Suchergebnisse

AbstractObjectiveAbolition is sometimes portrayed as a taking of property rights from former masters. If we consider freedom as the baseline, slavery could instead represent a taking of property rights from slaves. To gauge pecuniary losses to slaves, I estimate foregone wages to former U.S. slaves alive at the time of emancipation.MethodI use slave hire rates and values from colonial times to the 1860s to calculate lost compensation to former slaves.ResultsEstimated pecuniary losses to former slaves at the time of their emancipation are nearly $7 billion in 1860 dollars, or about $200 billion in today's dollars.ConclusionsToday's calls for reparations to U.S. blacks appeal to a sense of justice but encounter legal problems because potential plaintiffs cannot show direct harm from slavery. Former slaves, however, arguably possessed legal standing at the time of emancipation to request reimbursement for past wages. Because our nation failed to compensate newly freed persons for lost wages, they and their descendants have suffered a financial disadvantage for generations.

This is an abbreviated account of the UK webinar launch in October 2021 of the biography, Cedric Robinson: the time of the Black Radical Tradition, written by Joshua Myers. Moderated by James Pope, panellists, including Myers, Colin Prescod, John Narayan, Avery Gordon and Elizabeth Robinson present their takes on Robinson in relation to the UK and especially his relationship with the Institute of Race Relations and the journal Race & Class. They discuss key aspects of Robinson's work, including the meaning of racial capitalism, his understanding of time, and how for him historical materialism was grounded, not in the mode of production but in the primacy of social struggle and in a dialectic of power and resistance to its abuses.

An interview with Chicago-based Black historian, activist and writer Barbara Ransby in July 2020 as to how to understand the significance of the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) uprisings across the US. Ransby defines the movement and the forces that made George Floyd's murder a pivotal point for so many people, bringing them on to the streets in over 500 locations. She explains the gestation of the movement against 'racial capitalism' from 2012 onwards and its current political formation as made up of an array of forces. The largest most organised coalition is the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL). She traces the white Left's unwillingness to see the Black working class as now the defining point of class politics and addresses issues of police violence, incarceration and white supremacy. Organic solidarity is developing between progressive groups around an abolition agenda, which is simultaneously about dismantling the carceral state and building new institutions.

The author warns against accepting the concept of unconscious bias (measured by a supposedly scientific cognitive function test) as the explanation for racism and the terrain on which it should be combatted. Using the writings of Sivanandan, in which he distinguished between attitude, action and state or institutional racism, she traces the different ways over time in which racism has been camouflaged by the use of words such as xenophobia or disadvantage, and hails the landmark acceptance of institutional racism in 1999. Returning racism to individual attitude (if unconscious) means not distinguishing between the ways in which racism affects classes and communities differentially, not distinguishing between 'the racism that kills' and 'the racism that discriminates', and suggests, wrongly, in a non-materialist way, that bias creates rather than reflects structured and institutional racism.

A former member of the CARF Collective from the 1970s onwards explains the significance to the anti-racist movement of seventy-two issues of the CARF magazine (1991–2003), now digitalised and available to download on the website of the Institute of Race Relations. She traces the emergence of a grassroots movement in the 1970s which gave primacy to anti-racism over anti-fascism, pointing out also the tensions with 'the Left' over such politics, the various forms in which CARF has appeared, the collective way in which it was produced, and the ways in which the magazine conceptualised lived experience and contributed to theory on the changing nature of state and institutional racism.