Society in America today is like a 100-yard dash in which two groups are running, said lawyer, lobbyist and civil rights activist Randall Robinson. "One group runs, and the second group, you shoot them in the knees and say, 'Run! You can catch up!' But you can never catch up because great crimes have never been addressed," he said.
The crime is 246 years of slavery that has yet to be remedied, said Robinson, the keynote speaker of the Black History Month Celebration that culminated with last night's event in Page Auditorium. The speech was sponsored by the Black Student Alliance, the Duke chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Reginaldo Howard Scholars.
Robinson, author of books including The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, emphasized the need for reparations in his speech, stressing the need to remedy past errors as critical for society as a whole, not just for blacks.
"When we talk of reparations, it's not a measure that puts checks and monies in the hand of those who are descendants of slavery. We're talking of a measure that helps the future of our society," Robinson told the audience of about 150 to 200 people. "But when we don't talk about this for so long, we are in danger of putting the whole society at risk."
With much criticism targeted at the United States, Robinson demanded the government follow some of its own advice to other countries, apologize and award reparations to the black population. "We said to the Germans that you can't bury the horrors of the Holocaust. The only way is to apologize, compromise and repair the victims. We've said it to the Armenians, the Koreans... to people all over the world," Robinson said. "But we've never been able to say it to ourselves."
The result of our society's refusal to talk about our history is a people who do not know who they are because they have forgotten who they were in the past, he said, calling this problem America's time bomb.
"The worst crime you can commit to any human beings is to strip them of any memory of themselves and to lead them to believe they have no story," said Robinson, the founder of TransAfrica, an advocacy group for people of African descent. "Since no one knows [what has happened] for African Americans, they can't explain their current condition. For white Americans, they can't explain their current advantage [and so it ends up] explained in languages of racism."
Robinson's speech climaxed Duke's celebration of Black History Month, which included a week-long "Global Flows" conference on hip-hop culture. A Black History Month Celebration was held Monday night with performances from United in Praise gospel choir and Dance Black, among other groups.
Freshman Cherisse Cobrand, who attended the screening of Mississippi Burning, one of the weekly Black History Month movies shown during the month in Randolph Dormitory, suggested that the event expand next year. "It was great, but should be on a bigger scale. It would have been better if it went school-wide and was held in Griffith theater," she said.
Brandon Dorsey, a freshman, was one of the audience members of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity's production of the gameshow The Weakest Link--with questions about black history.
"It was very engaging and I learned a lot of things about our history that I didn't know before," he said. "But just like Randall Robinson said, it's not possible or fair to push everything into a month and make it to all the events. But there was definitely a lot to get yourself involved in."
Brandi Dumas, a senior and president of the Duke chapter of the NAACP, was disappointed at the turnout at Robinson's speech, but was pleased at the caliber of questions asked by the audience. "I really wish more people would have come out. But when you get an academic, you're not going to get a turnout like you would with someone from pop culture," she said.
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