When I was asked to comment on Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations,” published in The Atlantic, I had three simultaneous thoughts:  1.  why address the specific issues of reparations in a feminist bioethics blog? 2.  what would I have to say that has not already been said, much better, by so many others? and 3.  oh $%#@!   I will now attempt to offer responses to the first two (allowing the third one just to sit there, enigmatically).

In my own work, my own research and teaching, I am often struck by the centrality and significance of the intersectionality of the systems of oppressions, of power differentials, of discrimination, whether in health care, in education, within the law, and so on.  Most times, I am both moved and horrified by how various axes of identity, such as race, gender, religion, class, ability, etc., interact and contribute to systematic inequality, injustice, disempowerment, and suffering of not only individuals, but entire classes of people  —  in some cases, impacting numerous generations.  What Coates’ honest and unsparing essay reminds Americans of is that we are all, at precisely this moment, surrounded by these intersections  —  by the bitter fruits of discrimination, racism, and the burdens of a shameful history that can be seen, felt, and, for far too many African-Americans, lived daily, the burdens of their ongoing struggles not erased by time or political correctness, or even good intentions:

All of our solutions to the great problems of health care, education, housing, and economic inequality are troubled by what must go unspoken. “The reason black people are so far behind now is not because of now,” Clyde Ross told me. “It’s because of then” (Coates 2014).

So, yes, a feminist bioethics blog is a perfect place to address reparations if we are serious about our intersectional approaches to justice, fairness, and the burdens of multiple oppressions.

So, on we go.  As a response to the moral atrocities of “[t]wo hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy,” and its modern-day consequences, Coates calls for reparations:

And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is—the work of fallible humans (Coates 2014).

Coates then foresees, and addresses, the major objections to such measures:

Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say—that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt.

What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling “patriotism” while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history (Coates 2014).

But reparations are out of the question, one often hears:  too expensive, too difficult to tell who owes what to whom, too many worries about “innocent” people being “forced” to pay to those who themselves have ostensibly not experienced any of the aforementioned crimes….You have probably heard most of this before.  However, as Coates quickly and devastatingly shows, the crimes of the past not only continued into the future (albeit sometimes under different names, using different methodologies, and so on), but the consequences of these moral atrocities, like waves rippling forever into the horizon, are very much still with us, their effects on vulgar display amid the ruin and decay of the inner cities, amid the illness and lack of services within the black communities, amid the historically redlined neighborhoods, largely untouched by rising economies and middle-class comforts, and on and on….There are no innocents, just as there are none not touched by what so many Americans choose to look past on their commutes elsewhere.  The truth is hard to take, Coates tells us, but take it we must:  America is not at peace, it has not moved gently beyond its racist past.   As William Faulkner reminds us, “[t]he past is never dead. It’s not even past.”  And it is not only ghosts with which we must contend.

And what is more, there are indeed precedents for this “impossible” task  —  precedents that had some measure of success!  In addressing perhaps the best-known case of reparations  —  Germany’s contentious post-Holocaust and World War II payments to the state of Israel, as well as to individual victims and their families world-wide  —   Coates quotes David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s primary founder and its first Prime Minister:
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For the first time in the history of relations between people, a precedent has been created by which a great State, as a result of moral pressure alone, takes it upon itself to pay compensation to the victims of the government that preceded it. For the first time in the history of a people that has been persecuted, oppressed, plundered and despoiled for hundreds of years in the countries of Europe, a persecutor and despoiler has been obliged to return part of his spoils and has even undertaken to make collective reparation as partial compensation for material losses (Coates 2014).

Granted, the cases are different, the call for reparations in America much older, and much more indecently unanswered.  And yet….it is there, whether reified through John Conyers Jr’s., HR 40, presented to Congress for the past twenty-five years, or through Coates’ essay itself.  (On a personal note, as a Jewish refugee from the U.S.S.R., my family has been touched by WWII more closely than we would have liked.  My grandmothers received some money from Germany.  They were not too happy to receive it  —  it is meaningless, they said.  It changes nothing.  It does not undo the unspeakable.  But in speaking to one of them, I heard something else, too:  Even if the money seems like a mockery of their devastation and suffering, and even if, in the end, it stands for nothing but an admission of insurmountable, monstrous, irretrievable guilt, that in itself is something.  It is the devil on his knees, ashamed and atoning for his sins, however clumsily.)  Perhaps, on some level, this is why I have agreed to comment on Coates’ work:  Even though I am two generations removed from WWII, reparations have been a part of my life, too.  I have seen them do some repair, and if that repair has not been instantaneous and miraculous, then it has certainly been significant in the narratives of individual, and collective, lives.

Setting aside the specific questions of how such reparations ought to be reified,  I want to conclude with the question of how we  —  all of us  —  might consider thinking about them in moral (rather than just socio-political) terms.  How do we  —  all of us  —  engage in discourses about reparations that share a moral vocabulary that offers any hope of overcoming the deep polarization of that word?  How can the notion of reparations become something that is a part of our national awareness, more akin to post-World War II Germany, and less like yet another moral and political “third rail”?

What I am talking about is a re-conceptualization of the goals.  Coates calls us to a “national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.”  I think that we can also put it in another, complementary way, where what “spiritual renewal” means is a kind of reparative reconciliation  —  a coming to terms with our collective past, intending toward our collective future.  In “Restorative Justice and Reparations,”  Margaret Urban Walker makes a distinction between “corrective justice” (or “compensatory justice”)  —  something more akin to the tort model  —  and “restorative justice,” where corrective justice “demands correction” of what are presumed to be discrete lapses from that prior or standing moral baseline in particular interpersonal or institutional  transactions with individuals, or unacceptable impacts of the action or omission of some individuals upon others” (Walker 2006).  Corrective justice, whether in the form of money, set-asides, or other methods,  “may be at least artificial and perhaps incoherent in addressing histories, acts, or forms of injustice that consist in radical denial of moral standing or in relentless enforcement of degraded moral status of individuals, especially when these are systemic conditions and persist  over extended periods of time” (Walker 2006).

Instead, Walker proposes what she calls “restorative justice,” introduced as a part of South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission.”  As she notes, restorative justice is premised on the idea that “what demands repair is a state of relationship between the victim and the wrongdoer, and among each and his or her community, that has been distorted, damaged, or destroyed” (Walker 2006).  Specifically, restorative justice seeks to repair harm; to make central the lived experiences and current needs of victims; insists  on genuine accountability; strives to put the practices of resolution into the hands of affected parties; seeks to offer the offender the chance to repair the wrong; and strives to strengthen individual and communal capacities to pursue justice without surrendering of “doing justice” to experts, professional, and other outsiders (Walker 2006).

Restorative justice, unlike rule-based compensatory methodologies, is also a bottom-up, collaborative (rather than juridical) practice.  Indeed, this personalized, collective work is likely to be largely decentralized and localized, involving smaller institutions, cities, communities, and populations addressing specific grievances, participating in multiple acts of forgiveness, atonement, and compensation that [seem] fitted to the historical length, breadth, and complexity of the injustice in question.  These actions might also build momentum toward the passage of Representative John Conyers’s H.R. 40 proposal for a national commission to examine the history and effects of slavery and its sequels to the present day, to explore ways to educate the American public and to study the question of reparations, itself a measure in the spirit of restorative justice, inviting public dialogue and seeking a fuller accounting of wrongs” (Walker 2006).  Restorative justice, if successful, begins with community and tends toward communities;  it opens the door through small, local encounters, and tends toward the larger stages of a nation; it begin with an “us,” and slowly grows into an “all of us.”  In Coates’ words, we might begin by normalizing the conversations about reparations with many “small reckonings” that would eventually lead to a larger “spiritual renewal.”

Coates is so very right  —  we are much overdue in even beginning to assess the questions of reparations as something real, as something other than a political dead-end, as something that is not on the peripheries of a national conversation about the sins of the fathers and the suffering of the sons, the granddaughters, the  predictable struggles of the not-yet-born.  Like Germany post-WWII, America has to, not only as a matter of justice, but as a part of its moral evolution  —  as a part of our individual and collective moral evolution  —  declare and admit publicly the obvious thing (yes, this is a nation built in large part on the backs of hideous, unspeakable crimes) and then do the scary one (to atone, to feel, and to express shame, to even beg for forgiveness).  Only against the background of such restorative practices can real repair begin to take place.

By now, we have exhausted all the false and fraudulent moves.  Real repair, I think, is all that we have left.