CONVERSATION STOPPING, CONVERSATION CHANGING

Why embrace a language of reparations now? Loury’s concern that speaking of reparations is dangerous ought to give advocates pause. But it may be precisely the dangerous character of the language of reparations—its offense—that makes it so necessary today. Indeed, part of what is singular about reparations talk is that it is heard both as a threat or affront and as a promise of repair. The latter, with its close connection to maintenance, mending, fixing, restoring, and making amends, is akin to the kinds of ongoing political work that Sheldon Wolin (Reference Wolin1989) calls tending. Politically, it matters a great deal that reparations claims have been not only unthinkable, but also largely unspeakable, in mainstream public discourse. The banishment of reparations as unworthy of serious discussion does real work. In the face of what Thomas Shapiro (Reference Shapiro2004) describes as a “U-turn in racial progress” (p. 10), race-neutral and ahistorical public languages can naturalize and even exacerbate racial inequality. Although the idea of Black reparations is often popularly interpreted to mean a one-time pay-out, many reparations activists and scholars have refused such narrow terms. Instead, they have approached reparations as a political language that joins a vision of a reconstituted, multiracial polity to an insistence on confronting racial slavery and its legacies (Biondi Reference Biondi2003; Henry Reference Henry2007; Johnson Reference Johnson2007; Kelley Reference Kelley2002). Following their lead, this section focuses on the distinctive promise of reparations as a political language that: (1) situates political claims within the historical framework of slavery, reconstruction, and segregation; (2) links past to present to future in its demand for concrete forms of redress; and (3) has played an important role in both African American political history and in contemporary democracies in transition.

Reparations language, unlike other forms of political discourse, trains citizens’ sights on the heritage of the living past. Inculcating such a perspective is especially urgent in an era in which both political and popular commitments to color blindness disconnect present circumstances from past policies and relations of power. In the post-civil rights period, notes Eduardo Bonilla-Silva (Reference Bonilla-Silva2006), Americans both disown the overt racism of previous generations and rely on a collection of color-blind “story lines” (p. 76), collective myths that explain away contemporary racial inequalities and disavow responsibility. Among these story lines, claims such as “the past is the past” or “I didn’t own any slaves” discredit not only reparations efforts but any governmental efforts to address racial disparities. Perhaps even more ominously, one psychological study finds that a growing number of White Americans now believe that Whites are the primary victims of racial prejudice and that any forward motion against anti-Black racism entails an equal step backward in the status of Whites (Norton and Sommers, Reference Norton and Sommers2011). To scrutinize these views within a framework that traces links between past crimes and present inequality is not simply to appeal to history. Rather, a reparative frame unsettles progressive slavery-to-freedom narratives and dislodges the hold of color-blind histories that either collapse all historical specificity into an ideal in which race has no legitimate significance or admit the horrors of history only to reinforce a conviction about democratic accomplishment. Reparations talk also reveals how preemptory announcements that “the past is past” discredit some historical claims as wholly backward-looking, while advancing others as essential to Americans’ collective future. Often, these historical stories emphasize White sacrifice (in the Civil War, for example) and public largesse (the welfare state) while occluding the conditions in which African Americans have actually lived since abolition. “Reparations talk,” by contrast, “is exemplary in its historical rigor” (Johnson Reference Johnson2007, p. 55).

The language of reparations is also distinct in its association of the acknowledgment of wrong with a material response. Indeed, speaking of reparations raises unsettling questions about the purpose of the official expressions of regret for slavery and segregation, and calls for racial reconciliation that have proliferated at the local, state, and federal levels over the past five years. Often, these statements have explicitly or implicitly excluded consideration of material redress, whether individual or collective. They have been in effect, if not by design, instances of what Trouillot (Reference Trouillot2000) calls “abortive rituals” (p. 171), efforts that circumvent political efforts to address deep structural inequalities. By contrast, Margaret Urban Walker (2007) notes that reparations connect “acknowledgment” to “exemplification”; reparations efforts are transactional insofar as their meaningfulness depends on both the statement of responsibility and the action(s) it engenders. Although the idea of reparations is not reducible to economic compensation, and it may entail an apology or appeal for reconciliation, the value of those utterances is measured by the degree to which they actually enhance citizens’ well-being. The value of reparations, in other words, resides in their connection to concrete projects of repair. Such projects could encompass a range of initiatives, including major financial commitments to predominantly African American communities and institutions, political and legal reforms, scholarships and educational programs, public history projects, and truth commissions.^{Footnote 4} To see reparations in these terms is to refuse the choice between backward- and forward-looking orientations and to reconceive possible futures by shifting attention from Black disadvantage as a timeless social fact to the ways in which, historically, Black Americans have been “taken advantage of” (Lipsitz Reference Lipsitz2011, p. 2).

Reparations talk also raises questions about why White citizens are incredulous about Black entitlement to the basic benefits of citizenship and suggests that race-blind narratives of capitalist development and individual merit deserve closer scrutiny. To that end, Adrienne Davis (Reference Davis, Martin and Yaquinto2007) remarks, “Putting racism into economic language is important. A significant effect of racism is its dissociation of Blacks from markets and economics. Part of the reason so many Americans are skeptical of awarding reparations is the absence of a compelling discourse of Black economic personality and desert of wealth” (p. 378). Dave Chappelle’s 2003 spoof of societal fantasies about what Black Americans would do with a reparations check (think diamonds, fried chicken, and Cadillac Escalades) illustrates the force of Davis’s concern (Chapelle’s Show 2003). To be sure, it is possible that a language of reparations could do more harm than good, if it were reducible to a single transaction. Melissa Nobles’ (Reference Nobles2008) conclusion that “apologies potentially ‘open the books,’ whereas reparations close them,” registers such a danger (p. 139). Yet neither the language of reparations nor the historical claims of Black reparations activists require such closure.

Reparations talk not only rebuts the historical fallacies that undergird racial realism and offers an alternative to purely symbolic forms of memorial politics, but it also draws from the rich reservoirs of Black political thought and practice from the era of antislavery activism to the present. Speaking of reparations enlarges and deepens political theory by calling attention to often forgotten ideas of celebrated thinkers and leaders, in addition to the ideas that have emerged from less respectable, more nationalist forms of political organizing. On the one hand, taking reparations seriously might lead present-day thinkers to a new examination of Whitney Young’s 1963 proposal for a “Marshall Plan for the Negro”; Young’s proposal included federal investment in jobs, housing, and education for Black Americans to compensate them for years of preferential treatment toward Whites (Sugrue Reference Sugrue2008; Young Reference Young1964).^{Footnote 5} Thinking seriously about reparations could also attune contemporary admirers of Martin Luther King, Jr. (1986) to his references to the unfinished work of emancipation and his reminder that Americans have defaulted on the “promissory note” (p. 217) issued by the founders. On the other hand, and equally crucially, studying Black reparations movements requires engagement with the ideas of activists and intellectuals who have favored revolution over uplift; it reopens the conversation about ideas too casually dismissed as radical, nationalist, and militant (Aiyetoro and Davis, Reference Aiyetoro and Davis2010; Berry 2005; Biondi Reference Biondi2003; Kelley Reference Kelley2002). In this sense, my proposal echoes Mari Matsuda’s (Reference Matsuda1987) call for scholarship that proceeds by “looking to the bottom,” learning from the legal and political concepts of grassroots traditions and dishonored communities. Mary Frances Berry’s (2005) remark that “the poorest African Americans have been the most consistent supporters of reparations for slavery” (p. 230) since the late nineteenth century indicates why addressing reparations demands could upend conventional understandings of who produces theory and who is its object. That many of the leaders of the reparations movement, including Callie House in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and Audley (Queen Mother) Moore during the second half of the twentieth century, have been women further magnifies the importance of listening more attentively. It indicates how much democratic theorists have to learn from the dissident citizens whose critiques have gone unheeded.^{Footnote 6}

In a context in which not only reparations talk but (critical) Black political discourse more generally has been discredited by White Americans as “outside the boundaries of acceptable speech” (Dawson Reference Dawson2011, p. 26), taking reparations seriously may itself be a democratic act. It provides a weapon to counter what Walker (2006) discerns as the “normative contempt” (p. 226) embodied in White unwillingness to probe or be disturbed by the evidence of racial disparities. Developing political claims through a language of reparations need not preclude other possibilities. It does not, for example, undermine Ira Katznelson’s (Reference Katznelson2005) plea to reinvigorate the “idiom of affirmation” (p. 145) or to reconstitute affirmative action so that it is as robust as it was across the generations when its beneficiaries were almost exclusively White. Nonetheless, unlike affirmative action, which is associated with elite policy discourse, reparations language is distinctively challenging to the status quo in that it could not be thought or said in most polite policy circles. By returning to the ideas and words of politically marginal actors, it enlarges the world of democratic ideas that are “thinkable, sayable, legible” (Butler Reference Butler1997, p. 41).

Not only does the language of reparations draw from deep reservoirs of African American struggle, it also situates questions of democracy in the United States within a larger context of global efforts to come to terms with the living legacies of a violent or repressive history. Drawing on a language of reparations has the virtue of moving conversations about race and democracy beyond the United States in ways that not only challenge the boundedness of American politics, but also offer opportunities to learn from political experiments elsewhere, such as South Africa, Morocco, Chile, Peru, Sierra Leone, Timor-Leste, Argentina, and Ghana.^{Footnote 7} This list is incomplete, but it represents a sample of the countries in which reparations programs of some kind have been proposed, if not implemented, as part of the transition from mass violence and/or repression to a more democratic polity. That innovation often emerges from redress efforts in postcolonial and postapartheid settings heightens the democratic stakes of attending to those efforts.^{Footnote 8} Moreover, the currency of reparations language as a worthy topic of debate, if not a realized policy, around the world intimates that the anti-reparations intransigence in the United States is outdated. Examination of recent re-foundings that have involved some promise or at least a discussion of reparations may offer conceptual assistance at a moment when the United States seems firmly in the grip of forms of postracialism that either ignore or justify the degree to which gains of the civil rights era have stalled or regressed. Perhaps it might provincialize America, to borrow a line from Dipesh Chakrabarty (Reference Chakrabarty2007), and provincialize democratic theory by recalling the degree to which apparently universal ideals are born out of a particular, and often violent and antidemocratic, history.

AFTER JUSTICE

For the language of reparations to do the work I suggest, the concept of reparations needs to be approached as a political, and, more specifically, democratic idea. I contend that understanding reparations in this way offers an opportunity to approach the unasked questions of what it would mean to reform the United States as a democratic polity in the aftermath of slavery and segregation, and to make an overdue, explicit commitment to African American citizens. In this regard, my argument departs from most recent academic treatments of Black reparations, which have concentrated on questions of justice. Such an approach is not surprising, but it has been debilitating. Because debates about reparations typically revolve around questions of what is owed to victims and by whom, and they have flourished in law schools and philosophy departments, a preoccupation with justice is to be expected. My approach, like Pablo de Greiff’s (2007), conceives of reparations as “a political and not a juridical [or moral] project” (pp. 156–157). The aim is twofold—to explore reparations as a vehicle for redressing the historic denial and denigration of Black citizenship, on the one hand, and for rethinking the norms and attendant responsibilities of all citizens and the democratic state, on the other. In this sense, reparations are fundamental to democratic reconstruction.

What difference might such a reorientation make? First, shifting the focus of concern from justice to democracy would help to avoid the morass of technical questions—of standing, sovereign immunity, statutes of limitations, and so on—that have tied up legal inquiries in reparations. It would, furthermore, provide an alternative to interminable debates about how to identify appropriate perpetrators and victims or to distinguish between backward- and forward-looking remedies that have animated much of the philosophical literature. Let me offer just one example. In philosophical treatments of reparations, arguments frequently hinge on a distinction between corrective and distributive justice; and reparations advocates have been accused of confusing or conflating the two. Tommie Shelby (Reference Shelby2011), for instance, maintains that “the concept of reparations is fundamentally about rectifying past wrongs. In particular, it is about repairing the damage done by past injustice, restoring the victims to their condition prior to the injustice or, if this isn’t possible, compensating the victims for their losses. Whether such restitution or compensation would help bring about material equality or democratic inclusion is irrelevant” (p. 395). Yet insisting on this neat division between “past injustice,” with its idea of a status quo ante to which the victims might be restored, and current forms of economic inequality obscures the legacies of slavery and segregation, while hobbling efforts to develop creative responses to them. Instead, I echo Trouillot’s (Reference Trouillot2000) caution against a notion of historical responsibility that treats past crimes as discrete events—an original sin—and that ties reparations to a “linear relation between time and responsibility which assumes that the effects of past wrongs are necessarily more concrete when the actual victims are still on the ground” (p. 183).

Conceiving reparations as a democratic idea highlights the ways in which historical forms of racial oppression, exploitation, and violence have impeded the flourishing of Black citizens, and therefore damaged the polity as a whole. According to Ruth Rubio-Marín (Reference Rubio-Marín, Kymlicka and Bashir2008), reparations are “acts of recognition of people as equal citizens and right-holders which, paraphrasing Andrew Schaap, will facilitate the recognition of the other as ‘sharing a space for politics within which citizens divided by memories of past wrongs could debate and contest the terms of their political association’” (p. 211). Not only do they redress specific injuries, she continues, but they serve as “discursive instruments” (p. 212) that enable the articulation of political claims by women and men who have been publicly silenced or discounted.

A language of reparations can call attention to and begin to repair the historical—and ongoing—devaluation of Black citizenship. Ida B. Wells (Reference Wells and Rydell1999) noted at the turn of the twentieth century that the end of slavery did not simply give birth to freedom, as popular histories would have it. Drawing a direct connection between emancipation and abandonment accompanied by the chilling (wishful) thought that Black citizens were “doomed to extinction,” Wells reminds us that it was not simply reparations, but also Black membership in the life of the polity that could not be conceived of in the aftermath of the Civil War.

Her assessment, offered in 1893 as a counterweight to Americans’ self-representation in the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, also undercut the Supreme Court’s judgment in the late nineteenth century that Congress had done too much to remedy the injuries of slavery and its aftermath (Hutchinson 2009). Although Wells does not use the word “reparations,” she presses her readers to consider the harm done by refusing to contemplate what was owed and what was required at slavery’s end. As Robert Westley (Reference Westley2005) notes over a century later: “Actual reparations . . . cannot reinforce the cultural logic of Black devaluation and White privilege the way that denial of reparations does” (p. 106).

In the contemporary context, dismissals of reparations, even by egalitarians, can reinforce this logic and compound the injury. Discerning a connection between the rise of reparations activism in the late twentieth century and the emergence of a discourse of “victims’ rights,” John Torpey (Reference Torpey2007) bemoans the substitution of identity politics for an ideal of equal citizenship and the end of a prior (golden) age of universalist activism. To declare that the idea of equal citizenship “was once aspiration enough for the dispossessed and disenfranchised” (p. 222) is to give weight to a view that Black reparations claims are inherently narrow, particularistic, and illegitimate. In Torpey’s view, reparations demands fragment the polity, substituting “political claims on the basis of people’s membership in groups defined by sociological characteristics rather than . . . their common membership in a politically defined community” (p. 216). By reexamining the struggle for equal citizenship through the lens of African American history, in contrast, Wells prompts her readers to consider not only the obstacles to realizing equal citizenship, but also the democratic costs of proclaiming one’s commitment to equality by defaming the aspirations of women and men to whom it has been repeatedly, and viciously, denied.

Is it hyperbolic to call on Wells’s narrative of abandonment in the context of twenty-first-century struggles? Simply to say that nothing has changed is irresponsible. Yet the postracial insistence that everything has changed is equally worthy of scrutiny and critique. One of the dangers of color blind or postracial conceptions of U.S. democracy is their reinforcement of a history that occludes the actual conditions in which African American citizens have lived since abolition. As both Margaret Somers (Reference Somers2007) and Michael Dawson (Reference Dawson2011) have argued, the betrayal of New Orleans’ most vulnerable residents in 2005 provides a snapshot of citizenship in the postracial epoch. “The story of the Katrina crisis is a social parable of citizenship in America today,” writes Somers (2007, p. 63). Echoing Wells’ account of the post-Civil War landscape, Somers reconstructs the decades-old story of abandonment in which “those left behind in New Orleans to face the storm alone were already a rightless, stateless, and expendable population” (p. 11, emphasis in original). Despite the prevalence of narratives of racial overcoming and the attribution of inequalities to personal or communal failure, Somers contends that in the contemporary United States, “two different systems of inequality and exclusion—one based on immutable, particularistic and arbitrary race-based attributes, the other based on market-driven class inequalities—have been grafted together to create a previously unmatched level of almost total exclusion from civil society, an exclusion that is much greater than the sum of its parts as it amounts to nothing less than nonrecognition” (pp. 105–106). Not even the televised, real-time evidence of the fatal consequences of this “nonrecognition” could shake a widespread conviction that race no longer matters. On the contrary, Dawson (Reference Dawson2011) argues, Black efforts to shape public understanding of Katrina and bring racial questions to the fore were the subject of “ridicule” (pp. 2–3). They were unthinkable.

These histories intimate a kinship between the degradation or expendability of Black citizens, on the one hand, and the failure to consider reparations, on the other. They also suggest why thinking through reparations is potentially critical to the flourishing of democratic life in the United States. In the postracial context, to speak of reparations is not to be enmeshed in the burdens of the past so much as it is to affirm the possibility of a future in which broken promises of citizenship might be redeemed. Reparations talk offers a mechanism through which “to take into account the structures of privilege unleashed by a history of power and domination and to evaluate the current losses induced by the reproduction of these structures” (Trouillot Reference Trouillot2000, p. 183). Reparations, in other words, query what law professor Ariela Gross (Reference Gross2008) calls “the time of slavery” (p. 283) and impels citizens to reconsider their political priorities in light of the history of systemic disregard for some citizens and impunity for others.^{Footnote 9}

Building on Iris Marion Young’s (2011) conception of political responsibility, I suggest how thinking through reparations might provide an alternative to two regular features of public discourse that have stymied efforts to address the legacies of slavery and segregation: collective guilt and personal responsibility. The idea of collective guilt, which is conjured so vividly in the outraged insistence that “I didn’t own slaves,” individualizes and isolates responsibility, reducing it to liability for discrete actions that happened sometime in the past. Young’s argument, on the other hand, moves away from sterile conceptions of responsibility as a matter of inheritance or identity and sidesteps contested divisions of the political world into victims and villains.^{Footnote 10} Young’s (2011) formulation—“being responsible, but not guilty“ (pp. 91–92)—replaces languages of blame and absolution that feed either resentment or the evasion of acknowledgment or both with a call to action. It replaces the fully backward-looking orientation of guilt with “plural temporalities” (p. 108).^{Footnote 11} “Being responsible, but not guilty is a designation that belongs to persons whose active or passive support for governments, institutions, and practices enables culprits to commit crimes and wrongs” (pp. 91–92). Such a conception connects citizens to the actions of the state and incites them to ask what they can do to repair the damage of racist policies and institutions. Because all citizens are expected to take responsibility for unjust and unequal conditions, reparations are recast as a shared endeavor rather than a form of punishment.

Reparations, understood in this way, also unsettle a discourse of personal responsibility that has been deployed to blame African Americans for today’s racial inequalities. The hold of this discourse on the public imagination was vividly displayed on the night of Obama’s election to the presidency, when a national news commentator declared that anyone claiming to have been affected by racial injustice would henceforth have “no more excuses,” as though the one logically followed from the other.^{Footnote 12} Approaching reparations as a form of shared responsibility illuminates why the ground on which such claims are built is racially suspect, historically problematic, and as Nancy Rosenblum aptly discerns, a sign of “political despair” (quoted in Young 2011, p. 40).

Crucially, an emphasis on citizens’ responsibilities supplements arguments for reparations that focus wholly on the state, but it does not supplant them. Rather, conceiving reparations as reconstruction indicates that citizen and state action are intertwined and must be mutually responsive. To develop a more robust account of political responsibility is not to shift the burden of racial progress entirely to the shoulders of the citizenry. As Charles Henry (Reference Henry2007) observes, it was precisely this kind of shift that effectively undermined any positive political action by President Clinton’s advisory committee on race. One could raise similar concerns about recent public apologies that have called for racial reconciliation without delineating any concrete measures that the state might take to undo the ongoing effects of racial power inequities. Accordingly, my argument resembles Robert Fullinwider’s (Reference Fullinwider2000) account of reparations as a matter of both corporate (state) and civic (citizens’) responsibility. Fullinwider frames his argument as a matter of moral liability for the crimes of the past, but I want to suggest that a political conception of responsibility closer to Young’s allows reparations advocates to link a backward-looking assessment of harm to a forward-looking conception of democratic reconstruction.

At this point, it should be clear that my formulation of reparations “after justice” is misleading. It would be more accurate to say that I ask what a political account of reparations can do that prevailing philosophical and legal discussions have missed. Of course, if this supplement enables us to rethink the democratic value of reparations, it also has its own dangers. It is possible that the embrace of reparations could reinforce “histories that either implicitly or explicitly celebrate the advent of the modern state and the idea of citizenship” (Chakrabarty Reference Chakrabarty2007, p. 44) and that disguise the repression and violence that have defined this American statehood from its inception. Perhaps the most obvious worry is the inherently exclusionary character of citizenship and its historical dependence on the drawing of borders between members and their others. As a political project, reparations for slavery and Jim Crow need not, and cannot, be tied to a fixed status quo that depends on dividing members from outsiders. On the contrary, reparations claims ought to be oriented toward questions of how social and political arrangements might be otherwise constructed. Their power resides in the possibility of constituting the “people” without resuscitating the familiar set of assumptions captured in James Baldwin’s (Reference Baldwin1984) observation that “the Black man, to become truly human and acceptable, must first become like us” (p. 45). Extending Baldwin’s logic not only to African Americans but to immigrants, Muslims, criminals or others figured as fundamentally not like us, a democratic reparations project would highlight the urgency of conceiving forms of U.S. citizenship that are not predicated on the denigration of outsiders. Here again, Young’s conception of shared responsibility is illuminating. For it is oriented toward the development of new forms of solidarity. Young (2011) views solidarity as “a relationship among separate and dissimilar actors who decide to stand together, for one another” (p. 120). Pablo de Greiff (2007) similarly understands reparations to be tied to the expression of solidarity, a manifestation of “the interest of the traditionally most advantaged in the interests of the least favored” (p. 165). In other words, a commitment to reparations could signal an acknowledgment of Americans’ repeated failures to stand together and a repudiation of the boundary-drawing that has proved essential to the maintenance of racial hierarchy.