David Roediger & Sundiata Cha-Jua's Presentation on the Case for African-American Reparations

The next meeting of the ICR's project on Communications, Culture, and Policy, funded by the Ford Foundation, will be held on Friday, April 30, at 1:30 PM in the Peterson Conference Room (231 Gregory Hall). The very distinguished speakers will be David Roediger, Professor of History at UIUC, and Sundiata Cha-Jua, Director of the Afro-American Studies and Research Center at UIUC. The title of their presentation is: "African Americans' Historic Right to Reparations and the Democratization of the Black Community."

ABSTRACT This presentation advances three interrelated arguments. First, that history—the study of the past—can contribute to stimulating contemporary Black self-reflexivity and the formulation of political strategy. Second, that an exploration of the historic roots and development of African Americans' quest for reparations can expand the contemporary political discourse by introducing previously ignored political possibilities. Third, that revitalizing the democratic ethos of Black civil society—Afro-America's autonomous institutional structure—is the key to Black liberation and radical transformation in the United States.

Background Readings:

"19th Century Demands for Slavery Compensation: 'The Laborer is Worthy of his Hire'" (by Paul Ortiz)

"Slavery, Racist Violence, American Apartheid: The Case for Reparations" (by Sundiata Cha-Jua)

David Roediger is Kendrick C. Babcock Professor of History at UIUC. He is a graduate of Northern Illinois University (1975) and completed his doctorate at Northwestern (1980). David Roediger's research interests include race and class in the United States, and the history of U.S. radicalism. His current research is on immigration and racial formation in the U.S. Few scholars can be said to have transformed our thinking as deeply as David Roediger, whose now-classic book, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (Verso, 1991), inspired the field of "whiteness studies." Roediger has underscored the psychological as well as economic benefits of race privilege enjoyed by white workers in the nineteenth century. In so doing, he has challenged scholars and activists to reframe our understanding of race as a white problem - a set of practices, ideologies, and institutions in which white people in the U.S. have been deeply invested. Roediger deepens his analysis in Toward the Abolition of Whiteness: Essays on Race, Politics and Working Class History (Verso, 1994). Since then, he has edited a collection of African American voices on white privilege, Black on White: Black Writers on What It Means to Be White (1998) and published, with James Barrett, a much-cited article, "In between Peoples: Race, Nationality and the 'New Immigrant' Working Class" (Journal of American Ethnic History, Spring, 1997). Among his other works are Our Own Time: A History of American Labor and the Working Day (with Philip S. Foner). He is the editor of Fellow Worker: The Life of Fred Thompson, The North and Slavery as well as an edition of Covington Hall's Labor Struggles in the Deep South. His articles have appeared in New Left Review, Against the Current, Radical History Review, History Workshop Journal, The Progressive and Tennis.

Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua directs the Afro-American Studies & Research Program and teaches history at UIUC. His published work has focused on African American community-building, radical Black intellectual thought, lynching, and agency during the Nadir, 1877-1917, and in the contemporary Black Freedom Movement, 1966 to the present. His is the author of America's First Black Town, Brooklyn, Illinois, 1830-1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000) and Sankofa: Racial Formation and Transformation, Toward a Theory of African American History (Dept of Comparative American Cultures, Washington State University, 2000). He has authored numerous scholarly and popular articles, which have appeared in journals such as: Black Scholar: Journal of Black Studies and Research; Journal of American History; Journal of Black Studies; Journal of Urban History; Nature, Society, and Thought; and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society. Currently he is editing a collection of primary documents on resistance to lynching; examining Black Power; Floyd B. McKissick, Sr.'s "selling" of Soul City, North Carolina; Black Capitalism; and the origins of contemporary Black conservatism. He is also writing a book, which proposes a structural theory of racial oppression and offers a new paradigm for analyzing African American history.