African American Reparations Negative

We negate the resolution, Resolved: The United States Federal Government ought to pay reparations to African Americans Framework:
First, This debate revolves around the idea of race relations. At that point, the team that is best able to evaluate the root cause of racism should win the round. If we prove that reparations don’t solve for the underlying issues of racism, a negative ballot is in line. Second, the topic uses the phrase “pay reparations to African Americans”. At that point, the basis of the affirmative is to interact with the African Americans themselves. Contention 1

Subpoint A: The root cause of racism is the structures of economic inequality, which reparations can’t fix. Nuruddin ‘1 (Yussuf, adjunct professor of African American Studies and social science at the New School University, “The Promises and Pitfalls of Reparations,” Socialism and Democracy. New York: Winter 2001. Vol. 16, Iss. 1; pg. 87, P. Proquest//DN) Of course, human agency can only be effective at the ripe historical moment. Marcus Garvey, known for his visionary Pan Africanism rather than any materialist conception of history, once stated with Marxist clarity that “When all else fails to organize our people, conditions will.” 4 The material conditions in Black America were ripe for a reparations movement. In the public discourse generated by this movement, some reactionary whites have argued that the movement by African Americans to obtain reparations for slavery would divide the American people. But the American people are already divided–by stark economic inequalities.

These structural inequalities are the material conditions which have mobilized the African American populace in support of a reparations agenda. A study of households conducted in the mid-1980’s showed that while income gaps between blacks and whites were closing, the median white American family owned eleven times as much wealth (real estate, investments, savings, etc.) as the median black American family. 5 During 1990s and into the twenty-first century this racial wealth divide has been widening. Wealth is often accumulated through inheritance; thus the origins of this widening divide may be traced back many generations. The Civil Rights movement dismantled American apartheid (de jure segregation–but certainly not de facto segregation as a tour through any of America’s chocolate inner cities and vanilla suburbs will reveal), qualitatively transforming the landscape of civil liberties, access and opportunities for African Americans.

Yet the dismantling of the social and political aspects of American apartheid has not led to African American community empowerment or development, just as the dismantling of the social and political aspects of Zimbabwean and South African apartheid has not led to national reconstruction in those societies, because in all three cases, the economic resources (including the land and the mineral wealth–all ill-gotten gains) remained concentrated in the hands of whites.