactly what it is doing and it means to do it. William Green and Mathew Woll of the A. F. of L. have no excuse of illiteracy or religion to veil their deliberate intention to keep Negroes and Mexicans and other elements of common labor, in a lower proletariat as sub-servient to their interests as theirs are to the interests of capital.

This large development of a petty bourgeoisie within the American laboring class is a post-Marxian phenomenon and the result of the tremendous and world wide development of capitalism in the 20th Century. The market of capitalistic production has gained an effective world-wide organization. Industrial technique and mass production have brought possibilities in the production of goods and services which out-run even this wide market. A new class of technical engineers and managers has arisen forming a working class aristocracy between the older proletariat and the absentee owners of capital. The real owners of capital are small as well as large investors — workers who have deposits in savings banks and small holdings in stocks and bonds; families buying homes and purchasing commodities on installment; as well as the large and rich investors.

Of course, the individual laborer gets but an infinitesimal part of his income from such investments. On the other hand, such investments, in the aggregate, largely increase available capital for the exploiters, and they give investing laborers the capitalistic ideology. Between workers and owners of capital stand today the bankers and financiers who distribute capital and direct the engineers.

Thus the engineers and the saving better-paid workers, from a new petty bourgeois class, whose interests are bound up with those of the capitalists and antagonistic to those of common labor. On the other hand, common labor in America and white Europe far from being motivated by any vision of revolt against capitalism, has been blinded by the American vision of the possibility of layer after layer of the workers escaping into the wealthy class and becoming managers and employers of labor.

Thus in America we have seen a wild and ruthless scramble of labor groups over each other in order to climb to wealth on the backs of black labor and foreign immigrants. The Irish climbed on the Negroes. The Germans scrambled over the Negroes and emulated the Irish. The Scandinavians fought forward next to the Germans and the Italians and “Bohunks” are crowding up, leaving Negroes still at the bottom chained to helplessness, first by slavery, then by disfranchisement and always by the Color Bar.

The second influence on white labor both in America and Europe has been the fact that the extention of the world market by imperial expanding industry has established a world-wide new proletariat of colored workers, toiling under the worst conditions of 19th century capitalism, herded as slaves and serfs and furnishing by the lowest paid wage in modern history a mass of raw material for industry. With this largess the capitalists have consolidated their economic power, nullified universal suftrage and bribed the white workers by high wages, visions of wealth and the opportunity to drive “niggers.” Soldiers and sailors from the white workers are used to keep “darkies” in their “places” and white foremen and engineers have been established as irresponsible satraps in China and India, Africa and the West Indies, backed by the organized and centralized ownership of machines, raw materials, finished commodities and land monopoly over the whole world.

How now does the philosophy of Karl Marx apply today to colored labor? First of all colored labor has no common ground with white labor. No soviet of technocrats would do more than exploit colored labor in order to raise the status of whites. No revolt of a white proletariat could be started if its object was to make black workers their economic, political and social equals. It is for this reason that American socialism for fifty years has been dumb on the Negro problem, and the communists cannot even get a respectful hearing in America unless they begin by expelling Negroes.

…

In the United States also a petty bourgeoisie is being developed, consisting of clergymen, teachers, farm owners, professional men and retail business men. The position of this class, however, is peculiar: they are not the chief or even large investors in Negro labor and therefore exploit it only here and there; and they bear the brunt of color prejudice because they express in word and work the aspirations of all black folk for emancipation. The revolt of any black proletariat could not, therefore, be logically directed against this class, nor could this class join either white capital, white engineers or white workers to strengthen the color bar.

Under these circumstances, what shall we say of the Marxian philosophy and of its relation to the American Negro? We can only say, as it seems to me, that the Marxian philosophy is a true diagnosis of the situation in Europe in the middle of the 19th Century despite some of its logical difficulties. But it must be modified in the United States of America and especially so far as the Negro group is concerned. The Negro is exploited to a degree that means poverty, crime, delinquency and indigence. And that exploitation comes not from a black capitalistic class but from the white capitalists and equally from the white proletariat. His only defense is such internal organization as will protect him from both parties, and such practical economic insight as will prevent inside the race group any large development of capitalistic exploitation.

Meantime, comes the Great Depression. It levels all in mighty catastrophe. The fantastic industrial structure of America is threatened with ruin. The trade unions of skilled labor are double-tongued and helpless. Unskilled and common white labor is too frightened at Negro competition to attempt united action. It only begs a dole. The reformist program of Socialism meets no response from the white proletariat because it offers no escape to wealth and no effective bar to black labor, and a mud-sill of black labor is essential to white labor’s standard of living. The shrill cry of a few communists is not even listened to, because and solely because it seeks to break down barriers between black and white. There is not at present the slightest indication that a Marxian revolution based on a united class-conscious proletariat is anywhere on the American far horizon. Rather race antagonism and labor group rivalry is still undisturbed by world catastrophe. In the hearts of black laborers alone, therefore, lie those ideals of democracy in politics and industry which may in time make the workers of the world effective dictators of civilization.