As a conclusion to our 2002-03 Faculty Seminar's focus on "Race, Justice, and the Politics of Memory", the Franklin Humanities Institute hosted two public conversations on "Reparations in Perspective."

Full descriptions of both events, as well as complete videos of both conversations are available below.

Click to see a pdf version of our poster for these events.

Click to read the Duke press release about these events.

Click to read an account of the first event from the Duke News Service.

REPARATIONS IN PERSPECTIVE: Part I
A Panel Discussion

Monday, April 7, 2003
4:00 - 6:00 pm EDT
Bryan Center, Von Canon B & C, Duke's West Campus
Free and open to the public

Click the button above to view a full video of this discussion.

How have different societies redressed (or failed to redress) past violence? Scholars assess legal, philosophical, and economic issues surrounding reparations to descendants of African-American slaves in the context of Ancient Roman encounters with Egypt and India, white
interactions with Native Americans, Japanese reparations to Koreans, and South African attempts at "truth and reconciliation."

Introduction: Cathy N. Davidson, Director, Franklin Humanities Institute

Distinguished opening remarks by Dr. John Hope Franklin ,
James B. Duke Professor Emeritus, Duke University
Historian, Intellectual Leader, and Life-long Civil Rights Activist.

Panelists and A Preview of Issues:

Chungmoo Choi, Dept. of East Asian Languages & Literature, University of California at Irvine

The Question of Justice and Neighborliness: The Case of Korean Comfort Women

The international tribune on the sexual slavery by the Japanese military was held in Tokyo in December 2000. There the court arrived at the verdict that the former emperor of Japan Hirohito was guilty of the crime against humanity. What does this historical guilty verdict mean to the surviving victims of military sexual slavery? What do the septuagenarian women who gather for the Wednesday protest at the Japanese Embassy every Wednesday for over a dozen years want? Are there ways to equate the exchange value of monetary compensation for the symbolic value of dignity and honor? What alternative ways of thinking may be available for us to make such equasion possible? These are some of the questions I would like to raise for the historic trauma that intersects colonialism, race, gender, sexuality, and body.

Adrienne Davis, School of Law, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

.

I plan to focus on two things: first, I’ll argue that one of the hallmarks of American slavery was the wholesale assault on what I’ll characterize as “black economic personality.” We tend to be more familiar with the effects of racial subordination on other aspects of black legal personality. We tend to be more familiar with the effects of law on other legal personality. When asked, many would cite as primary indicia of black subordination exclusion from basic citizenship rights/rites such as voting and jury participation, and marginalization in criminal law, both as defendants and victims. But, by excluding them from the primary mechanisms of generating, holding, and transmitting wealth, early American law systematically denied enslaved blacks legal subjectivity in the economic arena, as well. I’ll show how this economic disfranchisement not only materially devastated the enslaved community, but also reinforced the exclusion of all blacks from meaningful citizenship. I characterize it as an assault on economic personality for two reasons. I want to stress the ways that economic injury resulted in not only material deprivation, but also in a lingering suspicion of black economic relations and hostility toward black claims made on the nation’s wealth. Tellingly, black economic injury is one of the most enduring effects of slavery and has been the most difficult to repair. The next focus of my comments will be on recovering the Thirteenth Amendment as a tool of achieving racial equality.

Wahneema Lubiano, Dept of Literature, Duke University

I've been working on thinking through some of the possibilities of the struggle for reparations to make apparent, in the general public domain, ideas and arguments around labor, redress of theft, history's relation to public imaginings of social and economic justice, and attention to the idea of collective responsibility in the making of a polity. Black reparations' struggle and discourse broaden and reenergize ideas about what goes into the making of a culture, what a culture "knows," and what it can attend to and/or repair. Attending to the idea of and activism around black reparations helps us think the relation of the state to private notions about ideas of home, property, mortgages, the distribution of wealth, the making of our present corporate culture, and group acquiescence in the distribution of private and public assets.

Grant Parker, Dept of Classics, Duke University

Reparations the Athenian Way

How can the wrongdoings of the recent past be addressed, in ways that are both legitimate and effective in creating a new order? An episode in ancient Greek history offers some points for consideration. The Peloponnesian War (431-404BCE) was disastrous for Athens, and its aftermath severely dislocated political life. A number of aristocrats staged a coup, replacing the city-state?s democratic institutions (e.g. the lawcourts) with oligarchic ones. A board of thirty ruled brutally and rapaciously under the control of the victorious Spartans, who stationed a garrison on the Athenian Acropolis. These Thirty Tyrants had some 1,500 of their Athenian enemies put to death before a moderate faction within the group seized power. Full democracy was restored under the mediation of the Spartan king Pausanias, who intervened by force. An amnesty agreement initially protected the hated oligarchs, but most were eventually killed. Meanwhile the Athenian citizens, restrained by the amnesty, identified an eccentric elderly philosopher as a culprit, thereby making Socrates (executed in 399) a scapegoat of its defeat.

Orin Starn, Dept of Cultural Anthropology, Duke University

My presentation will focus on the theme of violence, apology, and reparations in the context of Native America. The particular way that thinking about reparations for Native American losses of life and land has been quite different from the way the issues has been debated for African Americans and slavery, or Japanese Americans and internment. I'm interested in what these differences say about the questions of race, identity, history and memory in this country.

Moderated by William Darity, Jr., Director, Institute of African-American
Research, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Concluding Remarks: Richenel Ansano, Associate Director, Franklin Humanities Institute.

The audience will have an opportunity to ask questions and provide comments after brief remarks and a discussion among the panelists.

REPARATIONS IN PERSPECTIVE: Part II
A Three-Way Videoconference with Scholars from Duke, Harvard, and Spelman

Wednesday April 9, 2003
12:00 noon till 2:00 pm EDT
Room 240, John Hope Franklin Center
2204 Erwin Road, Durham, NC 27708
Free & open to the public.

Duke's Franklin Humanities Institute Faculty Seminar fellows discussed reparations with scholars from Harvard University and Spelman College.

Speakers from Duke included:
(Click links below for available full texts of remarks)
Susan Thorne, History Department
Grant Farred, Literature Program
Ian Baucom, English Department

Speakers from Harvard included:
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, African-American Studies
Charles Ogletree, Law School

See the Spelman College announcement of this event.

For more information on either event, call 919-668-1901.

The Franklin Humanities Institute gratefully acknowledges the ongoing support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the offices of the Dean of Arts and Sciences and the Vice Provost for Interdisciplinary Studies at Duke University.