REPARATIONS, MAYBE -- BUT REPAIR, DEFINITELY

SATURDAY'S MILLIONS FOR Reparations march and rally in Washington, D.C., is
gathering steam. But here in Oakland, Angela Glover Blackwell pays it no mind.

She's too busy building communities. But she stopped to explain the two
images America has of African Americans:

"We are very visible in ways that talk about our successes" -- Oprah, the
two Michaels (Jordan and Jackson), Bryant Gumbel -- "and in ways that make
the nightly news, where we are portrayed as heartless criminals," she said.
"So if you don't know any black people, you're left with those two images,
both extremely distorted. In fact, most black people go to work every day,
trying to create lives for their children. They are faceless to America."

Blackwell, director of the Oakland nonprofit PolicyLink, brought up the
images because I asked her why it was that Americans have wholeheartedly
trashed the idea of reparations for African Americans. Those images also
explain lots of other things, including why inner- city schools totter on
their own and nothing is done about the Third World conditions in some
communities, except for hiring more cops and building more prisons.

REPARATIONS ARE EXTREMELY controversial among blacks themselves. It was the
same with Japanese Americans in the early 1980s. Some thought it beneath
their dignity to seek monetary redress; others saw it as the quintessential
American remedy for a wrongful act. Indeed, reparations raise all kinds of
hackles. Even the Japanese Americans avoided the word and went with "redress."

I encounter visceral feelings about reparations in my e-mail. The same
readers who lavish praise on the worthiness of Japanese American redress
rail bitterly against any possibility of reparations for blacks, whom they
dismiss as dangerously powerful and rich -- or despicably criminal.

Perhaps it's because the $1.2 billion allocated to Japanese Americans in
1989 -- roughly $20,000 each -- is peanuts compared with some calculations
of what might be owed to blacks based on years of unpaid labor, murder,
rape and torture. I've heard figures from $10 trillion to $43 trillion. Of
course, no slaves are alive today, and that is the rub for reparations critics.

But it's hard to dismiss the impact of not just slavery but also a hundred
years of brutal Jim Crow laws that induced generations-long poverty and
bias that held blacks back in every conceivable way.

SOME MIGHT HOPE for individual payments. But I've mostly heard advocates
talk about "repair," about creating a fund to target those bottom-stuck
communities that have lousy schools, unemployment and a dearth of services
such as job training and health care.

Sounds strikingly like the kind of social equality Blackwell calls for in
her co-written book, "Searching for the Uncommon Common Ground" (Norton;
$15. 95): Fewer heart-to-hearts about race. More action to effect real
change -- whether it's ensuring that all schools get equally adequate
funding and attention, or decriminalizing communities where more youth are
in jail than out.

The latter means changing inequities in the criminal-justice system. The
War on Drugs saved lives but also has filled our prisons with folks mostly
of color. The reason: stiffer penalties for crack cocaine, most associated
with black drug users, than for powder cocaine, preferred by whites, even
though the drugs are pharmacologically identical.

As a result, prison life has become a rite of passage. Blacks now make up
15 percent of youths younger than 18 but 26 percent of young people
arrested, 46 percent of those in juvenile jails and 58 percent of juveniles
sent to adult prison.

Fixing that is the easy part. The effects of excellent education, of
community repair, will be long term. They require both a revolution and
evolution.

Reparations or not, who could be against that? Perhaps the question should
be who will step forward?