Reparations & Identity Politics- Balfour

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Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Political Theory. http://www.jstor.org Reparations after Identity Politics Author(s): Lawrie Balfour Source: Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 6 (Dec., 2005), pp. 786-811 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30038464 Accessed: 07-07-2015 12:50 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. This content downloaded from 129.89.24.43 on Tue, 07 Jul 2015 12:50:35 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

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Article about discourse in reparations debate.

Transcript of Reparations & Identity Politics- Balfour

Page 1: Reparations & Identity Politics- Balfour

Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Political Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

Reparations after Identity Politics Author(s): Lawrie Balfour Source: Political Theory, Vol. 33, No. 6 (Dec., 2005), pp. 786-811Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30038464Accessed: 07-07-2015 12:50 UTC

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 129.89.24.43 on Tue, 07 Jul 2015 12:50:35 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Page 2: Reparations & Identity Politics- Balfour

REPARATIONS AFTER IDENTITY POLITICS

LAWRIE BALFOUR

University of Virginia

The end of the twentieth century witnessed a resurgence of demands for reparations for slavery and segregation in the United States. At the same time, a chorus of prominent political theorists warned against the threat "identity politics" posesfor democratic politics. This essay considers whether it is possible to construct an argumentfor reparations that responds to these concerns,

particularly as they are articulated by Wendy Brown. To do so, I explore how Brown's analysis of the dangers ofpolitical organizing around "wounded identities" and ofappealing to the statefor redress might inform and be informed by arguments for black reparations.

Keywords: reparations, slavery, race, identity politics, Wendy Brown

Modern life begins with slavery.

-Toni Morrison1

INTRODUCTION: ANTI-IDENTITY POLITICS IN THE "AGE OF APOLOGY"2

On a 1998 trip to Africa, President Bill Clinton almost apologized for the slave trade. "Going back to the time before we were even a nation," he observed, "European-Americans received the fruits of the slave trade, and we were wrong in that."3 That Clinton was moved to offer an acknowledgment of American complicity in the transport and subsequent enslavement of mil- lions of Africans is perhaps not surprising. His comments were in keeping

AUTHOR'S NOTE: Earlier versions of this paper were presented at the 2004 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association and at the 2005 conference on "Comparative Per-

spectives on Race, Nationalism, and the Politics of Memory: Poland and the United States" in Warsaw. I am grateful to the organizers and participants in both sessions, and I owe special thanks for the careful readings of Adrienne Davis, Roxanne Euben, William Freehling, Joel

Olson, Thomas McCarthy, George Shulman, Stephen White, and an anonymous reviewer for Political Theory.

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 33 No. 6, December 2005 786-811 DOI: 10. 177/0090591705279067 © 2005 Sage Publications

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with the tenor of an age in which victims of identity-based injustices around the world were demanding and receiving both symbolic and material redress, in which states' claims to democratic legitimacy in the present were increas- ingly connected to a willingness to confront the crimes of the past.4 Also unsurprising was the swift, outraged response Clinton's remarks generated at home-most notably, Representative Tom DeLay accused the president of behaving treasonously by criticizing the United States on foreign soil-and the fact that they issued in no substantial changes in policy.

While it is tempting to dismiss the near-apology and the ensuing fracas as a clash between the merely symbolic or therapeutic racial politics of the Clinton administration on one hand, and partisan sniping on the other, to do so would be to neglect deeper questions raised and evaded in the Clinton- DeLay exchange. Regardless of the intentions of the actors, the drama reveals the degree to which the ghosts of slavery still shadow political life in the United States. For political theorists, furthermore, it conjures a range of ques- tions never articulated by Clinton and DeLay: How ought we to understand the relationship between past crimes and present political arrangements? What kind of historical consciousness does the practice of democracy require? To what degree and how should past injustices shape oppositional politics? Recent developments in left politics and political theorizing in the United States suggest two different and apparently unreconcilable responses to these questions."

On one hand, the late twentieth century witnessed the reemergence of the movement for reparations for slavery and Jim Crow and an explosion of scholarly literature inspired by this movement. Although the idea of demand- ing redress for slavery dates back at least to the mid-nineteenth century,6 it has acquired new purchase at a moment when affirmative action programs are being attacked and dismantled, when school resegregation is on the rise, when felony disenfranchisement, deindustrialization, and the depletion of black communities as a result of the "war on drugs" aggravate the political and economic marginalization of these communities, and when issues of racial injustice go largely unnoted in national political agendas. In lieu of a politics organized around enacting and enforcing formal guarantees of equal- ity, many activists and scholars have turned to the task of formulating politi- cal projects that explicitly account for ongoing effects of slavery and Jim Crow.7 Although varying widely in their assessment of both the justifications for and desired ends of reparations, these efforts comprise a movement whose implications for political theory are substantial. Most fundamentally, they provide a counternarrative to received understandings of the develop- ment of democracy in the United States and challenge theorists' persistent blind spot with regard to matters of race. For even as political theorists

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increasingly address questions of identity, observes Hawley Fogg-Davis, the discipline "has not given theoretical priority to American race."8 The rise of reparations politics presses radical, progressive, and liberal political theorists to consider whether and to what extent race blindness disables us from think- ing creatively about democracy in the United States.9

During roughly the same period, however, a substantial group of scholars questioned the value of "identity politics," contending that political organiz- ing around historically marginalized group identities substitutes preoccupa- tion with past injuries for emancipatory aspirations and divides the left into rival factions and the world into victims and villains. These arguments, like the identity-based movements they challenge, are heterogeneous, but Susan Bickford usefully crystallizes three central complaints: "ressentiment, balkanization, and regulation."10 At first glance, reparations politics appears susceptible to all three. Insofar as reparations advocates focus on past and present injury and insist on the relationship of injury and identity in their appeals for redress, they risk enshrining a view of black citizens as victims whose moral authority is not subject to discussion or critique; insofar as they restrict their focus to injustices suffered by African Americans and remedies that target black communities, they invite the charge of divisiveness; and insofar as their understanding of those injustices and remedies relies on unproblematized conceptions of blackness and whiteness, they engage in the kind of shoring up of borders, internal and external, that produces new exclu- sions. Critics of identity politics and advocates for reparations thus appear to be at an impasse. Is the recent popularity of the idea of reparations politically counterproductive, an instance of one or more of the pitfalls the critics of identity politics describe? Or are anti-identity politics arguments merely a recent manifestation of a longer history of resistance, particularly on the part of white Americans, to acknowledging the grievances of black citizens?

Believing that there is a limited truth to both sides, this essay aims to engage them together by reading Wendy Brown's subtle and troubling account of the ways that identity-based movements can subvert their own democratic aspirations against what I take to be the most persuasive argu- ments for reparations. Brown worries that the pursuit of legal redress for the subordination of racial and sexual minorities, women, and other margin- alized groups signals a departure from the pursuit of freedom. This approach, she writes, bears too close a resemblance to what Nietzsche calls a "politics of ressentiment":

Developing a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured, it delimits a specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as responsible for the "injury" of social subordination. It fixes the identities of the injured

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and the injuring as social positions, and codifies as well the meanings of their actions against all possibilities of indeterminacy, ambiguity, and struggle for resignification or repositioning. This effort also casts the law in particular and the state more generally as neutral arbiters of injury rather than as themselves invested with the power to injure. Thus, the effort to "outlaw" social injury powerfully legitimizes law and the state as appropriate protectors against injury and casts injured individuals as needing such pro- tection by such protectors. Finally, in its economy of perpetrator and victim, this project seeks not power or emancipation for the injured or the subordinated, but the revenge of punishment, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does.l1

Although the reparations movement differs from the prohibitionist cam- paigns against pornography and hate speech that are the subject of much of Brown's critique, she nonetheless sees it as part of the larger trend. "In con- temporary political parlance," she writes, "the relation of the present to the past is most often figured through idealizations and demonizations of partic- ular epochs or individuals on the one hand, and reparations and apologies for past wrongs on the other."12

Much of the power of Brown's analysis derives from its sympathy with the stated ends of the efforts she criticizes. She speaks from the perspective of a fellow traveler, a veteran of feminist and other struggles who reflects on the unintended results of her own political investments and who conveys a sense of personal peril at the apparent impotence of oppositional movements today. Unlike critics from the right, who contrast a discourse of victimhood with an account of individual and group initiative that understates the significance of racial power, Brown's critique of identity politics is allied to a critique of structures of injustice.13 Unlike critics who accuse reparations activists of failing to acknowledge progress already made, Brown calls progressive nar- ratives of history into question and discloses the forms of domination they disguise. Yet her swift dismissal of reparations is unconvincing. While Brown's account of the traps that can ensnare the reparations movement ought to give its advocates pause, her assumption that they must do so is symptomatic of a more general tendency among political theorists to repro- duce a white perspective in the course of the analysis. This essay thus consid- ers arguments for reparations in light of Brown's fundamental question: "When do certain political solutions actually codify and entrench existing social relations, when do they mask such relations, and when do they directly contest or transform them?" (SOI, 12). And it suggests that critics of identity politics have a corresponding responsibility to ask when their assessments of reparations codify and entrench white privilege, when they mask the work- ings of white supremacy, and when they directly contest or transform racialized forms of power.

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It would require another full-length essay, at least, to do justice to the range and complexity of claims made for and against reparations.14 But before proceeding, let me briefly sketch the barest outlines of the negative and positive case underpinning my argument. At a minimum, Americans' persistent unwillingness-from Emancipation until today-to take the idea of slave redress seriously deserves scrutiny. This is the negative case for repa- rations, and it provides a crucial rejoinder to those opponents who insist that the passage of time and the difficulty of determining precise links between contemporary African Americans and the victims of slavery make repara- tions a nonstarter. Regardless of the persuasiveness of any particular claim for reparations, I maintain that the demonstration of good faith in the fight against racial injustice entails a willingness to consider why compensating the former slaves has been so consistently dismissed as unthinkable."'5 Posi- tively, I contend that it is possible to piece together elements from a variety of sources, including activists, legal scholars, historians, political scientists, and philosophers, to formulate three general features of any adequate form of reparations. First, it would offer an acknowledgment of the scope and horror of slavery and Jim Crow. This is not an acknowledgment of guilt but the expression of "a collective responsibility of U.S. citizens as such for the enduring harms to African Americans that have resulted from legally sanc- tioned injuries of race under earlier regimes."'6 Second, reparations would be used to support a range of public-history efforts aimed at educating the citi- zenry about connections between past injustices and racial inequalities today. And third, by focusing on massive investment in African American commu- nities and the institutions that serve them, not individual payments, repara- tions would make substantial changes in the material and political conditions of African American lives. Rather than advocate a particular strategy- whether it be legal, legislative, or grassroots-this essay treats reparations claims together as parts of a multipronged movement. With this rough sketch in mind, then, it is possible to assess how well Brown's arguments against identity politics apply to the reparations struggle. To that end, this essay will focus on three issues: I. the identity claims at work in the debate over reparations; II. the implications of seeking redress from the state; and III. the kind of historical consciousness that reparations politics might produce.

I. WHAT IS THE "IDENTITY" IN REPARATIONS POLITICS?

Readers of Brown's work are confronted with a view of late modern politi- cal life in which the prospects for democracy are dim. Freedom is increas- ingly defined in narrowly economic terms; emancipatory narratives of histor-

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ical progress have been discredited but not replaced; and left politics has been supplanted by left posturing. The quest for reparations thus appears to be a symptom of larger ills. It represents the replacement of democratic politics with moralism and "the merger of racial justice into the language of essential- ized identity and cultural preservation.""17 But must reparations advo- cates rely on essentialized identity claims? Do they invariably-and do their opponents-make sweeping distinctions between the innocent and the guilty? To address these questions, this section considers three issues: the role of fixed identity categories in making the case for redress, the description of identity-based movements as preoccupied with suffering and revenge, and the significance of white ressentiment in sustaining the racial status quo. With regard to the last of these, I aim to suggest that Brown's analysis, extended in a direction that she does not explicitly take, can be invaluable in going beyond accounts that make white ignorance or self-interest the pri- mary explanation of resistance to reparations.

Identity, for Brown, is understood as "a fall and a set of foreclosures."08 Because identity claims rely on boundaries that must be constantly rein- forced, they misdescribe the ambiguities of human being and the multiple channels through which political subjects are constituted. They admit little of the contingency and invite none of the debates that are the stuff of politics. Politicized identity, moreover, engenders a kind of antipolitics insofar as the identity to be preserved, at all cost, is that of the powerless subject. It inhibits rather than produces democratic forms of collective engagement. Brown thus urges a reorientation away from claims that are grounded in a sense of one's location in a historically disempowered community to a form of politics that is explicitly active, future oriented, and inclusive. "What if it were possible," she muses, "to incite a slight shift in the character of political expression and political claims common to much politicized identity? What if we sought to supplant the language of 'I am'-with its defensive closure on identity, its insistence on the fixity of position, its equation of social with moral position- ing-with the language of 'I want this for us'?" (SOI, 75).

As a number of recent writers have shown, however, the opposition between identity-based movements and democratic politics is not a neces- sary one. There is a growing literature that theorizes a relationship between identity and politics without appealing to a fixed, exclusive "I." Bickford, for example, emphasizes multiple sources and effects of identity claims beyond those that might be described as expressions of ressentiment or narrowly plu- ralist assertions of group interest. Relatedly, Iris Marion Young's conception of "social difference as a political resource" explores how it is possible to mobilize around the experiences of a disadvantaged social group without appealing to a suspect racial ontology.'9 Tommie Shelby's notion of black

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solidarity explicitly rejects the idea that the political mobilization of African Americans must depend on a sense of shared peoplehood.20 And the concept of "political race" advanced by Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres is meant to acknowledge and build upon "the heavy social lifting that clear black and white categories do" by exploiting for democratic ends the work of race as both a structure of privilege/subordination and an effective tool for activating communities in resistance.21 In each case, these thinkers aim to come to terms theoretically with the tensions between a recognition of the external and internal politics that constitute identity categories on one hand and the con- crete, public effects of those categories on the other.22

Nor must an emphasis on a history of suffering entail an unhealthy invest- ment in that suffering or a stance of moral superiority. For the history recalled is not only a history of injury but also, crucially, a history of survival and achievement against long odds. Moreover, drawing attention to the suffering of African Americans can constitute a form of opposition in a society that has historically denied the reality of black pain. Brown does not deny this point, acknowledging that a Nietzschean call to forget can engender its own form of cruelty (SOI, 74). Nonetheless, she proceeds by considering how a demo- cratic political culture could accommodate demands that suffering be recog- nized without inquiring into the role these demands might play in producing a democratic political culture (SOI, 75). What is absent, in other words, is an exploration of the possibility that claims of injury can engender positive, cre- ative forms of politics. Marlon Ross's meditation on the pleasures of identity offers an alternative reading: "Fortunately for us, the pleasure in identifying against dominance cannot be delimited by acts of domination. Belonging to a group formed through others' domination and one's own subordination para- doxically affords its own peculiar pleasures aimed at upsetting the norms of power."23 To say that the experience of racial domination, and the injuries it inflicts, gives rise to political claims is thus not necessarily to limit political action to the public reiteration of suffering.24

Furthermore, by focusing on the centrality of suffering to claims of iden- tity, Brown may accept too uncritically prevailing perceptions of the charac- ter of oppressed groups. According to Bickford, "to see identity claims as obsessed with suffering is to overlook the fact that it is the perspective of the dominant culture that marks them out that way."25 The availability of such assumptions and the distortions they reproduce when African American claims are involved can be illustrated by the response to Trent Lott's homage to Strom Thurmond. That Lott's comments were discredited by commenta- tors across the political spectrum might be celebrated as a sign of progress. That they were widely described as "racially insensitive" ought to inspire caution. For in characterizing Lott's remarks as a matter of racial sensitivity,

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journalists simultaneously reinforced the suggestion that African Americans are a particularly sensitive group and obscured the white supremacist charac- ter of the order for which Lott pined. Charles Henry crystallizes the perva- siveness of this kind of thinking when he illustrates congressional reactions to Representative John Conyers's call for a commission to study slave repara- tions with a comment by former Vice President Al Gore: "I'm for handling it sensitively without conveying a sense that it's ever likely to occur, because it's not."26 Here a concern for black suffering, however sincerely meant, serves as a substitute for action and effects a sleight of hand in which hurt feelings, not centuries of systemic injustice, are taken to be at issue. The irony, of course, is that an excess of attention to the imagined suffering of those presumed to be overly sensitive serves to displace any genuine confron- tation with the pain at the heart of African American history.27

The centrality of the victims' desire for revenge in Brown's description deserves similar circumspection. Brown offers an important caution about how democratic impulses can be perverted into dreams of destroying the powerful. Yet the reduction of reparations politics to a politics of vengeance is troubling in two respects where African American claims are concerned. First, as Thomas Dumm remarks, "It is remarkable, though rarely remarked, that [members of stigmatized groups] do not express greater paranoia and resentment."28 The idea of vengeance certainly has a place in the history of African American political thought and action, but what is more striking is the degree to which it has not been central to the framing of black political aspirations. Second, the association of identity politics with a desire for ven- geance reproduces without interrogation one of the most vivid images of white negrophobia. It overlooks a history in which black political mobiliza- tion, of any stripe, has been figured by white Americans as an instrument of revenge.

Nonetheless, Brown's account of the politics of ressentiment can be applied in illuminating ways to a kind of political identity that is virtually invisible in her work-white identity. While Brown notes in several places that American political culture as a whole is largely defined by the kind of ressentiment that she ascribes to members of subordinated groups, her con- centration on those groups as an obstacle to democratic politics represents a missed opportunity. It is an opportunity that is easy to miss in discussions of identity politics, because white identity claims are generally not presented as identity claims; they are a species of what Brown, discussing male domi- nance, calls "point-of-viewlessness" (SOI, 167). "Whiteness in the color- blind state," observes Joel Olson, "functions as a norm in which white privi- lege is sedimented into the background of social life as the 'natural outcome' of ordinary practices and individual choices."29 But if the role of white enti-

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tlement in structuring virtually every dimension of American life is imper- ceptible to many Americans, threats to that privilege are palpable. This phe- nomenon is revealed, humorously, in Patricia Williams's recollection of a group of "Real Hungry Men" grumbling about being shut out of the job mar- ket by women and blacks, even as they attempt to monopolize a table of cook- ies and creampuffs at a law conference that is overwhelmingly white and male.30 It is evident in the availability of "reverse discrimination" as a respectable term in both popular and scholarly discourse, despite the radical asymmetry between Jim Crow and programs designed to ameliorate its effects. White aggrievedness, furthermore, is not the exclusive property of racial conservatives and avowed supremacists. "Lip service to the Civil Rights Movement is de rigeur in this social-democratic domain," comments Eric Lott in his examination of anti-identity politics literature, "but it hides a nasty vein of ressentiment about constraints on white privilege. The point is the left's difficulty in imagining a potentially hegemonic universalism that would be black-led and race centered."'31

Where Brown's finely textured analysis can be particularly useful is in providing a way to understand the workings of ressentiment manifested in the intensity of white opposition to reparations. Even casual acquaintance with the issue through newspaper articles, editorials, and letters to the editor reveals the passion with which many whites react to the very idea of repara- tions-or even an apology-for slavery.32 The immediacy and the vehe- mence of the responses-"My family never owned slaves!" "I had to work for everything I have!" "Enough already!"-offer a glimpse into the ways in which privilege is dissembled and whiteness is refigured as vulnerability in the face of the perceived juggernaut of the government and vocal minority groups. Whites' lack of enthusiasm for reparations comes as no surprise. But how to account for the fact that a stunning 96 percent of white respondents to a 2000 survey by Lawrence Bobo and Michael Dawson rejected the idea of monetary payments to African American descendants of slaves?33 What, fur- thermore, would prompt those surveyed to attribute the idea of reparations to black greed?34 Ignorance tells part of the story. The same study found that white Americans believed that black Americans had already or would soon enjoy full equality, a view undermined by substantial scholarly literature. Along these lines, Thomas McCarthy makes a persuasive case that a distorted understanding of the history of slavery and its aftermath contributes to Amer- icans' unwillingness to acknowledge any responsibility for the racial crimes of the past or to recognize their connection to present forms of racial inequal- ity.35 Yet mistaken judgments about the facts cannot entirely account for white reactions to the idea of reparations. Self-interest is surely another part of the equation, but it too seems insufficient.36

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Brown's account of how contradictions in liberalism produce ressenti- ment points toward another possibility.37 Identifying, at the core of liberal- ism, tensions between freedom and equality on one hand and self-reliance and embeddedness in relations of power on the other, Brown acknowledges that "all liberal subjects and not only markedly disenfranchised ones, [are] vulnerable to ressentiment" (SOI, 67, italics in the original). What she does not address is how white supremacy has historically mediated those tensions. Recent scholars, examining what W. E. B. Du Bois calls the "public and psy- chological wage" of whiteness, attest to the ways that the racial compensa- tion of less-advantaged whites has mitigated their sense that the United States has defaulted on the promise of equality. Relatedly, the historical invisibility of the work of African Americans coupled with cultural assumptions about their dependency have enabled whites to sustain a false sense of self-reliance. As Patchen Markell remarks, "Subordination insulates some people from the force of the contradiction between the desire for sovereignty and the in- eliminable fact of finitude, enabling them to live within that contradiction at other people's expense."38 By laying bare the history of white privilege, demands for reparations thus pose a fundamental threat to white identity or white presumptions of identitylessness. Attention to the dynamics of white ressentiment can provide a means of investigating the dynamic of innocence/ guilt in which it is white Americans who assume the mantle of powerless- ness, representing themselves as innocent of responsibility for the subordina- tion of African Americans and as victims of state programs of redress.39 It offers a rejoinder to the claim that reparations politics is too divisive by pro- viding a language for exploring and understanding why any significant effort to counter racial injustice is figured as divisive. While I do not mean to argue against the importance of ignorance or self-interest or other factors in explaining white opposition to reparations, Brown's conception of the poli- tics of ressentiment might be developed to help uncover the forces that have succeeded in figuring reparations as an outrage. To convey, in Sheldon Wolin's words, the living power of a history not forgotten but "only publicly unrecalled.'"'40

II. REPARATIONS AND THE STATE

Even if my assessment is right, and the reparations movement need not be built upon a fixed, unchanging conception of black and white identities, even if it is possible to offer an interpretation of the relationship between identity- based suffering and emancipation that evades the traps Brown so effectively exposes, and even if the idea of a politics of ressentiment might be more aptly

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used to limn the contours of white identity politics than to provide a whole- sale critique of the reparations movement, Brown points toward another, related, constellation of dangers. In asking the state to play a central role in resolution, the reparations movement risks both reinforcing and disguising state domination. Although one might reply that the demand for reparations involves an airing of state complicity in slavery and Jim Crow, to stop there is to miss the deeper challenge of Brown's argument. Not only could a success- ful claim for redress serve as an invitation for an expansion of the state's dis- ciplinary power, it could also authorize a repressive politics within African American communities. In particular, Brown's arguments about the mascu- linism of state power raise crucial questions about the (un)intended conse- quences of the demand for reparations. "The state," Brown writes, "does not simply handle clients or employ staff but produces state subjects, as bureauc- ratized, dependent, disciplined, and gendered" (SOI, 195). These effects are more pernicious as they become more difficult to detect. Just as race has become more diffuse and subterranean in the post-civil rights era, Brown exposes ways in which state repression is increasingly disguised: "its power and privilege operate increasingly through disavowal of potency, repudiation of responsibility, and diffusion of sites and operations of control" (SOI, 194). In this section I ask how Brown's concerns about turning to the state might be applied to the politics of reparations and consider how the reparations move- ment, in turn, uncovers limitations in her argument. I begin by attending to one of the central questions her analysis raises: What kinds of political sub- jects might a successful reparations movement produce?

One answer is that it could provide new mechanisms through which Afri- can Americans are interpellated as victims. This is supported by a range of critical race theorists, who demonstrate ways in which U.S. law requires a victim.41 For example, Williams recalls that, in the courtroom, "I learned that the best way to give voice to those whose voice had been suppressed was to argue that they had no voice."42 Contrast this comment with white reactions to signs of black militancy, and it is easy to imagine that the claimants most likely to become beneficiaries of state largesse are those whose performance of will-lessness is most convincing. Historically, argues Daryl Michael Scott, the deployment of "damage imagery" has ensured the success of many liberal policies aimed at improving the conditions of African American lives by reaffirming white, middle-class racial assumptions and eliciting pity.43 Un- like social-welfare policies that are not evidently "racial" in character, those associated in the public imagination with African Americans have traded on perceptions of victimhood.44 Furthermore, Scott warns, any politics empha- sizing the harms of centuries of oppression is especially worrisome in more conservative periods, when pity is in short supply; for accounts of black

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Americans as victims can become justifications for further marginalization. And these concerns extend beyond claims for reparations in the United States. Writing about the international trend toward restitution for historic injustice, Elazar Barkan notes, "no restitution has lifted the burden of victim- ization; instead it has routinized it."45

Related to the prospect that an effective reparations campaign would both trade on and reproduce a conception of African American victimhood is the danger that it could entrench distinctions between deserving and undeserv- ing recipients of compensation. While arguments for reparations can evade some of these traps by balancing the emphasis on the suffering of African Americans with an appreciation for their contributions,46 such an approach has its own risks. Among them is the possibility of contrasting those citizens who embody an ethic of hard work and self-sacrifice against those who repre- sent a perversion of those values, those identified as the "underclass." As Eric Yamamoto explains, this is an aspect of "the underside of reparations." Examining the arguments that led to reparations for Japanese Americans interned during World War II, Yamamoto notes the significance of an ideol- ogy of "group worthiness" and posits that the effectiveness of those argu- ments was at least partly traceable to Japanese Americans' self-presentation as "deserving superpatriots."47 In light of the dependence of this image of Japanese Americans as a model minority on a distinction from black Ameri- cans, Yamamoto's argument provides a crucial reminder of how reparations claims can be used to support, rather than to transform, public perceptions of whose citizenship counts.

One of the attractions of many proposals for reparations is the idea that responsibility for allocating any resources would reside within black com- munities themselves or be overseen by organizations with African American leadership. Shifting authority away from government to these communities does not entirely allay Brown's concerns, however. Such an arrangement promises some measure of self-determination. But for whom? And on what terms? In this regard, Adolph Reed's warning about the ways that reparations politics can reinforce intraracial class lines deserves close attention, and Cathy Cohen's arguments about how internal policing mechanisms can stifle oppositional politics cautions against reparations programs that might fur- ther marginalize the least privileged members of black communities.48 They suggest the limitations of exclusively empowering "reputable citizens" to oversee the distribution of resources.49

Perhaps the aspect of Brown's critique most pertinent to the articulation of democratic reparations demands is her analysis of gendered forms of power. As a number of commentators have noted, considerations of gender are often neglected in arguments for reparations.50 The absence of gender is worrisome

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in several respects, but I will focus on two. On the one hand, gender is central to the story of slavery and Jim Crow, and reparations cannot contribute to a transformative reckoning with the past without attending to the specific effects of racial patriarchy."' On the other hand, acknowledging the sexual domination at the heart of slavery and the double burden of victimhood borne by African American women may produce new dilemmas. Such acknowl- edgment has too often been used to reinforce the idea that African American women are in need of patriarchal protection. Furthermore, as black feminist scholars have amply demonstrated, social science studies of slavery's terrible toll on black families have produced a pathologizing discourse that con- demns black women for excessive dependence on the state and inadequate dependence on black men. One only has to look to recent developments in welfare policies to see how a reparations program conceived as a means of repairing black families and reaffirming the worth of black women could become a mechanism for reproducing masculine authority. The danger is put with particular pointedness in Wahneema Lubiano's adaptation of the Jeop- ardy answer-question format-"Answer: the romanticized black patriarchal family and its disciplinary possibilities. Question: what is one way that the state can mobilize blackness to do its repressive work and its policing of civil society?"52

Brown is thus surely right to warn against the repressive possibilities that inhere in any turn to the state-and its surrogates-as the ultimate source of relief for centuries of injustice. Yet even as her caution ought to inform repa- rations advocates, the reparations movement indicates the shortcomings of a politics that abandons the aspiration to remake the state. In view of a history in which the response of the demos to African American claims has proved unreliable at best, Brown's apparent faith in the collective engagement of the people seems no less quixotic than efforts to seek change through state action. Although any movement must confront the possible unintended con- sequences of its success, this history indicates why ceding the struggle over the proper uses of state power to the forces of the racial status quo is the greater danger.53

First, the demand for reparations provides a reminder that the dismissal of the use of state power as an instrument for meaningful social change mis- reads history. In this light, Martin Luther King, Jr.'s comment that "it was a great relief to be in a federal court"'54 does not signal a belief in the benignity or ultimate fairness of the federal judiciary so much as a sense of the impossi- bility of local justice in the Jim Crow South. The state is figured as protector only in a relative sense, and what is sought is not recognition of a wounded self-image. Instead, the turn to the courts represents an instance of the demo- cratic practice of insisting that the government be responsive to all of the peo-

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ple. Thus where Brown laments the "boundless litigiousness of the present age, .... the conversion of historical-political claims of oppression to legal claims for rights or reparations,"55 Charles Ogletree, the cochair of the Repa- rations Coordinating Committee, makes a case for litigation as a tool for the expression of "historical-political claims of oppression." Reparations law- suits, according to Ogletree, are not understood as an alternative to struggle so much as an instrument of struggle, and recognizing the disciplinary power of law does not entail the refusal to engage it as an always limited and prob- lematic ally in emancipatory political projects.56 Shifting attention away from legal outcomes to the importance of public claim-making in reparations politics, Yamamoto suggests that it is useful to treat "law and court pro- cess . .. as generators of 'cultural performances' and as vehicles for providing outsiders an institutional public forum.""'57

Further, by explicitly linking its claims to an international system of white supremacy and global struggles for human rights,58 the reparations move- ment offers an example of oppositional politics not content "to rely upon the U.S. nation-state as a stable container of social antagonisms, and as the nec- essary horizon of our hopes for justice."59 And even as reparations advocates turn to the U.S. government, their actions explicitly uncover the implication of state power in the institution of slavery and the forms of racial injustice that succeeded it. They call attention to the ways citizenship and anticitizenship have been defined and uncover the multiple dimensions in which those cate- gories persist.60 For example, the "Freedom Agenda" of the Black Radical Congress indicates how an explicitly "Black" politics can be oppositional not only in its attack on white supremacy but also in its simultaneous refutation of patriarchal power and the exclusion of marginalized subcommunities.61 While it is possible that reparations programs could reinforce class lines and structures of authority within black communities, furthermore, such an out- come is not inevitable. In lieu of a single fund of monies managed by elites and dispersed to individual claimants, many supporters of reparations advo- cate the development of multiple channels of funding. To that end, Manning Marable suggests that economic reparations should make resources available to a range of community-based organizations and give priority to those groups operating in black communities with high rates of unemployment.62 Reparations activist "Queen Mother" Audley Moore makes a related case, arguing for a democratic decision-making structure that would give authority over any compensation to ordinary citizens.63

Finally, Brown's critique prevents her from recognizing, in the repara- tions movement, the ways in which identity claims can be mobilized to chal- lenge capitalist ideals. "What we have come to call identity politics is partly dependent upon the demise of a critique of capitalism and of bourgeois cul-

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tural and economic values," Brown explains (SOI, 59). And she ponders whether politicized identity represents a particular version of class resent- ment, whether "without recourse to the white masculine middle-class ideal, politicized identities would forfeit a good deal of their claims to injury and exclusion, their claims to the political significance of their difference" (SOI, 61). Yet the tradition of black political thought offers ample examples of cri- tiques of racial oppression not tethered to that ideal. And while there are argu- ments for reparations that reinforce Brown's point, one of the real contribu- tions of some versions of reparations discourse is the capacity to bring to public attention the complex historical relationship between American capi- talism and white supremacy.64 Unlike affirmative action programs, whose aim is inclusion in the present order, reparations activism challenges the legitimacy of that order. Thus Robert Allen observes, "At its most radical, the demand for reparations stands as a critique of capitalist property relations."65 As such, furthermore, the demand for reparations suggests how it is possible to use the specific case of injustices committed against African Americans to formulate a vision of society that is juster for all. To consider what this alternative might look like, I consider reparations and the politics of history in the concluding section.

HLI. PAST REPAIR?

We speak about expense. There are several ways of addressing oneself to some attempt to find out what the word means here. From a very literal point of view, the harbors and the ports and the railroads of the country-the economy, especially in the South-could not conceivably be what they are if it had not been (and this is still so) for cheap labor. I am speaking very seriously, and this is not an overstatement: I picked cotton, I carried it to the market, I built the railroads under someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing.66

When James Baldwin, in a 1965 debate against William F. Buckley, Jr., told a Cambridge University audience that he had labored under the whip "for nothing," his repetition of that simple phrase "was an explosion." The speech earned Baldwin a standing ovation and a gratifying 544 votes to Buckley's 184.67 Rhetorically effective it surely was, as the lopsidedness of the debate attests. But the continuing power of the phrase resides equally in its sub- stance-more specifically, in two distinct but related meanings. At first glance, the literalism of Baldwin's formulation is troubling. What exactly does he mean when he writes that he picked cotton and built the railroads for nothing? Does he traffic in the kind of identity politics against which Brown warns? Or might his identification with the many thousands gone suggest, alternatively, the kind of relationship to historic injustice that Brown would

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endorse? Can it help political theorists to reimagine the presence of the slave past in such a way that more racially just futures become possible? And how do these contrasting readings illuminate the politics of reparations?

The first meaning of Baldwin's "for nothing" emphasizes the value of the uncompensated labor performed by generations of African Americans, a staggering theft whose legacy can be traced in the economic inequalities of Baldwin's day and our own.68 This alone provides a forceful moral basis for the demand for reparations, and a growing body of literature attends to the question of just how much is owed.69 While such calculations provide testi- mony to the scope of slavery and the effects of decades of discrimination on the lives of individuals and communities, however, arguments for reparations tied primarily to this kind of calculus reveal several of the traps to which Brown alerts her readers. First, insofar as the claims are framed as a return of resources stolen by white Americans from African Americans, with present- day individual whites and blacks standing in for their forebears, they risk reinforcing precisely the kinds of identity against which Brown warns. As Robert Fullinwider notes, reparations arguments that trade on notions of per- sonal guilt and innocence can distract from questions of collective responsi- bility.70 A second peril resides in the effort to build the case for reparations from a notion of inheritance. Although a compelling argument can be made along these lines,7 to do so requires accepting inegalitarian aspects of liberal individualism. A single-minded emphasis on fixing, precisely, the meaning of slavery in monetary terms raises a third set of concerns insofar as it pre- cludes a more complex analysis of slavery's reach into all domains of Ameri- can life. For example, the centrality of sexual slavery is not easily reckoned with in this kind of accounting; nor is the worth of years of underpaid domes- tic work performed by African American women susceptible to measure- ment in market terms. Finally, even if advocates were successful in obtaining a substantial settlement, a focus on the value of what was taken from African Americans under slavery and in its aftermath highlights the insufficiency of any form of material redress. Because the value of reparations will be far smaller than the approximate value of what was stolen, arguments organized around measurements of the debt inevitably highlight the ineradicability of the loss. Thus although rectification of the pattern of unjust enrichment is a significant part of the demand for reparations, too narrow a focus on this aspect of the larger struggle could sow the seeds for a future politics of ressentiment.

A second reading of Baldwin's "for nothing," by contrast, shifts the weight of the sentence from the calculation of his unpaid suffering to his dis- tress that the aspiration to remake the United States into something more gen- uinely democratic has been continually thwarted. By this reading, Baldwin's

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call to remembrance is not wielded as a weapon, intended to bludgeon a white audience with repeated invocations of his own and others' victimiza- tion. Rather, he fashions his history in order that the suffering and the achievements of the men and women working under the lash might not prove to be for nothing. Despite the labor of generations, he seems to say, too little has changed. And that is the crime. In this sense, a demand for reparations is a call to grapple with the ways the past is lived and its object is the transforma- tion of society as a whole. It compels public witness to the fact that "the inju- ries not only perdure, but are inflicted anew."72 In this sense, it corresponds to Brown's own arguments about redemptive uses of the past, and challenges her condemnation of reparations.

Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to do justice to Brown's recent writings on historical consciousness, and in particular to her extended readings of Derrida and Benjamin, I think it is possible to tease from them a sense of the way reparations might contribute to democratic politics in the United States. Crucially, Brown sketches the way the injustices of the past must be lived if they are to foster a different future:

Suffering that is not yet finished is not only suffering that must still be endured but also suffering that can still be redeemed; it might develop another face through contemporary practices. Making a historical event or formation contemporary, making it "an outrage to the present" and thus exploding or reworking both the way in which it has been remem- bered and the way in which it is positioned in historical consciousness as "past," is pre- cisely the opposite of bringing that phenomena to "closure" through reparation or apol- ogy (our most ubiquitous form of historical political thinking today). The former demands that we redeem the past through a specific and contemporary practice ofjustice; the latter gazes impotently at the past even as it attempts to establish history as irrelevant to the present or, at best, as a reproachful claim or grievance in the present.73

Like Toni Morrison's ambiguous admonition that the story of slavery's ghosts is "not a story to pass on," Brown's work shows how reckoning with the afterlife of even ancient crimes is both necessary and dangerous. Redemptive politics, she maintains, is not a matter of overcoming or domesti- cating the past. Instead, it requires "the connection of a particular political aim in the present with a particular formation of oppression in the past."'74 It disrupts both unthinkingly progressive narratives of history that presume the impotence of the past and business-as-usual politics that presume the impos- sibility of fundamental change.

Reparations politics can "redeem the past through a specific and contem- porary practice ofjustice" in two ways: first, by providing a critical discourse that serves as a counterweight to race-blind language and incorporates acknowledgment of the past into present practices; and, second, by offering

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an avenue for concrete social change. As Bill Lawson observes: "our moral/ political vocabulary is morally unsatisfactory and inadequate for characteriz- ing the plight of present-day black Americans.'7"" The most persuasive repa- rations claims derive their power from reworking that vocabulary in light of the history of slavery and Jim Crow. Thus Ogletree conceives of reparations lawsuits as a means of stimulating a national dialogue about the legacies of the past,76 and Marable similarly suggests that such a conversation may be the most significant contribution of the quest for reparations.77 Robin Kelley pushes the creative possibilities of reparations discourse further, likening it to poetry. In Kelley's view, the experience of activists working collectively to demand a reckoning with history can wed past horror to future promise in previously unimagined ways.78 Arguments for reparations might thus be seen as a kind of genealogical politics, a departure from liberal discourse in which equality is achieved through the suppression of the past.79 In this sense, they hold out the promise that American racial history might be put to the service of what Brown and Janet Halley call critique:

Critique offers possibilities of analyzing existing discourses of power to understand how subjects are fabricated or positioned by them, what powers they secure (and disguise or veil), what assumptions they naturalize, what privileges they fix, what norms they mobi- lize, and what or whom these norms exclude. Critique is thus a practice that allows us to scrutinize the form, content, and possible reworking of our apparent political choices; we no longer have to take them as givens.80

Enacting such a practice, however, requires resisting the allure of closure. In this regard, my argument departs from Robert Westley's conclusion that "the closure afforded by reparations means that no more will be owed to Blacks than is owed to any citizen under the law. This is the effect of any final judgment on the merits. Once reparations are paid, Blacks will be able to function within American society on a footing of absolute equality."81 Given the depth of societal denial about the significance and effects of slavery and the pervasiveness of antiblack racism, about which Westley writes so elo- quently, it is unlikely that reparations alone could accomplish so much. And while my view is substantially informed by Marable's argument, I am wary of his reading of the etymological kinship of reparations and "repair" as a promise "to make whole again."82 The pursuit of final judgment or wholeness might well appeal to white Americans eager to put the ugliness of U.S. racial history permanently in the past. It might, furthermore, disallow what Martha Minow calls "a constant double move" between the salience of group-based claims and the recognition of the multiplicity of perspectives and identities that compose the groups in whose name the claims are made.83 By emphasiz- ing struggles rather than outcomes,84 by contrast, reparations discourse can

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provide an avenue for investigating the public meanings of a history long suppressed and contesting received explanations of present racial hierarchies.

Arguments for reparations, in this sense, could constitute a language of "I want this for us." They can reveal the ways that whiteness is smuggled into the collective imagination by asking Americans to consider what democracy demands when the "us" is understood to be black. Yet in the pursuit of poli- cies and programs that focus specifically on the contributions of and crimes committed against African American citizens and their ancestors, repara- tions activism need not proceed by "rendering suspect the language and pos- sibilities of collectivity, common action, and shared purposes.""85 Instead, tak- ing the reparations movement seriously requires attending to the question of whose interests can and cannot stand for the common good and shifts the bur- den of argument to those who would characterize all demands for redress as an outrage. Highlighting the historical imbalance between black Americans' sacrifices and their enjoyment of the benefits of citizenship exposes both the regularity with which all citizens are asked to subordinate their interests to the greater good and the disproportionate losses that African Americans have borne in the name of that good.86 For political theorists, grappling with the question of reparations may provoke a reorientation of vantage-point, dis- placing presumptively race-blind accounts of U.S. democracy and giving pri- ority to the perspectives of its black citizens.87 Reparations claims might even be a medium for the resurgence of the "black worldliness" that Nikhil Singh finds in the work of radical black activists of the 1940s. This democratic pro- ject builds from the specific experiences of African Americans a vision of democracy that not only criticizes multiple structures of domination in the United States but also challenges racial oppression beyond national borders.88

Crucially, the idea of reparations as a critical discourse is always linked to efforts to make material change in the lives of African Americans. Here too, it is important to note that specific commitments to African American commu- nities need not benefit them exclusively. The example of Reconstruction, which targeted the welfare of the freedmen and women but also created new educational possibilities, social welfare programs, and more democratic state constitutions throughout the South, indicates the broader democratic effects that might follow from attending to the lingering impact of slavery.89 Indeed, one of the central contributions of reparations activism is its capacity to undermine the idea that effecting improvement in some of the most neglected U.S. communities would somehow only be to the good of black citizens. As Kelley observes: "By looking at the reparations campaign in the United States as a social movement, we discover that it was never entirely, or even

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primarily, about the money. The demand for reparations was about social jus- tice, reconciliation, reconstructing the internal life of black America, and eliminating institutional racism."90

It is not necessary, finally, to see in the quest for reparations an example of "left melancholia," a brooding antipolitics that stands accusingly "to the left of the possible."91 Although Brown paints a recognizable picture of a kind of radical posturing that focuses on unsatisfiable grievances, and her account aptly captures some elements of the reparations movement, the dismissal of all reparations demands as examples of this kind of posturing disguises the ways in which the idea of redress for slavery has been, since the nineteenth century, figured as outside "the possible." It elides those reparations claims that go beyond good and evil, that contest the assumptions of liberal legal dis- course and imagine how to evoke the complex haunting of the American present, that aspire to obtain redress without requiring that African Ameri- cans present themselves as helpless victims or as super-Americans, and that attempt to harness state power and criticize it simultaneously. Thus, one might ask why critics are so quick to dismiss a movement that has galvanized a range of actors, including grassroots activists as well as lawyers, lawmak- ers, and academics. The rejection of reparations per se--rather than critical assessment of different, specific arguments for reparations-and the desire to eschew any complicity with state power raise unsettling questions about whose left melancholia pervades the most acute political theorizing today. If the political energy and purpose generated in the pursuit of reparations does not represent a promising example of democratic politics, then what does?

NOTES

1. Toni Morrison, quoted in Paul Gilroy, "Living Memory: A Meeting with Toni Morrison," in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent's Tail, 1993), 178.

2. Roy L. Brooks, "The Age of Apology," in When Sorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy overApologies and Reparationsfor Human Injustice, ed. Roy L. Brooks (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 3-11.

3. Bill Clinton, quoted in Katharine Q. Seelye, "Clinton Commentary on Slavery Draws a Republican's Ire," New York Times, March 28, 1998.

4. For a list of apologies offered by Clinton himself, see Alfred L. Brophy, "Some Concep- tual and Legal Problems in Reparations for Slavery," New York University Annual Survey of American Law 58 (2003): 501. Helpful surveys of apologies and redress for historic injustice include Martha Minow, Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Eric K. Yamamoto, "Racial Reparations: Jap- anese American Redress and African American Claims," Boston College Law Review 40 (December 1998): 483-84; When Sorry Isn't Enough; and Elazar Barkan, The Guilt ofNations: Restitution and Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York: Norton, 2000).

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5. I use the term "left" loosely to encompass a range of radical, progressive, and liberal posi- tions that are oriented toward democracy and critical of the forms of inequality and domination that define the status quo. Perhaps Susan Bickford's term "leftish" most effectively captures the difficulties of characterizing such a diverse group. Susan Bickford, "Anti-Anti-Identity Politics: Feminism, Democracy, and the Complexities of Citizenship," Hypatia 12 (Fall 1997): 112.

6. See Vincene Verdun, "If the Shoe Fits, Wear It: An Analysis of Reparations to African Americans," Tulane Law Review 67 (February 1993): 600-07.

7. These efforts include: H.R. 40, legislation introduced by Representative John Conyers, calling for the establishment of a commission to study the idea of reparations; the 1988 founding of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA); the publication of Randall Robinson's The Debt: WhatAmerica Owes to Blacks (New York: Dutton, 2000); the ini- tiation of lawsuits against the U.S. government, corporations, and individuals who benefitted from slavery by a group of prominent civil rights lawyers and academics; and the passage of repa- rations resolutions in several cities and the state of California. This essay follows many of these efforts in linking reparations to slavery and Jim Crow. In doing so, I do not dispute the conclusion of thinkers such as Boris Bittker and Robert Fullinwider that the crimes of the Jim Crow era alone are substantial enough to warrant redress. Rather, I concur with Charles Ogletree that strategic reasons for focusing solely on the more recent crimes of segregation ought not to overshadow the moral and political interconnections between slavery, Jim Crow, and present injustices. Boris I. Bittker, The Casefor Black Reparations (1973; reprint, Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); Robert K. Fullinwider, "The Case for Reparations," Philosophy and Public Policy 20 (Summer 2000): 1-8; Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., "Repairing the Past: New Efforts in the Reparations Debate in America," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 38 (Summer 2003): 279-320.

8. Hawley Fogg-Davis, "The Racial Retreat of Contemporary Political Theory," Perspec- tives on Politics 1 (September 2003): 555.

9. For a critical account of some of the distinctions between "left" and "right" race blind- ness, see Lani Guinier and Gerald Torres, The Miner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power Transforming Democracy(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 32-66.

10. Bickford, "Anti-Anti-Identity Politics." 11. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton:

Princeton University Press, 1995), 27 (hereafter cited in text as SOI). 12. Wendy Brown, Politics Out of History (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001),

140. 13. See Shelby Steele, " . . . Or a Childish Illusion of Justice?: Reparations Enshrine

Victimhood, Dishonoring Our Ancestors," in Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging Debate on Reparations, ed. Raymond A. Winbush (New York: Amistad/HarperCollins, 2003), 198; John McWhorter, "Blood Money: Why I Don't Want Reparations for Slavery," The Ameri- can Enterprise (July/August 2001): 19-22.

14. For a succinct overview of these arguments, see Michael C. Dawson and Rovana Popoff, "Reparations: Justice and Greed in Black and White," Du Bois Review 1 (2004): 47-91. Roy Brooks offers a thoughtful examination of some of the most frequent objections to reparations. Roy L. Brooks, Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 180-206.

15. One recurrent claim made by opponents of reparations is that the bloodshed of the Civil War constitutes adequate recompense for slavery. I think it is crucial to resist the Civil War argu- ment for several reasons. Among them are two questionable historical assumptions whose wide- spread acceptance intimates something of the political power of historical narratives. First, the Civil-War-as-reparations argument occludes the fact that the Union did not go to war with the

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aim of ending slavery, although abolition became an objective in the last two years of hostilities. Second, to focus exclusively on the deaths of white Northerners is to obfuscate the interracial character of the Union effort, in which thousands of African Americans risked their lives as fugi- tives, "contraband," and soldiers. On black contributions to the war effort and the North's reluc- tance to embrace abolition, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (Cleveland: Meridian, [1935] 1964); and William W. Freehling, The South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate Southerners Shaped the Course of the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). For an example of an argument that misreads Du Bois to support the claim that the sacrifices of the Civil War constitute sufficient reparations, see Algis Valiunas, "Paying for Jefferson's Sins," Commentary 114 (November 2002): 42-43.

16. Thomas McCarthy, "Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II: On the Morality and Politics of Reparations for Slavery," Political Theory 32 (December 2004): 757 (italics in the original). While I focus on national responsibility, I do not mean to rule out the significance of efforts for reparations from state, local, and corporate sources.

17. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley, "Introduction," Left Legalism/Left Critique, ed. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 3.

18. Wendy Brown, "At the Edge," Political Theory 30 (August 2002): 558. 19. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press,

2000). 20. Tommie Shelby, "Foundations of Black Solidarity: Collective Identity or Common

Oppression?" Ethics 112 (January 2001): 231-66. 21. Guinier and Torres, The Miner's Canary, 9. 22. Although they refute biologized conceptions of race, these writers provide a forceful

challenge to the argument that it is not possible to identify who counts as "African American" for the purposes of reparations. They take as a starting point the ease with which we employ racial categories in everyday life, particularly when it is to the disadvantage of black Americans. For example, police officers in Charlottesville, Virginia, appear to have had little difficulty in identi- fying African American men when they instituted a "dragnet" to collect DNA samples from nearly two hundred men who were said to resemble a composite drawing of an alleged serial rap- ist. Carlos Santos, "DNA Dragnet to Become More Strict," Richmond Times-Dispatch, April 16, 2004.

23. Marlon B. Ross, "Commentary: Pleasuring Identity, or the Delicious Politics of Belong- ing," New Literary History 31 (Autumn 2000): 848 (emphasis in the original).

24. See Linda Martin Alcoff, "Who's Afraid of Identity Politics?" in Reclaiming Identity: Realist Theory and the Predicament of Postmodernism, ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R. Hames-Garcia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 312-44; Shelby, "Foundations of Black Solidarity."

25. Bickford, "Anti-Anti-Identity Politics": 117. 26. Charles P. Henry, "The Politics of Racial Reparations," Journal of Black Studies 34

(November 2003): 140. 27. For instance, Ogletree cites Randall Kennedy's research on the gap between U.S. judges'

solicitude for the feelings of white Americans and relative indifference to the feelings of blacks. Ogletree, "Repairing the Past": 289.

28. Thomas Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary (New York: NYU Press, 1999), 104. 29. Joel Olson, "Whiteness and the Participation-Inclusion Dilemma," Political Theory 30

(June 2002): 390. 30. Patricia J. Williams, The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (Cambridge:

Harvard University Press, 1995), 97.

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31. Eric Lott, "After Identity Politics: The Return of Universalism," New Literary History 31 (Autumn 2000): 677.

32. Brown appears to underestimate the ferociousness of this opposition when she includes "White House apologies to African Americans for enslaving or mistreating them" as examples of the contemporary rush to apologize in spite of the fact that no U.S. president has issued an apol- ogy for slavery. Brown, Politics Out of History, 140.

33. Dawson and Popoff, "Reparations": 62. 34. Dawson and Popoff, "Reparations": 88. 35. Thomas McCarthy, "Vergangenheitsbewiiltigung in the USA: On the Politics of the

Memory of Slavery," Political Theory 30 (October 2002): 623-48. 36. Derrick Bell's "interest-convergence" theory of civil-rights law and Cheryl Harris's

genealogy of "whiteness as property" expose the power of white interests in resisting changes in the racial order. Derrick A. Bell, Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism (New York: Basic Books, 1992); Cheryl I. Harris, "Whiteness as Property" Harvard Law Review 106 (June 1993): 1707-91.

37. I do not mean to suggest that Brown's is the only work to address these issues. For instance, her understanding of the dynamics of ressentiment provides a powerful philosophi- cal elaboration on some of the empirical findings of scholars such as Donald Kinder and Lynn Sanders, whose Divided by Color examines the role of racial resentment in U.S. politics. Donald R. Kinder and Lynn M. Sanders, Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ide- als (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

38. Patchen Markell, Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 22. For a psychoanalytical exploration of this point and its relationship to reparations, see Isaac D. Balbus, "The Psychodynamics of Racial Reparations," Psychoanalysis, Culture & Society 9 (August 2004): 159-85.

39. "Increasingly... whites experienced themselves as oppressed victims of an uncaring authority and cited efforts on behalf of Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, and other ethnics as 'reverse racism,'" according to David Gresson. Quoted in Henry, "Politics of Racial Repara- tions": 148.

40. Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), 34.

41. Kimberld Williams Crenshaw, "Color Blindness, History, and the Law," in The House That Race Built:.' Black Americans, U.S. Terrain, ed. Wahneema Lubiano (New York: Pantheon, 1997), 287.

42. Patricia J. Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cam- bridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 156.

43. Daryl Michael Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880-1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997).

44. In this regard, the suggestion that reparations be thought of as a kind of social welfare pro- gram analogous to programs like the New Deal or the G.I. Bill misses Scott's point. Brophy, "Some Conceptual and Legal Problems in Reparations for Slavery": 520.

45. Barkan, The Guilt of Nations, 306. My argument departs substantially from Barkan's, which relies on the language of "victims" and "perpetrators" and describes guilt approvingly as "a powerful political tool."

46. Lawrie Balfour, "Unreconstructed Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Repa- rations," American Political Science Review 97 (February 2003): 33-44.

47. Yamamoto, "Racial Reparations": 499-501.

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48. Adolph L. Reed, Jr., "The Case against Reparations," The Progressive 64 (December 2000): 15-17; Cathy J. Cohen, The Boundaries ofBlackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

49. Brooks, Atonement and Forgiveness, 161. 50. Martha Biondi and Dawson and Popoff note this absence but do not develop the point.

Martha Biondi, "The Rise of the Reparations Movement," Radical History Review 87 (Fall 2003): 17; Dawson and Popoff, "Reparations": 55. Robin Kelley explores how reparations activ- ism can provide an avenue for coming to terms with the gendered character of racial exploitation. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon Press, 2002), 131-32.

51. Naming slavery as a sexual as well as racial regime is critical to this effort. See Adrienne D. Davis, "The Case for Reparations to African Americans," Human Rights Brief7 (Spring 2000).

52. Wahneema Lubiano, "Black Nationalism and Black Common Sense: Policing Ourselves and Others," in The House That Race Built, 244-45.

53. I am grateful to Adrienne Davis for pressing me to emphasize this point. 54. Martin Luther King, Jr., quoted in Danielle Allen, Talking to Strangers: Anxieties of Citizen-

ship since Brown v. Board of Education (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 192, n. 12. 55. Brown, Politics out of History, 154. 56. Mari Matsuda's conception of reparations as a "critical legalism" captures this idea. Mari

J. Matsuda, "Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations," Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 22 (1987): 323-99.

57. Yamamoto, "Racial Reparations": 492. 58. Biondi, "The Rise of the Reparations Movement": 5. See also Sam Anderson and Muntu

Matsimela, "The Reparations Movement: An Assessment of Recent and Current Activism, Socialism andDemocracy 17 (Winter-Spring 2003): 255-76; and Michael T. Martin and Marilyn Yaquinto, "Reparations for 'America's Holocaust': Activism for Global Justice," Race & Class 45 (2004): 1-25. For a classic account of the black struggle in the U.S. as a human rights struggle, see Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and State- ments, ed. George Breitman (New York: Grove Press, 1965).

59. Nikhil Pal Singh, "Culture/Wars: Recoding Empire in an Age of Democracy," American Quarterly 50 (September 1998): 472 (emphasis in the original).

60. Olson helpfully builds on David Roediger's work on whiteness to flesh out the contours of citizenship and anticitizenship in U.S. history. Joel Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 31-63.

61. Black Radical Congress, "The Freedom Agenda," Let Nobody Turn Us Around: Voices of Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, An African American Anthology, ed. Manning Marable and Leith Mullins (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 627-33.

62. Manning Marable, The Great Wells of Democracy: The Meaning of Race in American Life (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 249-50.

63. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 119. 64. For example, the Black Manifesto, which was adopted by the National Black Economic

Development Conference in April 1969 and, notoriously, delivered by James Forman during ser- vices at the Riverside Church, New York City, is premised on a critique of capitalism, and the demand for reparations is understood as part of a broader social, economic, and political restruc- turing. The text of the Black Manifesto is reprinted in Bittker, The Case for Black Reparations, 159-75.

65. Robert L. Allen, "Past Due: The African American Quest for Reparations," The Black Scholar 28 (Summer 1998): 13.

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66. James Baldwin, "The American Dream and the American Negro," in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985 (New York: St. Martin's/Marek, 1985), 404.

67. David Leeming, James Baldwin: A Biography (New York: Knopf, 1994), 244-45. 68. For an account of causal links in the racial wealth gap from slavery to Jim Crow to the con-

temporary U.S., see Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/White Wealth: A New Perspective on Racial Inequality (New York: Routledge, 1997). For an exploration of the moral and political implications of such links, see McCarthy, "Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II."

69. See The Wealth ofRaces: The Present Value ofBenefits from Past Injustices, ed. Richard E America (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1990).

70. Fullinwider, "The Case for Reparations." 71. See Bernard R. Boxill, "A Lockean Argument for Black Reparations," The Journal of

Ethics 7 (2003): 63-91. 72. Saidiya Hartman, "The Time of Slavery," SouthAtlantic Quarterly 101 (Fall 2002): 758. 73. Brown, Politics Out of History, 171. 74. Brown, Politics Out of History, 165. 75. Bill E. Lawson, "Moral Discourse and Slavery," in Howard McGary and Bill E. Lawson,

Between Slavery and Freedom: Philosophy andAmerican Slavery (Bloomington: Indiana Uni- versity Press, 1992), 72.

76. Ogletree, "Repairing the Past": 284-85. 77. Marable, The Great Wells of Democracy, 250. 78. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 9-10. 79. See Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 32-46. 80. Brown and Halley, "Introduction" 26-27. 81. Robert Westley, "Many Billions Gone: Is It Time to Reconsider the Case for Black Repa-

rations?" Boston College Law Review 40 (December 1998): 476. 82. Marable, The Great Wells of Democracy, 251. 83. Martha Minow, "Not Only for Myself: Identity, Politics, and Law," Oregon Law Review

75 (Fall 1996): 697. 84. My argument echoes McCarthy's emphasis on the "public-pedagogical" role of the repa-

rations movement. McCarthy, "Coming to Terms with Our Past, Part II": 765. It is also informed by James Forman's understanding of reparations as "an intermediate step on the path to libera- tion," rather than an end in itself. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries (1972; reprint, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1997), 545.

85. Sheldon Wolin, "Democracy, Difference, and Re-Cognition," Political Theory 21 (August 1993): 480. I take this to be the force of Minow's call for "language and politics that per- mit people to be for themselves, but also for others." Minow, "Not Only for Myself': 676.

86. This understanding of citizenship and sacrifice is substantially informed by Allen's Talk- ing to Strangers.

87. To focus on African Americans as I have suggested is not to disallow the rightfulness of other reparations claims or to support the kind of comparative judgment embodied in J. Angelo Corlett's observation that providing reparations to Japanese Americans "seems morally appall- ing" in light of the failure to do so for Native Americans and African Americans. J. Angelo Corlett, Race, Racism, and Reparations (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 223.

88. Singh, "Culture/Wars." This orientation is also present in the BRC's "Freedom Agenda." 89. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America. 90. Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 114. 91. Brown, Politics out of History, 170.

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Lawrie Balfour is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Virginia. She is the author of The Evidence of Things Not Said: James Baldwin and the Promise of Ameri- can Democracy, and is currently working on a book manuscript on W E. B. Du Bois's political thought.

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