Omowale Clay, April 19, 2005
From Social Justice Wiki
Phone Interview
April 19, 2005
Jesse Chanin (JC): Could you explain what Millions for Reparations does?
Omowale Clay (OC): In 2001, there was a United Nations world conference against racism that took place in Durban, South Africa. There was organizing around the world in terms of going to that conference to deal with the questions of racism, xenophobia, and other forms of prejudice. The December 12th Movement International Secretariat, which I am a member of, has NGO status, non-governmental organization status, at the United Nations, [and] has been participating in the UN human rights commission over the past 15 years. And during its participation, it has participated in a number of world conferences, the world conference on women in Beijing, China, the world conference on development in Vienna, Austria, the world conference against crime that took place in Cuba, and a number of other world conferences. The efforts of those conferences as far as the December 12th movement went was to, as we felt, take up Malcolm X’s legacy, which was to bring the United States before the international community for the violation of black people’s human rights. As people know, Malcolm’s view was that black people do not suffer from a civil rights issue, but from a human rights issue and that, in fact, to bring the victim before the perpetrator within the context of civil rights would never resolve our problems. And so Malcolm had always raised that the United States must be brought before the world body to be condemned for violating black people’s human rights. So in that spirit, the December 12th movement had been participating in the Human Rights Commission over 15 years, which meets twice a year, in the Spring, when the full commission meets, and in the summer when the sub-commission meets and puts together the agenda for the following Spring commission. And during that time our efforts have been to bring before the world body in the United Nations Human Rights Commission which meets in Geneva, Switzerland, the conditions that black people suffer in the United States as violations of their human rights. So over the past 15 years, we have been bringing this information and research and condemnation of the United States before the Human Rights Commission. When there would be world conferences, we would utilize those world conferences to once again bring up those issues about the violation of black people’s human rights. Now, along with that, we would also take up issues that affected not only black people in the United States, but African people as a whole, not only on the continent of Africa, but in the Diaspora, from Australia, to the Caribbean, to Central and South America, to wherever Africans lived in the Diaspora. And so that has basically been our program.
The world conference against racism that took place in 2001 was a central focus of many brothers and sisters and progressive people around the world as an opportunity to deal with the question of racism as developed, perpetrated and continued by basically, in the UN, what they call the WEO nations, which are Western European nations and which includes the United States and Canada. However, at the 2001 UN World Conference, one of the things that had been brought to the fore was that the question of racism has an economic base. And the economic base of racism is very important to understand because more than an attitude and an ideology, the basis of racism is economic in terms of benefiting the racists over the people who are the victims of racism. And, therefore, the resolution of racism must have an economic base. And, therefore, the greatest expression of racism in world history was the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which has been viewed as the greatest crime against humanity. And "crimes against humanity" is a term from the United Nations which deals with crimes that are of such a magnitude that they go beyond the issue of countries themselves, but as violations of the human race itself. And so in terms of dealing with heading toward the world conference against racism in 2001, the December 12th Movement, in particular, having been given council and advice from many progressive countries around the world, had said the conference, instead of dealing with a zillion different issues, needed to focus on the underpinnings of racism, which is its economic base. And, therefore, if racism has an economic base, its resolution must be economic. And, therefore, if there was a crime committed and it’s a crime against humanity, then the resolution of that is economic. And, therefore, the question of reparations is a fundamental lynchpin to understanding the connection between fighting against racism and resolving the issues of racism. And so we went into that conference with many other countries, particularly the Africa group of countries, which many people in the world had deferred to as the most important conference for African people, saying that the only issue fundamental to the World Conference Against Racism is the issue that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity and, therefore, the descendents and victims of that deserve reparations. Because reparations is compensation for the crime. And that was the battle in the world conference against racism, the end result of which, in the final declarations that came out of the world conference against racism in 2001 in Durban, was, in fact, a declaration that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity and therefore its victims are due reparations.
JC: And what has that meant on a concrete, material level?
OC: Building on that question and that victory – because the victory in terms of the United Nations was a victory in terms of public opinion and a victory in terms of propaganda, because people know, the UN is one of the battlegrounds in the world, but where people might be fighting with guns, might be fighting with demonstrations in different places, the UN is basically a war of words and policy and public opinion. And so, therefore, what came out of that declaration was the legitimacy, that there is a legitimate right for African people to be compensated with reparations. Now, this was very important for the reparations movement around the world because there had always been a long history of the demand for reparations but it had not been tied to the question of criminality and crimes against humanity because crimes against humanity have no statutes of limitations in that sense. So one of the issues that had always been raised by the West was that these were things that happened a long time ago and we need to move on. And the effect of the declaration was that crimes against humanity had no time frame and whenever the issue can be organized for and bought before the world, then that is legitimate. And so, based on that victory, because the December 12th Movement had organized the largest single delegation that had gone to the conference, we’d organized over 400 people that went to Durban from the US, that coming out of that conference there was a call for there to be a national rally for reparations in the United States. Now, this is coming upon the fact of a tremendous upsurge through many different issues, Randall Robinson’s book The Debt, different issues had come up that had put the reparations question on the agenda. But coming out of Durban, this call for a national rally around reparations was probably the first national rally to be held in the United States in terms of reparations. And so, it was called for coming out of Durban that there would be a Millions for Reparations rally, August 17th, which was going to be the 115th anniversary of the birth of Marcus Garvey, in Washington, DC. And so in terms of getting a sense of where the Millions for Reparations came from, it came out of the victory in Durban at the world conference and it became a call for national mobilization around reparations.
The idea was that the issue first around reparations was to mobilize and educate people to the fact that reparations is a legitimate demand by African people for a crime that took place. And that the criminals that perpetrated this crime were never going to legitimize the demand for reparations, but it was the task of the victims of that to raise that demand to an international level. So the national conference in Washington, DC, in 2002, was a historic event in terms of African American struggle in this country. It was followed by an international African conference around reparations in Barbados that following year, and it really set the tone for beginning to inject the question that the 21st century for African people – the issue is reparations. It is no longer a question of simply dealing with the question of civil rights. It is no longer dealing with the question of Affirmative Action simply. But the real question in terms of the development of African people was that a crime was committed and that that crime not only was committed in terms of the theft of African labor and resources, but it also continues up until this day that African people are the victims of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and its continuing practices. And that the only resolution of that is the question of reparations, reparations being on a national level, in terms of the US government, and on a corporate level in terms of corporations that have built their entire wealth off of the enslavement of African people.
So what was set in motion by that was the first major historical federal suit that is continuing right now in the federal court district in Chicago, the first court case where major US corporations were brought into federal court to demand reparations for their participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery. A number of those corporations like CSX Railroads, the insurance company Aetna, where a young lady had gone back to research that Aetna life insurance policy had millions of dollars of life insurance policies on slaves and had made money from that. The Millions for Reparations mobilization has basically set in motion across the country efforts to tie the question of black underdevelopment to the development of white corporate America and government development based on the slave trade and the continuing effects of racism. And so there’s a legitimate demand for reparations. What we mean by that is two things: one, that the demand for reparations is in fact, on one hand, a reclamation of history and a correction of history, something that can only be told by the victims because it is never in the interest of the perpetrator to do that, and so a reexamination of not just the question of racism in America, but a reexamination of the concrete profit that was made off of the enslavement of African people. We can trace those instances almost in every sector and sear of the United States, from Gillette razor company, whose early beginnings were built on developing and manufacturing steel iron manacles to enslave people, that the beginnings of the Gillette razor company go back to producing leg irons for slaves; to the theft of black intellectual genius in terms of major inventions that were created by African people that were stolen by American corporations, and were the founding point of their wealth. Also, intellectual properties that reflect themselves even in culture. And so the important thing to understand is that the mobilization around reparations has a twofold purpose: one, to reexamine history from the point of view of the economic deprivation of African people, at the same time the simultaneous enrichment of white people in this country built off the enslavement and free labor of Africans. And now to go back and reexamine history from that perspective to build a case for reparations. On the other hand, it serves a purpose to throw a different light on the question of disparities in the black community today and the white community today. Because, you know, one of the views was, at the present rate of development, the black community would never catch up to the white community because there’s a fundamental flaw in that question because a tremendous amount of wealth was transferred from African people’s enslavement to the white community that has never been transferred back. And it has allowed the European community to make a leap in terms of development, at the same time as the underdevelopment of the African community. Not only in the United States, but in the Caribbean, on the African continent, and such. So, you know, the demand for reparations has given an economic basis to not only the question of explaining the nature of disparity but looking at the question that these were crimes.
So instead of looking back through history at political and social forces from the point of view of differences, it is to look back through them as: these were criminals, carrying out crimes against humanity that must be reconciled through compensation and reparations. So that’s what the effort was. So you can then see this now getting reflected in many campaigns that go on now. And that’s why this ties into the question of the Incarnation Children’s Center and the clinical trials that have been perpetrated against black and latino children. And something as interesting as - last year there was a major campaign because Miller Brewing Company which is wholly owned by the South African Brewing Company, developed a campaign that Elvis Presley was the founder of rock and roll. And we were doing some research and there’s a black man named Otis Blackwell who basically wrote some of the key major records that Elvis Presley produced and sang, and that Elvis Presley studied Otis Blackwell – he never met Otis Blackwell, Otis Blackwell had to make tapes and Elvis Presley got the tapes and studied the tapes because Elvis Presley couldn’t read or write music. And what he not only copied was the songs, but he copied Otis Blackwell’s way of singing the song. And so, we looked at the question of the theft of rock and roll, just the very idea of where the music came from. Miller Brewing Company and the South African Brewing Company perpetuated that this last year was the 50th anniversary of rock and roll and they said it was the 50th anniversary because they go back to the beginning of rock and roll when Elvis Presley recorded in the Sun Studios back in 1954. They said, that is the beginning of rock and roll, when the bottom line was that the music that white people called rock and roll was actually developed and created by black people. And so this became another reflection in terms of reparations of how black intellectual genius, or what is called today "intellectual properties", was also stolen and profits made off it. And so there are many legends of black music who never ever got compensated for their musical genius but their music was stolen by white artists and perpetuated as if it was their own, and not only their own, but their own creation. And that’s one example of how that perpetuates itself today. And the Millions for Reparations mobilization which has committees throughout the boroughs in New York City, it has committees throughout the mid-West, in Chicago, in Texas, and in California. The task of Millions for Reparations is to put on the agenda the reclamation of African history from the perspective of how our wealth was stolen. And, to look at today’s events as examples of the continuation and perpetuation of that, all to build a political case around the question of how the reparations issue is the key issue in the 21st century.
JC: With so much thievery going on of black intellectual property and black actual, physical property, how do you establish an amount of money – a specific amount – that you would demand from the government or from corporations? How can you put a price to that?
OC: That’s a good question, but it’s putting the cart before the horse. I think the first question is not how we put a price tag on it; the first task is the acknowledgement that a crime was committed and that reparations are due. Because, you see, one of the things that has happened – and this is one of the tricks that has been perpetuated – is, “Well how do you do that?” And I remember once when I was in Geneva, there a special Rapporteur, that’s a special investigator, named Van Boven, he was from the Netherlands. And he had done a presentation to the human rights commission, he was charged to look at the question of crimes that had gone on, like the crimes against the Japanese interment in World War II, and crimes against the Jews, and to look at a UN standard for how the UN would look at the question of compensation. Well, it’s very interesting that when Van Boven went to explore this, the issue naturally came up about the question of slavery. So Van Boven’s response to that was, “Well, you know, that was so long ago, how could we even calculate how much money was involved? So, the best way to deal with that would be to deal with it in terms of Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity today.” Well, I thought it was fascinating that that was his presentation because that is certainly the presentation of the perpetrator. Because, one, he would try to take something and make it impossible to determine. Now here’s people who on any other condition would say, “There’s nothing that’s unknowable or impossible to do. We can go to moon, we can create computers, we can go under the water… but suddenly, the question of being able to conceptualize the wealth that was stolen from Africans toward the end of transferring it back, suddenly we’ll become stupid now. Suddenly, we’ll have no sense and it’s an insurmountable task in terms of that.” So, that was always a fascinating thing to us, particularly the question of saying, “In fact, it’s so complicated that the way we’ll deal with it is through Affirmative Action and Equal Opportunity today.” Now, if the playing field is set that the West starts the football at the 50 yard line and Africans start the football at the goal line and then you say, “Well, we can’t really figure out how to get Africans to the 50 yard line so you know what we’ll do? We’ll just make sure there’s Equal Opportunity and Affirmative Action to help them get there.” That is the ideas of the perpetrator. Because the thing that they don’t want to acknowledge is that they committed a crime. That’s always very interesting – they never want to deal with that there was a crime committed. And that’s the most important part of it, that there was a crime! And not just a crime, but the greatest crime in humanity was committed during the trans-Atlantic slave trade. And not only committed, but that crime continues literally to today so that there are many indicators right now that can show that because of the effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, black people live a shorter life than white people do, entirely and precisely tied to the question of the remnants and continuing perpetuation of racism from the trans-Atlantic slave trade. And it’s almost in every factor, it’s almost something you grow up with: here are the statistics for white people, here are the statistics for black people, and they’re always put in the context of, well, blacks are doing a little better and dah dah dah, but it’s never put in the context of what is the schism that has created this temporal rift that has lifted one part of humanity to this level and lowered another part of humanity to this level.
And, you know, you get scientists, and your ideologues, and your geneticists and your folks… the whole thing around genetics was always created in the United States, you know, the Germans picked it up from geneticists in the United States. The whole Master Race thing didn’t develop in Germany, it actually developed in terms of eugenics in the United States in terms of the superiority of white people. So that always then gets translated to what this schism is. It’s really based on the fact that white people are superior anyone else and that everyone else is inferior. It’s never taken to the question of the crime that was committed and the criminals never being brought to justice and economic compensation not being made. So the presentation of how much money it would be is putting the cart before the horse. That can be determined. The first thing to be determined and to acknowledge is that there was a crime against humanity committed. Once that’s acknowledged, then we can now sit down to the table and talk about, rationally, what are we talking about in terms of wealth? And then we get to the heart of the matter of just how conflictual it will be. Because you’re now dealing with – no criminal who commits a crime voluntarily comes to court, drags himself back to court and says, “Let me be judged by the people who I perpetuated the crime against.” They never do that voluntarily. You have to snatch them, drag them back to the scene of the crime, and hold them accountable for what they’ve done.
JC: Has the United States government made any acknowledgment of the UN declaration that the slave trade was a crime against humanity?
OC: Well, if you remember, what the United States government did was it walked out of the UN conference on racism. And it walked out of it when Colin Powell announced that it was taking a position that the world conference against racism had become too conflictual, that the rights of Israel was being denied in terms of the perpetuation of the Palestinian issue. Which got played here in the United States, that the world conference against racism broke down because of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. It’s very interesting, because when you’re sitting in Durban, South Africa, that had nothing to do with anything that was going on at the UN. That was a readymade dis-information campaign so that the United States would not have to deal with the question of what happened, in terms of propaganda. Now, what they did was, on an orchestrated thing, they never sent a full delegation, Colin Powell never came, the US delegation was skeletal. And then, at a certain moment in time, they declared they’re walking out. Now, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is a serious conflict, but at the world conference against racism the Palestinians had taken a position of backseat, that their issue is not the most important issue at the world conference. The most important issue at the world conference is racism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. But the United States tried to focus on some minor issues that were taking place there around Palestinians and Israelis to say that was the main issue at the world conference. It never was. And once they propagandized through their machinery that that was the issue, they said, “Well, in defense of Israel, we’re walking out of the conference.” But that was all orchestrated. They planned on walking out before they even got there because prior to the world conference, they had spent an enormous amount of time and an enormous amount of political and economic pressure to get particularly the Africa group to back off from taking that declaration to the world conference. They tried to get people to water it down, they tried to get people to say it wasn’t the issue, they tried to get people to put other issues there. But as a real tribute and compliment to some of the young leadership coming up in Africa, the Africa group held tight on the question of the issue here is that the trans-Atlantic slave trade was a crime against humanity, that racism has an economic base, and that reparations is compensation for that. They held to that and so since the United States couldn’t turn it around, what they did was they orchestrated themselves walking out. And it was like a show. So back in the United States, people didn’t get a real view of what was happening there because their view was, “Oh, at the world conference it turned into a battle between the Palestinians and Israelis.” Which had nothing to do with what was going on in Durban! So that way the United States could try to slide out of that they were involved in that. However, the United Nations had passed the declaration.
Now, as Malcolm said, “You can’t go to the criminal and ask for justice.” And his point was always that you have to bring the United States before the world community. And that is what the real effort is. The United States is never going to openly acknowledge the crimes against humanity it created. It is tied inexorably to the very fabric of American life, not just from an ideological point of view but from an economic point of view. They never want to deal with the question that the basis of the development of the United States was fundamentally tied to the enslavement of Africans. They never want to deal with the question of wanting to quantify that in its development African slave labor was the most dynamic profitable source of development in the United States. And they never want to acknowledge that because to acknowledge that is to really make people take a step back and say, “What is my real understanding of what’s going on in this country?” And they never want to do that. So it is the task of the victims to do that, it is the task of other progressive people who are not blinded by racism and self-interest and their own careerism to acknowledge first, just objective reality. What took place? As congresswoman Cynthia McKinney says, “Who knew what and where? What happened, when it happened, and how much of it happened?” They never really want to deal with that, in terms of that.
JC: Right, so how are you trying to spread knowledge about reparations and the struggle within African American communities here and also in the world? I mean, aside from the UN conference, it seems like an issue that doesn’t get a lot of play in the media here at all.
OC: Well, absolutely, absolutely. It doesn’t get a lot of play in the mainstream media, which means it’s grunt-work. It’s the hard, pain-staking grassroots education and agitation that goes on, in terms of the battle of educating and broadening the understanding around what’s actually taking place. It is painful. It is slow. Sometimes it takes leaps forward, sometimes it takes steps backwards, but we believe in the overall motion there is no alternative but to pursue that course. Because at the present rate of development in the world, African people would never ever catch up under the present circumstances, under the status quo. They would never catch up. And our view is almost the classic one: that if somebody steals your car and they take it and when they’re finished with it they sell it to someone else and after that person uses it they sell it to someone else and that person gives it as a gift to someone they know, when you come upon that car, it’s yours. And it was always yours. And through all the different changes of events and circumstances and passing and transactions, it was always yours. And you know that. And knowing that, you go after your car and the possession of it with the determination that it was your car, it belonged to you, and you had a right to it. And it was a crime what was committed for it to be taken from you. Regardless of whose hands that car went to, and regardless of who benefited from having that car, the car belongs to you and any benefits that were made from the theft of that car belong to you too, because it was yours. And that same conceptual question is the one with reparations. The struggle is for people to understand the enormity – and when I say that, it’s almost like the concept of a zillion dollars. Sometimes, the number is so astronomical that you don’t have a frame of reference. But that’s the challenge – the enormity of what took place has been buried under a massive campaign to try to re-write history and establish history from the perpetuation of the perpetrator and not the victim. You know, there’s an old African saying that to truly understand the hunt, you not only have to interview the hunter, but you also have to interview the lion to understand what the hunter’s about. You can’t just interview one side, you have you interview the other side too. Once you interview both sides, then you get two different perspectives on what’s the nature of what’s going on. From the hunter, it’s sport. It’s fun. It’s a challenge. It’s taxing. It’s exhilarating. From the lion’s side, it’s criminal. It’s murder. It’s savagery. It’s wanton killing. It’s genocide. You know what I’m saying? So the question is, from whose perspective do you look at stuff? For young people today I always say that’s the challenge.
JC: Yeah. What steps are you taking to develop a sort of mass movement around the issue of reparations, really mobilizing people behind that?
OC: Well, it takes work! When we came out of Durban at the beginning of September, a couple of things had happened in the United States. Bush was not considered to be a legitimate president, that he had stole the election, that he was an idiot and didn’t even know where places in the world were. Of course, there were far members of the right who thought it was quite a coup that he got elected but remember, Gore had won the popular vote. And Florida had confirmed basically – I mean, all of the facts that came out in Florida in terms of him stealing the election in Florida, wiping people off the ballots, bum rushing the people when they were counting the chads, and stopping it, and then all the way to the supreme court, with – what’s his name? One of the justices on the supreme court, with him having the swing vote and then later on having his son in a very prominent position in Washington. I can’t think of his name.
JC: Was it Scalia? [Ed. Note: Upon reflection, I think he was referring to O'Connor. -- JC.]
OC: Scalia, right. A lot of stuff that wasn’t even known at that time came out later on and literally how the Florida vote was stolen. But the point was, where the country was at that time, was the United States had gotten their ass kicked at the world conference, they got run out of town, people around the world knew that they ran because they didn’t want to deal with the question of racism, Bush was considered an illegitimate president, he didn’t have the actual right to be president and that he was an idiot, and the economic question of the country was taking a tailspin – there was a tremendous recession going on. And so the United States in the world politically was on the defensive. The corporations were on the defense. The ruling class in this country was actually on the defensive. And then, right on their heels, comes 9/11. And the world as it existed on September 10th, became a different world on September 12th. All of the things that you saw were happening on September 10th, by September 12th it was a different world emerging. And in history lots of things will probably come out about what really happened on 9/11. But, you know, detectives will always tell you when they’re doing a criminal investigation, you always look for motives and you always look for who benefited from the crime. You know, all the Agatha Christie detective stories? If you want to find the criminal, find out who benefited from this. In whose interests did this seem to be? And the world of 9/10 and the world of 9/12 in terms of who benefited – if anybody benefited, some of the most right wing, fascistic forces in this country benefited from 9/11. The Bush Administration benefited from 9/11. Who suffered because of 9/11? Many of the progressive movements in this country became victims of this because the United States found a way to go onto a war footing and say, we can now turn loose our military power. And we could no longer negotiate politically and through public opinion, we can now just outright steal and take.
And, so, look at the world today. We have the Patriot Act. Right now, Arab people in this country literally are almost victims of the situation as much as black people. There’re hundreds of Arab people in this country in jails right now for no other reason that that they have been stigmatized in terms of fitting a certain profile. And some laws have been instituted in the United States that we would have thought impossible to institute 20 years ago, you would have thought you were talking about Nazi Germany. But they’re now on the books and in full operation. It’s a different world. So in that sense, our task is to see the bigger picture. And the bigger picture for us is that the reparations question is a real question. That whether the criminals are flexing their muscles now or not, the question is they’re still criminals, and that’s the task, to pull the covers off of who they really are. It’s almost like the Bush Administration is taking the position that they’re Godly. Now, here’s a group of people who couldn’t have anything further from the truth in terms of their relationship to Biblical principles of equality, justice, honesty, humanity. Here are people who sit out one side of their mouth talking about religion and God and out the other side of their mouth are all sitting in relationship to corporations that are raping the world. And yet they sit there with this aura of television and the media saying one thing and not the other. So our task is, as I said, the grunt work – sometimes you see it, sometimes you don’t. The Incarnation Children’s Center and the thing with Columbia University – you know, Columbia University has a long history of criminal activity in New York City.
JC: Yeah, what happened with the Incarnation Children’s Center?
OC: Columbia University is, if I’m not mistaken, the second largest land owner in New York City other than the city government.
JC: Yeah –
OC: And it has always had a predatory nature. You know, all the way back to 1968 there was a battle around building a gymnasium. And the students of Columbia got down with the black community in terms of the invasion of the black community for the development of Columbia University. Columbia University is one of the biggest landlords in terms of – actually it has a plan afoot to develop –
JC: West Harlem, but –
OC: Yeah, West Harlem. And the nature of that development, you know, there was a big struggle that went around the Audubon Ballroom. The Audubon Ballroom and the San Juan theater. There was a big struggle in the 90’s that went down around that. Because the Audubon Ballroom, there was a struggle to make it a landmark because that’s where Malcolm X was assassinated. And Columbia University wanted to build a bio-genetic research center. Now, the interesting thing about that is that bio-genetic research is experimental and can be very dangerous. The Washington Heights community, where the Audubon Ballroom is, like 168th and Audubon, is a Dominican neighborhood. It is one of the most densely populated communities in the United States, Washington Heights. And yet Columbia University is going to build a bio-genetic research center, where usually these centers are built in industrial parks, in suburban or rural areas because of the possibility of the escaping of some kind of form of gas or germ or bacteria or virus that might accidentally escape into the atmosphere. So you usually build these things somewhere where there’s less population – you know, sparsely populated.
Now, here’s Columbia building it in the most densely populated area probably in the United States. So there was a couple of battles that went down there, but Columbia really showed its true nature in terms of fighting to build it. And in collusion with New York City government, one of the gentlemen who was the head of the Columbia architecture school became the head of the New York City planning department. And Mayor Dinkins and him, between the two of them, they gave Columbia a honeymoon deal through ULURP. That’s the Unified Land Use Review Process [Ed. Note: "Uniform Land Use Review Procedure." --JC] through which all property is changed in terms of city government, there’s a process you go though for condemning property and transferring it to the city or to private ownership. Usually you ULURP pieces of property piece by piece. They put together a package so they could ULURP a section of Washington Heights, they turned it over to Columbia University. Now, very interesting, this guy Ron Shiffman, I think that was his name, he was the head of the architectural school at Columbia and then he became head of the city planning department that oversaw Columbia’s ULURP process to take property up in Washington Heights. David Dinkins, who was the mayor at that time, gave Columbia a sweetheart deal of city money to help develop those sites up there. Where, they could have given that amount of money they gave to Columbia which was about 18 million dollars – any community group could have done something just as good with that kind of feed money from the city. The other thing was that when David Dinkins left office, Columbia University gave him a job as a visiting lecturer at Columbia University, probably about 100, 150 thousand dollars a year. A little sweetheart job, David Dinkins teaches at Columbia probably about once a week.
JC: Right and what happened – you mentioned before the clinical trials on black and latino children –
OC: Well, one of the things Columbia is, is one of the leading research facilities in the country. And right along with their general relationship with developing communities or underdeveloped communities, Columbia University is one of the sites that the National Institute of Health has designated as a site to carry out clinical trials. One of the sites they developed was, Columbia University looked at the question of the foster care system and the kids who are in foster care are in fact wards of the state. But they also represent an interesting population with no one fundamentally caring about them except the state, meaning the Administration for Children’s Services, which is notorious in terms of its relationship to children. And Columbia University got together with the Administration for Children’s Services and with Catholic Charities that runs Incarnation Children’s Center and it got permission to use the children in Incarnation Children’s Center which is the center that houses foster children who have HIV, to use those children to carry on clinical trials. And those clinical trials were trials that were utilized not for developing drugs for children, but for developing drugs for adults. And they developed these lethal and toxic drug cocktails through experimenting on these children that they were going to use and bring to the market, to say that we found results with these and, therefore, these drugs can be used against HIV, and therefore these drugs, once rushed through the FDA for certification, would be the only drugs that would be able to be paid for with the United States money that they have put out there to be able to deal with AIDS.
What I mean by that is simply this, that – Dwight Eisenhower, a former president, talked about one of the most dangerous things in America was the Military Industrial Complex, that generals who were in the military come out of the military and join industries that are in the manufacture of weapons. And so, there’s a marriage between the military and the industry, that is, an incestuous relationship where each of them deal with it for their own self-profit. And so very similarly, you see a relationship between educational institutions and the academic community and those corporations that give them the money to carry on their experiments. It’s an incestuous relationship between the two of them to the degree that these corporations, these drug corporations, actually dictate and influence how the scholarly community, in terms of academia, carries on experiments, and brings drugs to the marketplace, also influencing the Food and Drug Administration to, in fact, certify and allow these drugs to be put on the market. So when President Bush says, the United States is going to give 15 billion dollars to fighting AIDS in Africa and in developing countries, they don’t tell you that what they mean by that is the money will only be spent on drugs that the United States has deemed as effective. Those drugs are drugs that have been produced from a marriage between the prostitution of academia with the drug companies. So that these drugs get brought to market with only, on the one hand, limited use, on the other hand, all sorts of side effects that have never been resolved because the Food and Drug Administration and these so-called scientists have said they’re effective. And so these drug companies now set to reap the benefits and these huge profits for bringing the drugs on.
Now who are the victims of this? These drugs are used on basically people of color. And they’re used on basically people of color because then it doesn’t matter if the drugs are effective or of the drugs have a negative impact, because after all, it’s only people of color. So, once again, this marriage of drug companies and these prostituted scientists is all based on the question of money. So Incarnation Children’s Center is an example of that. The clinical trials at Incarnation Children’s Center were begun by Columbia University. They carried on those clinical trials. Dr. Stephen Nicholas was one of the ones who led those trials. So the question is, why do you treat these children with clinical experiments and not give them the best possible care for the diseases you allege that they have? And the simple reason is because these children represent a valuable pool of human beings that can be experimented on without any hue and cry because they’re wards of the state. They don’t have politicians, they don’t have wealthy families, they don’t have advocates that are advocating for them because they’re hidden away in facilities like Incarnation Children’s Center. Our view is that that’s one of the examples we talk about in terms of reparations because the conditions of children of color continue to be the continuing effects of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, that in fact, these children are not real, complete human beings. And where does that concept come from? Because the trans-Atlantic slave trade had relegated human beings to being cannon fodder or stock, like on your farm. And that continues to this very day in terms of how these children are treated.