Winbush, the director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University and an editorial board member of the Journal of Black Studies,
oversees a gathering of scholars, attorneys and grassroots activists who offer a smorgasbord of compelling arguments, most of which explain why reparations are necessary for rectifying present damage done by the U.S.'s slave-holding past. For many of the contributors, reparations do not merely involve individual African-Americans receiving a cash payment. Rather, it's about recognizing that the legacies of slavery continue to be manifest in negative cultural attitudes and inferior socio-economic conditions. Law professor Robert Westley delves into the relatively fragile circumstances of middle-class African-Americans and compares them with the cases in which European Jews and Japanese-Americans received reparations after WWII. Winbush details the forgotten practice of "whitecapping," where black rural landowners were permanently driven off their land by whites in the early 2oth century. And journalist Molly Secours confronts her own white privilege. With passages that detail slaveholder atrocities and resulting governmental benefits, the text is generally sobering and direct, though activist Tim Wise gets points for metaphoric ingenuity by referring to racism's legacy as a type of "historical herpes" that's infected Americans. Winbush also includes three essays that are anti-reparations, but John McWhorter offers the group's only comprehensive rebuttal. Beyond pro or con, most of the pieces here are more deeply concerned with having its readers confront their notions of accountability by looking at our collective past and present. (Mar.)
