Professor Kumanyika Talks About Reparations, the Civil War, and Joe Biden
"...I do think that if you do not transform the way that capitalism functions, if you don’t transform the way that American imperialism functions, you can’t really have any real conception of justice. And there is a way in which you can have a kind of reparations that operates within a market system, doesn’t threaten it."
"... so many other scholars in the black radical tradition, Eric Williams and others have said, “no, slavery was at the center of capitalism,” right. With Craig Wilder’s book, “Ebony and Ivy,” slavery was at the center of actually building up the university system in the north. Slavery was not like this Southern problem that was like just a few sort of Southern racist people, you know what I mean, [that] really had some issues with bigotry so they decided to make black people slaves. Like none of that."
"...You know, you have a group of southern states who say they’re going to secede, because they really want to maintain their rights to slavery. In the battle over the Fugitive Slave Act, Lincoln basically sides with the South and says that slave owners can come back into the North and remove slaves. When the Southern states all give their reasons for secession, right, they all produce these sort of secession documents that declare the reasons why they’re seceding. And in each one of those documents, they all mentioned slavery as the only reason really that they’re seceding. So, they write other things, but they’re clear that the reason they’re seceding is because of slavery. In the aftermath of the Civil War, a different narrative took shape where the South, you know, started to change the idea and the reasons for why they seceded to be about something called states’ rights. They started to promote the myth that slavery would have withered away on its own and all kinds of other things that sort of confused and mystified the actual reason why they seceded."
"...is race really just this sort of issue about personal attitudes, right, and people’s individual biases and bigotry, a kind of psychological mode of thinking about the problem of racism, or
is it something that was deeply baked into the structures and economic systems of this country? You know, not even just the culture, but the economic systems like this country has had to have racism because racism essentially, or white domination, was built into the economic modes of slavery, right and the economic modes that currently drive the society, right?"