Introduction

I have been asked to summarize Monday’s conference for the benefit of those who were not able to attend. I cannot possibly do justice in my five minutes to the range and subtlety of the presentations. I will simply identify three themes that recurred in each of the presentations—and the fascinating discussion that followed.

Themes

1. The first theme suggested by the very subject of reparations is the vital connection between the past and the present, between memory and justice.. Or, to paraphrase Marx, history weighs like a nightmare on the living, whether we own it or not.

a. And especially it would seem if we do not. Several of our speakers drew our attention to the very real as well as linguistic connection between amnesty, which is perhaps the opposite of reparation, and amnesia.

b. Amnesty and amnesia certainly figure prominently in slavery’s American heritage.

i. The general amnesty granted to supporters of the Confederacy after the American Civil War required

ii. a collective forgetting of slavery’s violence on the part of whites throughout the nation. This forgetting was the price --or rather the prize --of a national re-union predicated on the continued hyper-exploitation of the formerly enslaved.

c. It was precisely this forgetting of slavery’s crimes that made possible their continuation well after emancipation. The conditions that characterized slavery as a crime against humanity on a scale without historical precedent did not come to an abrupt end in 1863 or in1865. The large-scale theft of labor, property, person, family integrity, dignity, indeed of life itself which characterized the slave world order would also haunt the African American experience during the reign of terror we know as Jim Crow.

d. Dr. Franklin’s childhood memories of the race riot in Tulsa in 1921 brought this terrible history home to us in a painfully immediate way.

i. A six year old’s terrified uncertainty about his father’s survival was followed by the crushing realization of the material loss his family suffered in the destruction of their new home.

ii. Also traumatic was Dr. Franklin’s separation from his father for four years after the riot while their home was being rebuilt.

iii. But the importance of memory to the human condition is suggested by the enormous pain inflicted by those who responded to the riot victims struggle for redress with contemptuous derision. Apologies may not be enough, but they are certainly a necessary beginning.

e. Dr. Franklin’s experience also reminds us of something the other panelists underscored, and that is the wide variety of injuries that require redress through reparations. In addition to the theft of labor, life and property committed against African Americans, these include the expropriation of Native American land as well as remains, the sexual enslavement of Korean comfort women, the internment of Japanese Americans, as well as the genocidal atrocities to which European Jews, East European Muslims, and Rwandan Tutsis, among others, have been subjected. In all these cases, reparations of some sort has been linked to the restoration of a basic dignity their refusal is meant to deny.

2. The second theme that emerged from Monday’s conference has to do with the inevitably political implications of historical memory. This becomes most evident, perhaps, when we confront the question posed by Professor Davis, ‘Why not reparations?’

a. To answer this question, we need to think about the nature of the perpetrating group’s investment in its victims’ perpetual degradation, an investment Professor Parker cautions is always historically specific.

i. This investment is partly moral.

As the Franz Fanon observed in the course of his psychiatric treatment of French soldiers who were tormented by the atrocities they had committed during the Algerian war for independence, violence dehumanizes not its victims but its perpetrators. The latter must then continually seek to dehumanize their victims if they are to avoid confronting their own inhumanity. In this immoral economy, the worse the crime the greater the motive to erase it from memory.

ii. Material investments are obviously crucial as well. As Professor Davis reminded us, the wealth that catapulted the United States to its present global economic supremacy was produced in large part by the labor of enslaved Africans. The enormity of this debt is registered in the extent to which African Americans’ economic wellbeing continues to be experienced as a direct threat. Jim Crow’s racial terror singled out the more successful within the African American community for particular attention.

b. Another angle from which the politics of memory become visible is the varying fates of different demands for reparations. What makes some wrongs worthy of redress and other wrongs unspeakable? Professor Starn reminded us, for example, that the memory of native oppression is more readily acknowledged in US today than the memory of enslavement. And reparations have been forthcoming for victims of the German Holocaust and of Japanese internment

c. Just as there are a diversity of injuries requiring redress, so too does redress necessarily take a diversity of forms. Professor Choi poignantly reminded us that what repairs one form of injustice isn’t adequate to another.

i. In the absence of an apology from the Japanese government, Korean comfort women view the offer of money as insult, a payment for their silence that would render them complicit in forgetting.

ii. The same holds within as well as between groups. Native Americans have been granted licences for casino gambling and have successfully secured the return of human remains and sacred artifacts from museums. Alongside money payments to individuals, such as were given to the Nisei, reparations might take the form of public funding for community projects, including one audience member’s suggestion of an education trust fund and another audience member’s suggestion of support for repatriation

iii. Options, as Professor Davis reminded us, are key.

3. The third theme to which Monday’s panel drew our attention is the transformative potential of the reparations struggle itself. Remembering the past changes the future.

a. As Professor Lubiano brilliantly reminded us, the conversation about reparations has the potential to transform not just the policy but the very polity we inhabit. By drawing attention to America’s debt to the labor of the enslaved, the very subject of reparations challenges property’s hegemony in the national imaginary. Our discussion of slave reparations restores to labor more generally a dignity denied throughout our culture.

b. The reparations conversation also reconfigures the legal subject. Reparations challenge liberalism’s emphasis on the individual by exposing the connections between individual injury to group identity, thereby rendering collectivities legal subjects.

Professor Starn cautions us that identity itself is problematic; it is as much a politically contested construct as memory itself. The racial subjects of reparations discourse are fictions to some degree; he points to native intermarriage with whites; the same individual might have ancestors who were perpetrators as well as victims of crimes in need of reparation. And all of us are equally capable of inflicting injury on groups constructed for ideological ends. Group belonging is not a matter of blood or descent or even identification, it is, rather, a material result of the wrong or wrongs inflicted. A recent immigrant from Africa whose ancestors were never enslaved will suffer from its effects the minute he arrives in the US.

c. And this may be my own peculiar investment in this conversation as a descendant of perpetrators of slavery and Jim Crow, but reparations may also help repair the souls of white folk. As Professor Choi reminded us, the concept of atonement has a long religious pedigree; in the Judeo-Christian tradition, compensating one’s victims is the very foundation on which community is continuously re-built. The Roman Catholic rite of confession and penance has been renamed the rite of reconciliation; it clearly frames confession and atonement as the necessary preconditions of one’s reconciliation of self with the other—the love that is god.

d. This model of justice has transnational ramifications that are painfully urgent today. The current war weighed on our panelists like the nightmare that it is. We might want to attend to the parallels between the liberal exclusion of crimes committed by and against groups to the United State’s refusal to subject itself to international law and its denial to other countries of the very freedoms it claims to promote—the right to self determination or national sovereignty foremost among them.

The nation state is no more legitimate a frontier of justice than the individual. We know that the pretense to universalism espoused by international law as well as liberalism are betrayed in practice and that these exclusions are constitutive. However, the liberal tradition has also constituted a double-edged sword, a weapon with which justice can be pursued as well as contained. The ongoing struggle for reparations is a very good example of the real power that can come from the audaciously utopian action of taking liberal ideals at their word.