History and current politics may thwart Africans and African Americans' request for slavery reparations at the upcoming United Nations conference on racism, says a UC Davis black history and race relations scholar.

At the first-of-its-kind World Conference Against Racism this month in South Africa, one possible topic is a demand that countries that prospered from slavery and colonization should apologize and pay compensation.

"Much of this is based on analogies to the Jews in the Holocaust and to the Japanese American internment during World War II," says Clarence Walker, history professor and author of "Deromanticizing Black History: Critical Essays and Reappraisals."

"There are no parallels with the Jews: It was the U.S. government that ended slavery, but it wasn't the German government that ended the Holocaust," Walker says. "What blacks did is fight in the Civil War, which gave them their citizenship and a stake in the American nation."

The Japanese internment analogy has some justification as a parallel argument for reparations, Walker agrees, but he is concerned with a bigger historical problem: Some of the same African kingdoms that originally suffered from slavery both practiced it themselves and profited by transporting slaves to the New World.

Doubting that U.S. public opinion or politics would support reparations based on race, Walker says a better solution would be to use a class-based compensation that benefits a wider group of disadvantaged people.

Walker specializes in the study of black history, the sociology of American race relations and American popular culture.