Lawyer argues for academic reparations

• Originally published in the Crimaon White Online on 4/22/2004 [here]

Lawyer argues for academic reparations

Touré says society has bred feeling of inferiority among blacks, other minorities
    Rose Sanders Touré, a Harvard-educated civil rights lawyer who works in Selma, said Wednesday night that the University and the rest of the country should pay academic reparations for minority groups. While that may be a hard sell to some people at the University, student and faculty leaders pushing racial equality at the Capstone won major victories in the past week, with UA President Robert Witt announcing efforts to recognize the school's racial past and the Faculty Senate voting Tuesday to apologize for the actions of former slaveholders at the University.

Touré said she thinks the recent events are important steps toward achieving equality, which she says still lacks in public schools almost 50 years after the Supreme Court's decision to desegregate them.

"I'm proud of you, but don't stop there," she told an audience of about 30 people at Bidgood Hall. "There are still many African-American children who suffer from this discrimination right in your midst. They need scholarships; they need reparations."

Touré said gifted tracks in public schools and magnet schools are ways of continuing the tradition of "separate but unequal" and keeping a mutual feeling of inferiority among blacks and superiority among whites. She advocated a "leveling of the playing field" in schools with academic reparations for blacks and other minorities who have been historically discriminated against in the United States.

"To separate primarily the children of color and poverty under the guise of ability grouping and to pretend it's democratic is meaner than slavery and pre-[ Brown v. Board of Education ] segregation," she said.

Touré said a system that sustains a feeling of inferiority among blacks early in the classroom has led many to crime and poverty.

"Why do you think the jails are filled with black men?" she asked. "The problem is we have accepted the inferior status of African-American children and people."

She blamed the government and politicians for appointing federal judges "who are determined to uphold that blacks, Hispanics and poor people have no rights that whites have to accept."

Touré also said the public school system has been perpetuating a "miseducation" regarding U.S. history, citing that today's teachers were taught, like many before them, automatically to venerate slaveholding men like George Washington.

"We have not made up our mind to stop the miseducation of this country," she said. "If so, then we'd all be out protesting Christopher Columbus Day every year."

Because the dehumanizing effects of slavery, a government-sanctioned institution, have produced an inferiority complex in blacks that is still there today, the government ought to be responsible for implementing "whatever is necessary to level the playing field," Touré said. She said every black person who wants to go to college should be able to do so for free.

Asked if affirmative action policies could have the reverse effect - to further a feeling of inferiority among minorities - Touré said that attitude is one adopted by the people who benefit from the unequal system.

She said no one questions the families of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when they ask for compensation, and she said it should be no different for families of former slaves.

Asked why people who had nothing to do with racism in the past should have to pay taxes to fund reparations, Touré said she wished she did not have to pay taxes for a lot of things, like the Bush administration's compensation of Halliburton in the Iraq war.

"Once we repair and deal with the truth, then there can be reconciliation," she said.