I am appalled at The Daily Free Press for displaying an advertisement in its Monday, March 12 issue entitled “Ten reasons why reparations for slavery are a bad idea — and racist too.” While I, a black female, do not believe that reparations for slavery are in any way a good idea, I found the reasons given by this advertisement not only ridiculous but very offensive.
It is obvious that David Horowitz has written about a community that he knows absolutely nothing about. He wrote, “There was never an anti-slavery movement until white Anglo-Saxon Christians created one. If not for the anti-slavery beliefs and military power of the white Englishmen and Americans, the slave trade would not have been brought to an end.” With these statements, he suggests that black Americans wanted to be slaves until white Americans told them that it was a bad idea!
Horowitz also forgets to mention that it was also the white Englishmen and Americans who started the slave trade in America. Horowitz believes that black people owe a debt to America, saying that those who were freed should be thankful. He forgets that the “white American president who gave his life to sign the Emancipation Proclamation” did so for political reasons and that his reasoning had little to do with his own personal convictions. He even goes on to say that African Americans should be thankful because if their ancestors were not yanked from their African tribes and forced into the American slave trade, blacks today “would not enjoy the greatest freedoms and most the most thoroughly protected rights anywhere.” He even refers to the freedom of slaves as “gifts” from white America. I’m sorry to tell Mr. Horowitz this, but no Americans should have been enslaved, anyway!
Horowitz then goes on to say that “the reparations claim is a separatist idea that sets African Americans against the nation that gave them freedom.” To give freedom, however, someone has to take it away from another person first. In this case, the country that gave freedom to slaves also happens to be the same country that took it from them. Horowitz does not mention this in his advertisement.
I could go on forever bashing this “ad,” because of all of the ideas that built up within after reading it. I want to stress again that I do not believe in reparations, for several reasons of my own, including the fact that no one alive today was ever a slave and ever had to suffer the hardships of slavery. It saddens me, however, that someone who obviously does not know what it is like to grow up Black in America can write such an insulting ad and that The Daily Free Press could publish it. I suggest that next time the Free Press read their advertisements before printing them, instead of just complying with the first person who offers them money.
Andrea Kelly
COM ’01
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