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Interns Needed

 Quitting America:
The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land

by Randall Robinson
Dutton Publishing
246 pp.

by Kam Williams
“I tried to love America, its people, the dominant majority, their depiction of me, their treatment of mine. I have tried to love America but America would not love the ancient, full African whole of me. The truth, put squarely, is that I am spent, having fought too many American social battles that should never, in a more decent society, have presented themselves as such to begin with.
I am no longer a normal person, as it were, preoccupied, as I have been constrained to be, with race and all the wearying baggage that rakes heavily in its train. But, of course, America had scarcely noticed me. Thus I could not love America. I stopped trying to love America. I have not despaired the moment. For with it has come a measure of unexpected contentment.”
-- Excerpted from Quitting America

When Randall Robinson published The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks in January of 2000, the book was greeted with all the emotionally divisive fervor of the OJ verdict. Blacks generally agreed with the book's basic premise that African-Americans deserved to be compensated for slavery, while the white counter-argument claimed that, if anything, it was blacks who were indebted to America.

As a lawyer, I was quite disappointed by The Debt, because the incendiary tome made mostly an anecdotal rather than a well-reasoned legal case for reparations. Robinson, a Harvard-trained lawyer, simultaneously headed a team of attorneys which filed a futile class action suit, on behalf of descendants of slaves, seeking unspecified damages for the centuries their ancestors spent in servitude.

When the litigation stalled in federal court, he wrote another book, that entitled, The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe Each Other. Robinson, whose late brother, Max, you may remember a national news anchor on ABC-TV News, ultimately got fed up with America and emigrated to St. Kitts in the Virgin Islands. There, he has finally scribed a profound opus more worthy of the attention garnered by his previous two publications.

Perhaps it took renouncing the land of his birth, but Randall speaks his mind freely, here, and in a refreshingly frank, down-to-earth fashion. He sounds like a man venting years of pent up anger as he indicts “brainless, insensate white Americans” for most of the world’s grievances. He claims that whites, "insult black people, brown people, everyone-but-them people, regularly and gratuitously,” pointing out not only domestic mistreatment like Clarence Thomas (“the biggest joke white America ever played on black America”), but also at the exploitation of Africa, Asia, South America and the Middle East, as proof.

He goes on to state that “the deterioration of American society has been alarmingly rapid” due, in part, to an obsessive greed which mistakes “wealth for worth.” Citing the insanely high incidence of violence in this culture, he proceeds to suggest that this civilization might “be disintegrating due to some diffuse and complex social disease eating away at its foundation.”

Sitting in the Caribbean, a safe distance from the demons which evidently once frustrated his tortured soul, Randall Robinson has managed to craft his best work to date. Quitting America, a valuable primer touting the prevailing Third World perspective, indicts America as an avaricious, insensitive imperial power. Given the author’s considerable intellect and impressive credentials, it’s just too bad that he needed to abandon the struggle and his homeland in order to unbridle his passion and write so effectively and honestly.

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