Plouffe ( The Audacity To Win: The Inside Story and Lessons of Barack Obama's Historic Victory, 2009) managed Obama’s successful campaigns in 20. Robinson is not optimistic that his message will be heard, but if the nation is to endure honorably, candid debate must begin on his jeremiad, whether or not cash reparations result.īarack Obama’s former campaign manager and senior adviser weighs in on what it will take to defeat Donald Trump and repair some of the damage caused by the previous election’s “historically disturbing and perhaps democracy-destroying outcome.” Not since Malcolm X has there been such outraged discussion of white domination. Since the legacy of slavery is poverty, America must pay for what it has cost the descendants of those who were stolen from their homes and deprived of their culture.

Affirmative action isn’t enough, he says. “Many blacks-most, perhaps, though I can’t be sure-don’t like America,- notes Robinson. Socioeconomic gaps remain undisturbed by prejudice or conditioned expectations those who do not expect better do no better. Blacks are imprisoned for using crack cocaine while whites sniffing powder cocaine stay free. US policy, says Robinson, blithely destroys Caribbean economies at the behest of Chiquita Brands and demands that the IMF impoverish African nations. White journalists are blind to what blacks see clearly. Still, despite their contributions, blacks continue to be abused and insulted. Like Shakespeare’s Moor, they too have been of service to the state, from chopping cotton to helping build the Capitol. African-Americans are history’s orphans, deprived of what is rightfully theirs: a proud and vital heritage. Zipporah, wife of Moses, was black, too, claims Robinson. (Little is said about Muslim influence or black participation in the evil trade.) That the ancient Egyptians were Africans as dark as any others is a given.

With the angry fervor of a street preacher and the artful rhetoric of a talented polemicist, Robinson’s impassioned brief offers a sampling of little-known black history and the somewhat better-known story of slavery perpetrated by profiteering whites. Robinson (Defending the Spirit, 1998), influential chief of the lobbying group TransAfrica, presents the long overdue bill, on behalf of America’s blacks, for centuries of social and economic abuse.

The Debt by Randall Robinson