Principles of Compensation (Malik Speaking)
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						Malik

I've got to tell you that all this discussion about which blacks deserve what from the government or from AT&T or whomever is pretty irritating.

As I said before, blacks labored for this country in its early years. The benefits of that labor made other people better off, and the value of that labor has never been paid back. I go along with the affirmative action programs you're talking about because I think they're the best deal we can get at this point in time. But what I really think is that compensation or reparations ought to be given to an organization representing black Americans. Blacks themselves ought to decide how it is used, who gets what, and so on. It should be up to us.

And besides, these arguments are too individualistic. Ann's liberal arguments and Fred's conservative arguments, as different as they are, have a tendency to reduce the history of race in America to thousands of actions for which individuals are separately responsible. But there's another aspect to it, a CORPORATE or GROUP aspect. The history of slavery and Jim Crow and employment discrimination isn't just the history of individual actions. The federal and state governments were heavily involved. Government created slavery and kept it going, not just by making it legal, but with dozens of laws that did things like preventing slave owners from freeing slaves and requiring people in free states to return slaves on the run.

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