The Debate Topics: Debate One

Chapters 2 & 3 of A People's...deal with racism. Specifically, his thesis addresses the contrived and government-motivated nature of relations among colonial American white Europeans, African blacks and continental natives. Whether or not you agree with the nuances of Zinn's position, and they are certainly debatable, the consensus should hold that part and parcel to the story of America are atrocities toward African Americans, Native Americans, and let's face it, most dark skinned human beings in general.

This point is NOT debatable. But some modern discussions in race relations, many of which contain relevance to early America, are.

Next Round of Debate Topics:

FOR: African Americans should be paid financial reparations from the American government to provide restitution for years of slavery. 

AGAINST: African Americans should NOT be paid financial reparations from the American government to provide restitution for years of slavery. 

Below find some background on the subject lifted off of enotes.com:

On a March 1998 tour of Africa, then-President Bill Clinton offered a “semiapology” for America’s participation in the transatlantic slave trade. The president expressed regret and contrition, admitting that America had not always “done the right thing by Africa,”1 yet he stopped short of a formal apology, asserting that to do so might antagonize race relations in the United States.2 Slavery was permitted by law in the southern United States from the era of British colonial rule in the seventeenth century until the surrender of the Confederate secessionists following the Civil War (1861– 65). Legal in Washington, D.C., slave labor was used to build the U.S. Capitol and the White House. The U.S. government, however, had never apologized to the more than 30 million African Americans living in America whose ancestors had toiled as slaves, nor had an apology been offered to the West African nations from which millions of Africans had been captured and transported on a harrowing, and often deadly, trip across the Atlantic Ocean.



What went unspoken by Clinton was the fact that a formal apology could be interpreted in a court of law as an admission of guilt by the U.S. government for sanctioning the institution of slavery. Such an admission might mean that the U.S. government could be successfully sued for reparations payable to the descendants of slaves. Reparations are the means by which governments and corporations make restitution—typically in cash payments—to individuals who have suffered wrongful harm as a result of negligent laws and actions. In 1988, for example, Congress passed legislation authorizing the payment of $20,000 to each Japanese American who was forcibly interned in camps on the West Coast of the United States during World War II.


Clinton’s tentative steps toward a formal apology for American slavery focused national attention on the growing campaign of African American activists who are seeking reparations from both the U.S. government and the still-intact corporations that profited from the slave trade. Demands for slavery reparations have been lodged since the Civil War, but the campaign’s modern incarnation took root during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Black Muslim leader Malcolm X demanded the “forty acres and a mule” that President Andrew Johnson (1865–69) was widely believed to have promised, but never delivered, to the freed slaves. According to historian Elazar Barkan in The Guilt of Nations, “During the urban riots of the 1960s [black] looters claimed their loot was their forty acres and promised to be back for the mule.”3 In 1969 an organized movement for reparations coalesced following a protest staged by black activist James Foreman. Interrupting a service at the predominantly white Riverside Church in New York City, Foreman read his “Black Manifesto,” which demanded that white churches and synagogues pay reparations totaling $500 million to African Americans for condoning and abetting slavery. Activist groups were formed throughout the 1970s and 1980s to study and promote the issue of slavery reparations.


By 1989, the payment of reparations to Japanese Americans had encouraged Michigan Congressman John Conyers Jr. to introduce bill H.R. 40—an allusion to “forty acres and a mule”—calling for federal acknowledgement of the cruelty and injustice of slavery and a study of slavery’s effects on contemporary African Americans. Conyers’s bill gave the reparations movement the imprimatur of mainstream backing, but it remains in congressional committee. In the meantime, other reparations advocates have sought redress through the judicial process. In March 2002 a lawsuit was filed by Deadria C. Farmer-Paellmann in Brooklyn, New York, seeking damages payable to slave descendants from insurance and rail companies that profited from the sale and transportation of slaves. Similar lawsuits have since been filed in several other states; the outcome of these cases is still pending as of spring 2003. In addition, the Reparations Coordinating Committee (RCC), a group of prominent African American lawyers and academics, has publicly stated that it plans to file a reparations lawsuit once a legal strategy has been determined.