White reparationists open new website

By Elizabeth Gordon

There are some arguments of substance against the case for black reparations. Then there are the inflatable-lawn-ornament-in-a-gale type arguments, such as “they all want something for nothing,” which can be knocked over by the simple fact of a handful of white reparationists.

Which is what CURE (Caucasians United for Reparations and Emancipation) is. With a new website, www.reparationsthecure.org, that uses a content management system, CURE, currently 120 strong, aims to grow into more than just a handful.

But oh what a handful that handful has been.

Addressing the U.N., winning Associated Press awards, founding youth centers, launching initiatives in faith communities, speaking far and wide, organizing community activists, training anti-racist therapists, crafting Amicus briefs for the supreme court, co-founding your own WACAN — all this and more is contained in a new section, Our Community, which presents longtime CURE members, their commitments, publications and links.

“We wanted to let the world know that persons who support reparations don’t exist in a vacuum,” Ida Hakim, CURE’s founder and CEO, said in a recent phone interview. “They’re already committed to justice.”

And, she adds, laughing in a way that transmits a little Georgia warmth up to my so-when-is-spring? Pennsylvania, “We also wanted people to know we’re not a bunch of crazies.”

And who would think that?

Click on over to Dialogue with White America to find out. In a thread of the “Get Over it – This is wrong” forum, one anonymous visitor writes, “You are perhaps one of the most thoroughly disgusting enterprises which I have ever had the misfortune of coming across. Give your selves [sic] a much needed slap in the face.”

This area is a carryover from the old site. Fielding comments like these, as well as more civil if also more challenging ones, has been part of CURE’s role since its founding. As Hakim explained in a 2005 WACAN forum that she led, one of CURE’s four main commitments is “to educate our white family with patience and respect.” The new site continues that commitment, with much greater interactivity and the option to subscribe to a feed.

In the Dialogue with White America forum, as in Building White Support for Black Reparations, returning users will find slow post times replaced by the kind of immediacy we’re all coming to expect of the World Wide Web. Visitors can now easily begin topics, and thanks to the new content management technology any CURE member can even volunteer to take charge of a whole section of the site.

“I wanted to make CURE members more a part of the functioning,” explains Hakim. Working with web designer Hugh Esco, a founding partner of CampaignFoundations.com, which provides web hosting, IT development and support services to Green Parties and other progressive organizations, Hakim spent the past four months building the site. “It was a steep learning curve,” reported the 62 year old grandmother; but she is, she said, very excited to have more control of the website. In fact, as we spoke she stood on the peak of that curve and updated the site right before my eyes.

Return users will find the familiar logo, with its three-flamed torch, on each page, although the pages themselves feel more spacious and inviting. Also intact, if redesigned, is the speaker’s bureau and news listing. CURE’s essay anthology, The Debtors: Whites Respond to the Call for Black Reparations, can still be ordered (the next edition, with more dialogue and a new cover, only awaits funding). Also available for purchase is an Amicus Brief filed before the Supreme Court in support of the case of Farmer-Paellmann v. Brown & Williamson, No. 06-1533 (the question at issue being whether the statutes of limitations should be suspended so slave descendants can bring actions for restitution).

Wholly new to the site is a Donor Guide, a resource for those impatient to begin paying down on the debt. Listed, with links, are fourteen organizations CURE has worked with, met, or corresponded with over the years. Also new is Resources for Faith Communities, which encourages faith communities to “make transparent their own history with regard to slavery, segregation, racism, discrimination and white privilege” — a daunting task, which may be why this area as yet lists only one resource, C. Mark Hollmon’s “A Scriptural Perspective on Reparations.”

New technology, new capabilities, new sections, new members, new energy – it might be easy to overlook just how old CURE is. Easy, that is, unless you’re on the site. CURE was founded in 1992 in response to the request of a Black Reparations leader. It is the oldest organization of white people working exclusively for reparations. While the Dialogue with White America goes only as far back as 2002 (mercifully perhaps), the Archive of member writings reaches to 1996.* A quick survey of those writings gives a sense of just how deeply rooted this organization is. What fruit and foliage those roots will bring forth is hard to estimate, as traffic to the site from students, researchers and activists increases.

“I want people to be able to have a serious discussion, in this public manner,” concluded Hakim, who herself has spoken about reparations on radio and television, on college campuses, and in the United Nations.

“I hope when you come here you’ll see your neighbors and friends. I would like the world to know that white people advocating for black reparations is not a fringe idea. It’s a very authentic and real form of justice work. There are many many white people who want to see changes come to pass. We’re part of that. . . .”

And with their new site’s April launch, CURE becomes a more vital, more responsive part. See for yourself at www.reparationsthecure.org. But don’t expect a slap in the face.

*This correspondent, for example, stumbled across a pre-publication, pre-in-fact-turn-of-the-millennium draft of a book chapter she’d supposed was lost.