Randall Robinson
Encyclopedia
TransAfrica Forum
TransAfrica Forum is an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. that seeks to influence the foreign policy of the United States concerning African countries and the African diaspora.-See also:* Diaspora politics in the United States...
. He is known particularly for his impassioned opposition to South African apartheid, and for his advocacy on behalf of Haiti
Haiti
Haiti , officially the Republic of Haiti , is a Caribbean country. It occupies the western, smaller portion of the island of Hispaniola, in the Greater Antillean archipelago, which it shares with the Dominican Republic. Ayiti was the indigenous Taíno or Amerindian name for the island...
an immigrants and Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Jean-Bertrand Aristide is a Haitian former Catholic priest and politician who served as Haiti's first democratically elected president. A proponent of liberation theology, Aristide was appointed to a parish in Port-au-Prince in 1982 after completing his studies...
.
Early life and education
Robinson was born in Richmond, VirginiaRichmond, Virginia
Richmond is the capital of the Commonwealth of Virginia, in the United States. It is an independent city and not part of any county. Richmond is the center of the Richmond Metropolitan Statistical Area and the Greater Richmond area...
to Maxie Cleveland Robinson and Doris Robinson Griffin, both teachers. The late ABC News
ABC News
ABC News is the news gathering and broadcasting division of American broadcast television network ABC, a subsidiary of The Walt Disney Company...
anchorman, Max Robinson
Max Robinson
Max Robinson was an American broadcast journalist, and ABC News World News Tonight co-anchor. He was the first African American broadcast network news anchor in the United States and one of the first television journalists to die of AIDS...
, was his elder brother. He graduated from Virginia Union University
Virginia Union University
Virginia Union University is a historically black university located in Richmond, Virginia, United States. It took its present name in 1899 upon the merger of two older schools, Richmond Theological Institute and Wayland Seminary, each founded after the end of American Civil War by the American...
, and earned a law degree at Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School
Harvard Law School is one of the professional graduate schools of Harvard University. Located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it is the oldest continually-operating law school in the United States and is home to the largest academic law library in the world. The school is routinely ranked by the U.S...
.
He also has an older sister, actress Jewel Robinson and a younger sister, Pastor Jean Robinson. Both sisters live and work in the Washington, D.C. area.
He and his first wife had a daughter, Anike Robinson, who is a teacher and artist, and a son, Jabari Robinson. He is married to Hazel Ross-Robinson, his second wife, and they have a daughter named Khalea Ross-Robinson.
Career
Robinson founded the TransAfrica ForumTransAfrica Forum
TransAfrica Forum is an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. that seeks to influence the foreign policy of the United States concerning African countries and the African diaspora.-See also:* Diaspora politics in the United States...
in 1977, which-according to its mission statement-serves as a "major research, educational and organizing institution for the African-American community, offering constructive analysis concerning U.S. policy as it affects Africa and the African Diaspora
African diaspora
The African diaspora was the movement of Africans and their descendants to places throughout the world—predominantly to the Americas also to Europe, the Middle East and other places around the globe...
(African-Americans and West Indians who can trace their heritage back to the dispersion of Africans that occurred as a result of the Transatlantic slave trade) in the Caribbean and Latin America." He served in the capacity as TransAfrica's president until 2001.
During that period he gained visibility for his political activism, organizing a sit-in at a South-African embassy in order to protest the apartheid era government's policy of segregation and discrimination against black South Africans, a personal hunger strike
Hunger strike
A hunger strike is a method of non-violent resistance or pressure in which participants fast as an act of political protest, or to provoke feelings of guilt in others, usually with the objective to achieve a specific goal, such as a policy change. Most hunger strikers will take liquids but not...
aimed at pressuring the United States government into restoring Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Jean-Bertrand Aristide
Jean-Bertrand Aristide is a Haitian former Catholic priest and politician who served as Haiti's first democratically elected president. A proponent of liberation theology, Aristide was appointed to a parish in Port-au-Prince in 1982 after completing his studies...
to power after the short-lived coup by General
General
A general officer is an officer of high military rank, usually in the army, and in some nations, the air force. The term is widely used by many nations of the world, and when a country uses a different term, there is an equivalent title given....
Raoul Cédras
Raoul Cédras
Raoul Cédras is a former military officer, and was de facto ruler of Haiti from 1991 to 1994.-Background:Cédras was educated in the United States and was a member of the US-trained Leopard Corps...
, and dumping crates filled with bananas onto the steps of the United States Trade Representative in order to protest what he views as discriminatory trade policies aimed at Caribbean nations, such as protective tariffs and import quotas
Import quota
An import quota is a type of protectionist trade restriction that sets a physical limit on the quantity of a good that can be imported into a country in a given period of time....
.
In 2001 he authored a book "The Debt: What America Owes To Blacks", which presented an in-depth outline regarding his belief that wide-scale reparations
Reparations for slavery
Reparations for slavery is a proposal that some type of compensation should be provided to the descendants of enslaved people in the United States, in consideration of the coerced and uncompensated labor their ancestors performed over several centuries...
should be offered to African-Americans as a means of redressing what he perceives as centuries of discrimination and oppression directed at the group. The book argues for the enactment of race-based reparation programs as restitution for the continued social and economic issues in the African-American community, such as a high proportion of incarcerated black citizens and the differential in cumulative wealth between white and black Americans. Although some reviewers praised Robinson for delving into a controversial topic that had not been addressed in the mainstream media, others criticized him for reverse racism
Reverse racism
Reverse racism is a controversial term which refers to racial prejudice or discrimination directed against the traditionally dominant racial group in a society. It is sometimes used as a pejorative description of systems which discriminate in favour of members of racial minorities, more formally...
, and asserted that his own personal success contradicted the dire portrait he portrayed of the conditions faced by African-Americans living in the United States.
In 2003 Robinson turned down an honorary degree from Georgetown University Law Center.
Robinson began teaching at The Pennsylvania State University — Dickinson School of Law in the fall of 2008.
Exile
In the same year that this book was published Robinson quit his position as head of TransAfrica and decided to emigrateEmigrate
Emigrate is a heavy metal band based in New York, led by Richard Z. Kruspe, the lead guitarist of the German band Rammstein.-History:Kruspe started the band in 2005, when Rammstein decided to take a year off from touring and recording...
to St. Kitts - where his wife, who is a member of a prominent Kittitian family, was born - a decision chronicled in his book, "Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from his Native Land."
While he still keeps a home in Virginia
Virginia
The Commonwealth of Virginia , is a U.S. state on the Atlantic Coast of the Southern United States. Virginia is nicknamed the "Old Dominion" and sometimes the "Mother of Presidents" after the eight U.S. presidents born there...
, Robinson's self-imposed exile is caused by what he describes as his antipathy towards America's domestic policies and foreign policy, both of which he believes exploit minorities and the poor.
Post exile work
In September 2005, Robinson wrote in a Huffington Post blog blasting the Bush Administration's handling of the Hurricane KatrinaHurricane Katrina
Hurricane Katrina of the 2005 Atlantic hurricane season was a powerful Atlantic hurricane. It is the costliest natural disaster, as well as one of the five deadliest hurricanes, in the history of the United States. Among recorded Atlantic hurricanes, it was the sixth strongest overall...
crisis, "It is reported that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive." Subsequently, Robinson issued a retraction of the claim as it proved unsubstantiated. Robinson is currently serving as Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the Pennsylvania State University Dickinson School of Law.
Publications
- An Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a PresidentAn Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a PresidentAn Unbroken Agony: Haiti, From Revolution to the Kidnapping of a President is a book on the history of Haiti by Randall Robinson ....
, Perseus Books Group, 2007. ISBN 0-465-07050-7 - Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man From His Native Land, Plume BooksPlume (publishing)Plume is a publishing company in the United States, founded in 1970 as the trade paperback imprint of New American Library. Today it is a division of Penguin Group, with a backlist of approximately 700 titles....
(Reprint), 2004. ISBN 0-452-28630-1 - The Reckoning: What Blacks Owe to Each Other, Plume (Reprint), 2002. ISBN 0-452-28314-0
- The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks, Plume, 2001. ISBN 0-452-28210-1
- Defending the Spirit, Plume, (1999). ISBN 0-452-27968-2
External links
- Randall Robinson official website
- Randall Robinson interviewed on Conversations from Penn State
- Randall Robinson on Democracy Now
- * Huffington Post biography
- African American Registry biography
- Randall Robinson Interview in The Progressive Magazine
- Randall Robinson: Aristide Says 'Tell the World It Is a Coup' Interview by Amy Goodman on "Democracy Now."
- Review of Randall Robinson, Alex Dupuy, and Peter Hallward books on Haiti NACLA, 2008