Reparations & Identity Politics - Balfour

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 support@jstor.org.
Sage Publications, Inc. is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Political Theory.
http://www.jstor.org
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
REPARATIONS AFTER IDENTITY POLITICS
LAWRIE BALFOUR
Universityof 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, identitypolitics, WendyBrown
Modern life begins with slavery.

-Toni
Morrison1
INTRODUCTION:ANTI-IDENTITYPOLITICS
IN THE "AGEOF APOLOGY"2
On a 1998 tripto Africa, President Bill Clinton almost apologized for the
slave trade. "Going back to the time before we were even a nation," he
received the fruitsof the slave trade,and we
observed, "European-Americans
were wrong in that."3ThatClintonwas moved to offer an acknowledgmentof
American complicity in the transportand subsequent enslavement of millions 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 Perspectives 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.
POLITICALTHEORY,Vol. 33 No. 6, December 2005 786-811
DOI: 10. 177/0090591705279067
2005 Sage Publications
786
Balfour / REPARATIONSAFTERIDENTITYPOLITICS
787
with the tenor of an age in which victims of identity-basedinjustices around

the world were demandingand receiving both symbolic andmaterialredress,
in which states' claims to democratic legitimacy in the presentwere increasingly connected to a willingness to confront the crimes of the past.4 Also
unsurprisingwas the swift, outragedresponseClinton'sremarksgeneratedat
home-most notably, RepresentativeTom DeLay accused the president of
behaving treasonously by criticizing the United Stateson foreign soil-and
the fact that they issued in no substantialchanges in policy.
While it is tempting to dismiss the near-apologyandthe ensuing fracas as
a clash between the merely symbolic or therapeuticracial politics of the
Clinton administrationon one hand, and partisansniping on the other, to do
so would be to neglect deeper questions raised and evaded in the ClintonDeLay exchange. Regardlessof the intentionsof the actors,the dramareveals
the degree to which the ghosts of slavery still shadow political life in the
United States.Forpolitical theorists, furthermore,it conjuresa range of questions never articulatedby 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 apparentlyunreconcilableresponses
to these questions."
On one hand, the late twentieth centurywitnessed the reemergence of the
movement for reparationsfor slavery and Jim Crow and an explosion of
scholarlyliteratureinspiredby this movement.Althoughthe idea of demanding redress for slavery dates back at least to the mid-nineteenthcentury,6it
has acquired new purchase at a moment when affirmativeaction programs
are being attackedand dismantled, when school resegregationis on the rise,
when felony disenfranchisement, deindustrialization,and the depletion of
black communities as a result of the "waron drugs"aggravatethe political
and economic marginalization of these communities, and when issues of
racial injustice go largely unnoted in nationalpolitical agendas. In lieu of a
politics organizedaroundenacting and enforcingformalguaranteesof equality, many activists and scholars have turnedto the task of formulatingpolitical projects that explicitly account for ongoing effects of slavery and Jim
Crow.7Although varying widely in theirassessmentof boththejustifications
for and desired ends of reparations, these efforts comprise a movement
whose implications for political theory are substantial.Most fundamentally,
they provide a counternarrativeto received understandingsof the development of democracy in the United States and challenge theorists' persistent
blind spot with regard to matters of race. For even as political theorists
788
POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005
increasingly addressquestions of identity, observes Hawley Fogg-Davis, the

discipline "hasnot given theoreticalpriorityto American race."8The rise of
reparationspolitics pressesradical,progressive, and liberalpolitical theorists
to consider whetherandto what extent race blindness disables us from thinking creatively about democracy in the United States.9
During roughlythe same period, however, a substantialgroup of scholars
questioned the value of "identitypolitics," contending thatpolitical organizing aroundhistoricallymarginalizedgroup identities substitutespreoccupation with past injuriesfor emancipatoryaspirationsand divides the left into
rival factions and the world into victims and villains. These arguments,like
the identity-basedmovements they challenge, are heterogeneous, but Susan
Bickford usefully crystallizes three central complaints: "ressentiment,
At first glance, reparationspolitics appears
balkanization,and regulation."10
susceptible to all three. Insofar as reparationsadvocates 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 moralauthorityis not subject to discussion or critique;insofar as they
restricttheirfocus to injustices suffered by African Americans and remedies
that target black communities, they invite the charge of divisiveness; and
insofar as their understandingof those injustices and remedies relies on
unproblematizedconceptions of blackness and whiteness, they engage in the
kind of shoringup of borders,internaland external,thatproducesnew exclusions. Criticsof identitypolitics and advocates for reparationsthus appearto
be at an impasse.Is the recentpopularityof the idea of reparationspolitically
counterproductive,an instance of one or more of the pitfalls the critics of
identity politics describe? Or are anti-identity politics argumentsmerely a
recent manifestationof a longer history of resistance, particularlyon 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 aspirationsagainst what I take to be the most persuasive arguments for reparations.Brown worries thatthe pursuitof legal redress for the
subordinationof racial and sexual minorities, women, and other marginalized groupssignals a departurefrom the pursuitof freedom. This approach,
she writes, bears too close a resemblance to what Nietzsche calls a "politics
of ressentiment":
Developing a righteouscritiqueof power from the perspectiveof the injured,it delimits a
specific site of blame for suffering by constituting sovereign subjects and events as
responsiblefor the "injury"of social subordination.It fixes the identities of the injured
789
and the injuringas social positions, and codifies as well the meanings of their actions
against all possibilities of indeterminacy,ambiguity,and strugglefor resignification or
repositioning. This effort also casts the law in particularand the state more generally as
neutral arbitersof 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
appropriateprotectorsagainst injury and casts injuredindividualsas needing such protection by such protectors.Finally, in its economy of perpetratorand victim, this project
seeks not power or emancipationfor the injuredor the subordinated,but the revenge of
punishment, making the perpetratorhurt as the suffererdoes.l1
Although the reparations movement differs from the prohibitionist campaigns against pornographyand hate speech that are the subject of much of
Brown's critique, she nonetheless sees it as partof the largertrend. "In contemporarypolitical parlance,"she writes, "the relationof the present to the
past is most often figured through idealizationsand demonizationsof particularepochs or individualson the one hand, andreparationsand apologies for
past wrongs on the other."12
Much of the power of Brown's analysis derivesfromits sympathywith the
stated ends of the efforts she criticizes. She speaks fromthe perspective of a
fellow traveler,a veteran of feminist and other struggleswho reflects on the
unintendedresults of her own political investmentsandwho conveys a sense
of personalperil at the apparentimpotence of oppositionalmovements today.
Unlike critics from the right, who contrasta discourseof victimhood with an
account of individualand group initiativethatunderstatesthe significance of
racial power, Brown's critique of identity politics is allied to a critique of
structuresof injustice.13Unlike critics who accuse reparationsactivists of
failing to acknowledge progress alreadymade, Brown calls progressive narratives 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 reparationsmovement
ought to give its advocates pause, her assumption that they must do so is
symptomatic of a more general tendency among political theorists to reproduce a white perspectivein the course of the analysis.This essay thus considers 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,andwhen do they directly
contest or transformthem?"(SOI, 12). And it suggests thatcritics of identity
politics have a correspondingresponsibility to ask whentheirassessments of
reparationscodify and entrench white privilege, when they mask the workings of white supremacy, and when they directly contest or transform
racialized forms of power.
790
It would require another full-length essay, at least, to do justice to the

range and complexity of claims made for and against reparations.14But
before proceeding, let me briefly sketch the barest outlines of the negative
and positive case underpinningmy argument. At a minimum, Americans'
persistent unwillingness-from Emancipationuntil today-to take the idea
of slave redressseriouslydeserves scrutiny.This is the negative case for reparations, and it provides a crucial rejoinderto those opponents who insist that
the passage of time and the difficulty of determiningprecise links between
contemporaryAfrican Americans and the victims of slavery make reparations a nonstarter.Regardless of the persuasiveness of any particularclaim
for reparations,I maintainthat the demonstrationof 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
Positively, I contendthatit is possible to piece togetherelements from a varietyof
sources, includingactivists,legal scholars, historians,political scientists, and
philosophers, to formulate three general features of any adequate form of
reparations.First,it would offer an acknowledgmentof 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 harmsto African Americans that have resulted from legally sanctioned injuriesof raceunderearlierregimes."'6Second, reparationswould be
used to supporta range of public-history efforts aimed at educating the citizenry aboutconnectionsbetween past injustices andracialinequalitiestoday.
And third,by focusing on massive investment in African Americancommunities and the institutionsthat serve them, not individual payments, reparations would makesubstantialchanges in the materialand political conditions
of African American lives. Rather than advocate a particular strategywhether it be legal, legislative, or grassroots-this essay treats reparations
claims togetheras partsof a multiprongedmovement. Withthis rough sketch
in mind, then, it is possible to assess how well Brown's argumentsagainst
identity politics apply to the reparationsstruggle. 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 redressfrom the state;and III. the
kind of historicalconsciousness that reparationspolitics might produce.
I. WHATIS THE "IDENTITY"IN REPARATIONS

POLITICS?
Readersof Brown's work areconfrontedwith a view of late modernpolitical life in which the prospects for democracy are dim. Freedom is increasingly definedin narrowlyeconomic terms;emancipatorynarrativesof histor-
791
ical progresshave been discreditedbutnot replaced;andleft politics has been

supplantedby left posturing. The quest for reparationsthus appears to be a
symptom of larger ills. It represents the replacementof democratic politics
with moralismand "themergerof racialjustice into the languageof essentialized identity and cultural preservation.""17
But must reparations advocates 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 identitycategories in makingthe case for redress,the description
of identity-basedmovements as preoccupiedwith sufferingand 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 primary 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 reinforced, they misdescribe the ambiguities of human being and the multiple
channels throughwhich political subjects areconstituted.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 antipoliticsinsofar as the
identity to be preserved,at all cost, is thatof the powerless subject. It inhibits
ratherthanproducesdemocraticforms of collective engagement.Brown thus
urges a reorientationaway from claims that are groundedin a sense of one's
location in a historically disempowered communityto a form of politics that
is explicitly active, futureoriented, and inclusive. "Whatif it were possible,"
she muses, "to incite a slight shift in the characterof political expression and
political claims common to much politicized identity?What if we sought to
supplantthe language of 'I am'-with its defensive closure on identity, its
insistence on the fixity of position, its equationof social with moral positioning-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 democraticpolitics is not a necessary one. There is a growing literaturethat theorizes a relationshipbetween
identity and politics without appealing to a fixed, exclusive "I."Bickford, for
example, emphasizes multiple sources and effects of identityclaims beyond
those thatmight be described as expressions of ressentimentor narrowlypluralist assertionsof group interest. Relatedly,Iris MarionYoung's conception
of "social difference as a political resource"explores how it is possible to
mobilize around the experiences of a disadvantagedsocial group without
appealing to a suspect racial ontology.'9 Tommie Shelby's notion of black
792
solidarity explicitly rejects the idea that the political mobilization of African
Americans mustdepend on a sense of sharedpeoplehood.20And the concept
of "politicalrace"advancedby Lani Guinier and Gerald Torresis 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 structureof privilege/subordinationand an effective tool for activating
communitiesin resistance.21In each case, these thinkersaim 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 concrete, public effects of those categories on the other.22
Nor mustan emphasis on a history of suffering entail an unhealthyinvestment in thatsufferingor a stance of moral superiority.Forthe historyrecalled
is not only a history of injury but also, crucially, a history of survival and
achievementagainstlong odds. Moreover,drawing attentionto the suffering
of AfricanAmericanscan constitutea form of opposition in a society thathas
historically denied the reality of black pain. Brown does not deny this point,
acknowledgingthata Nietzschean call to forget can engenderits own form of
cruelty (SOI, 74). Nonetheless, she proceeds by considering how a democratic politicalculturecould accommodate demandsthat suffering be recognized withoutinquiringinto the role these demands might play in producing
a democraticpolitical culture(SOI, 75). What is absent, in other words, is an
explorationof the possibility thatclaims of injurycan engenderpositive, creative forms of politics. MarlonRoss's meditationon the pleasuresof identity
offers an alternativereading:"Fortunatelyfor us, the pleasure in identifying
against dominancecannotbe delimited by acts of domination.Belonging to a
group formedthroughothers'domination and one's own subordinationparadoxically affordsits own peculiar pleasures aimed at upsetting the norms of
power."23To 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 reiterationof suffering.24
Furthermore,by focusing on the centralityof suffering to claims of identity, Brown may accept too uncritically prevailingperceptionsof the character of oppressedgroups. According to Bickford, "to see identity claims as
obsessed with sufferingis to overlook the fact that it is the perspective of the
dominant culturethat marks them out that way."25The availability of such
assumptions and the distortions they reproduce when African American
claims areinvolvedcan be illustratedby the response to TrentLott's homage
to Strom Thurmond.That Lott's comments were discreditedby commentators across the political spectrummight be celebrated as a sign of progress.
That they were widely described as "racially insensitive" ought to inspire
caution. Forin characterizingLott's remarksas a matterof racial sensitivity,
793
journalists simultaneouslyreinforcedthe suggestion thatAfrican Americans

are a particularlysensitive group and obscuredthe white supremacistcharacter of the order for which Lott pined. Charles Henry crystallizes the pervasiveness of this kind of thinking when he illustratescongressional reactions
to RepresentativeJohnConyers's call for a commissionto study slave reparations with a comment by former Vice PresidentAl Gore:"I'm for handling it
sensitively without conveying a sense that it's ever likely to occur, because
it's not."26Here 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 attentionto the imagined suffering of
those presumedto be overly sensitive serves to displaceanygenuine confrontation 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 importantcaution about
how democratic impulses can be perverted into dreams of destroying the
powerful. Yet the reductionof reparationspolitics to a politics of vengeance
is troubling in two respects where African American claims are concerned.
First, as Thomas Dumm remarks,"Itis remarkable,thoughrarelyremarked,
that [members of stigmatized groups] do not express greaterparanoia 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 framingof black political
aspirations.Second, the association of identity politics with a desire for vengeance reproduces without interrogationone of the most vivid images of
white negrophobia.It overlooks a history in which black political mobilization, of any stripe, has been figured by white Americansas an instrumentof
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
ressentimentthat she ascribes to members of subordinatedgroups, her concentrationon those groups as an obstacle to democraticpolitics representsa
missed opportunity.It is an opportunitythatis easy to miss in discussions of
identity politics, because white identity claims aregenerallynot presentedas
identity claims; they are a species of what Brown, discussing male dominance, calls "point-of-viewlessness" (SOI, 167). "Whitenessin the colorblind state,"observes Joel Olson, "functionsas a norm in which white privilege is sedimentedinto the backgroundof social life as the 'naturaloutcome'
of ordinarypractices and individual choices."29But if the role of white enti-
794
tlement in structuringvirtually every dimension of American life is imperceptible to many Americans, threatsto thatprivilege are palpable. This phenomenon is revealed, humorously, in Patricia Williams's recollection of a
group of "RealHungryMen"grumblingaboutbeing shut out of the job market by womenandblacks, even as they attemptto monopolize a table of cookies and creampuffsat a law conference that is overwhelmingly white and
male.30 It is evident in the availability of "reverse discrimination" as a
respectabletermin both popularand 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 Movementis de rigeur in this social-democratic domain,"comments
Eric Lott in his examinationof anti-identitypolitics literature,"butit hides a
nasty vein of ressentimentabout constraintson 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 particularlyuseful is in
providing a way to understandthe workings of ressentimentmanifested in
the intensity of white opposition to reparations.Even casual acquaintance
with the issue throughnewspaperarticles, editorials, and lettersto the editor
reveals the passion with which many whites react to the very idea of reparations-or even an apology-for slavery.32The immediacy and the vehemence of the responses-"My family never owned slaves!" "I had to work
for everythingI have!" "Enoughalready!"-offer a glimpse into the ways in
which privilege is dissembled and whiteness is refigured as vulnerabilityin
the face of the perceivedjuggernaut of the government and vocal minority
groups. Whites'lack of enthusiasmfor reparationscomes as no surprise.But
how to accountfor the fact thata stunning 96 percent of white respondentsto
a 2000 surveyby Lawrence Bobo and Michael Dawson rejected the idea of
monetarypaymentsto African American descendantsof slaves?33What, furthermore,would promptthose surveyed to attributethe idea of reparationsto
black greed?34Ignorance tells part of the story. The same study found that
white Americansbelieved that black Americans had already or would soon
enjoy full equality, a view undermined by substantial scholarly literature.
Along theselines, ThomasMcCarthymakes a persuasivecase thata distorted
understandingof the history of slavery and its aftermathcontributesto Americans' unwillingness to acknowledge any responsibility for the racial crimes
of the pastor to recognize theirconnection to presentforms of racial inequality.35Yet mistakenjudgments about the facts cannot entirely account for
white reactionsto the idea of reparations.Self-interest is surely anotherpart
of the equation,but it too seems insufficient.36
795
Brown's account of how contradictions in liberalism produce ressentiment points toward another possibility.37Identifying, at the core of liberalism, 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 markedlydisenfranchisedones, [are]
vulnerable to ressentiment"(SOI, 67, italics in the original). What she does
not addressis how white supremacyhas historicallymediatedthose tensions.
Recent scholars, examining what W. E. B. Du Bois calls the "publicand psychological wage" of whiteness, attest to the ways thatthe racial compensation of less-advantagedwhites has mitigatedtheirsense thatthe United States
has defaulted on the promise of equality.Relatedly,the historicalinvisibility
of the work of African Americans coupled with culturalassumptions about
their dependencyhave enabled whites to sustaina false sense of self-reliance.
As PatchenMarkellremarks,"Subordinationinsulatessome people from the
force of the contradiction between the desire for sovereignty and the ineliminable fact of finitude, enabling them to live within thatcontradictionat
other people's expense."38By laying bare the history of white privilege,
demands for reparationsthus pose a fundamentalthreatto white identity or
white presumptionsof identitylessness. Attention to the dynamics of white
ressentimentcan provide a means of investigatingthe dynamicof innocence/
guilt in which it is white Americans who assume the mantle of powerlessness, representingthemselves as innocent of responsibilityfor the subordination of African Americans and as victims of state programsof redress.39It
offers a rejoinderto the claim that reparationspolitics is too divisive by providing a language for exploring and understandingwhy any significant effort
to counterracial 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 politics of ressentimentmight be developed to help uncoverthe forces that have
succeeded in figuring reparations as an outrage. To convey, in Sheldon
Wolin's words, the living power of a history not forgottenbut "only publicly
unrecalled.'"'40
II. REPARATIONS
AND THE STATE
Even if my assessment is right, and the reparationsmovementneed not be
built upon a fixed, unchangingconception of black andwhite identities, even
if it is possible to offer an interpretationof the relationshipbetween identitybased suffering and emancipationthat evades the trapsBrown so effectively
exposes, and even if the idea of a politics of ressentimentmightbe more aptly
796
used to limn the contours of white identity politics than to provide a wholesale critique of the reparationsmovement, Brown points toward another,
related, constellationof dangers. In asking the state to play a central role in
resolution, the reparationsmovement risks both reinforcing and disguising
state domination.Although one might reply that the demand for reparations
involves an airingof statecomplicity in slavery andJim Crow,to stop thereis
to miss the deeperchallenge of Brown's argument.Not only could a successful claim for redressserve as an invitationfor an expansion of the state's disciplinary power, it could also authorize a repressive politics within African
American communities. In particular,Brown's argumentsabout the masculinism of state power raise crucial questions about the (un)intended consequences of the demandfor reparations."The state,"Brown writes, "does not
simply handleclients or employ staff but produces state subjects, as bureaucratized,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 subterraneanin the post-civil rights era, Brown
exposes ways in which state repression is increasingly disguised: "its power
and privilegeoperateincreasingly throughdisavowal of potency,repudiation
of responsibility,and diffusion of sites and operationsof control"(SOI, 194).
In this section I ask how Brown's concerns aboutturningto the state might be
appliedto the politics of reparationsand consider how the reparationsmovement, in turn,uncovers limitations in her argument.I begin by attending to
one of the centralquestions her analysis raises: What kinds of political subjects might a successful reparationsmovement produce?
One answeris thatit could provide new mechanisms throughwhich African Americans are interpellatedas victims. This is supportedby a range of
critical race theorists, who demonstrate ways in which U.S. law requires a
victim.41Forexample, Williams recalls that,in the courtroom,"Ilearnedthat
the best way to give voice to those whose voice had been suppressedwas to
arguethattheyhadno voice."42Contrastthis comment with white reactionsto
signs of black militancy, and it is easy to imagine that the claimants most
likely to become beneficiaries of state largesse arethose whose performance
of will-lessness is most convincing. Historically,arguesDaryl Michael Scott,
the deploymentof "damageimagery"has ensuredthe success of many liberal
policies aimed at improving the conditions of African American lives by
reaffirmingwhite, middle-class racial assumptions and eliciting pity.43Unlike social-welfarepolicies that are not evidently "racial"in character,those
associatedin the public imagination with African Americans have tradedon
perceptionsof victimhood.44Furthermore,Scott warns, any politics emphasizing the harmsof centuries of oppression is especially worrisome in more
conservative periods, when pity is in short supply; for accounts of black
797
Americans as victims can become justifications for furthermarginalization.

And these concerns extend beyond claims for reparationsin the United
States. Writing about the internationaltrend towardrestitutionfor historic
injustice, ElazarBarkannotes, "no restitutionhas liftedthe burdenof victimization; instead it has routinized it."45
Related to the prospect thatan effective reparationscampaignwould both
trade on and reproducea conception of African Americanvictimhood is the
danger that it could entrench distinctions between deserving and undeserving recipients of compensation. While argumentsfor reparationscan evade
some of these traps by balancing the emphasis on the suffering of African
Americans with an appreciationfor their contributions,46
such an approach
has its own risks. Among them is the possibility of contrastingthose citizens
who embody an ethic of hardwork and self-sacrifice againstthose who represent a perversionof those values, those identifiedas the "underclass."As Eric
Yamamoto explains, this is an aspect of "the underside of reparations."
Examining the arguments that led to reparationsfor Japanese Americans
internedduring WorldWarII, Yamamotonotes the significance of an ideology of "group worthiness" and posits that the effectiveness of those arguments was at least partlytraceableto JapaneseAmericans'self-presentation
as "deserving superpatriots."47
In light of the dependence of this image of
JapaneseAmericans as a model minority on a distinctionfrom black Americans, Yamamoto'sargumentprovides a crucial reminderof how reparations
claims can be used to support,ratherthanto transform,publicperceptions of
whose citizenship counts.
One of the attractionsof many proposals for reparationsis the idea that
responsibility for allocating any resources would reside within black communities themselves or be overseen by organizationswithAfrican American
leadership. Shifting authorityaway from governmentto 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 warningaboutthe ways thatreparations
politics can reinforce intraracial class lines deserves close attention, and
Cathy Cohen's argumentsabouthow internalpolicing mechanismscan stifle
oppositional politics cautions against reparationsprogramsthat might further marginalizethe least privileged members of black communities.48They
suggest the limitations of exclusively empowering "reputablecitizens" to
oversee the distributionof resources.49
Perhapsthe aspect of Brown's critiquemost pertinentto the articulationof
democraticreparationsdemands is her analysis of genderedforms of power.
As a numberof commentatorshave noted, considerationsof gender are often
The absence of genderis worrisome
neglected in argumentsfor reparations.50
798
in severalrespects,but I will focus on two. On the one hand,gender is central

to the story of slavery and Jim Crow, and reparationscannot contributeto a
transformativereckoning with the past without attending to the specific
effects of racial patriarchy."'On the other hand, acknowledging the sexual
dominationat the heartof slaveryand the double burdenof victimhood borne
by African American women may produce new dilemmas. Such acknowledgment has too often been used to reinforce the idea that African American
women arein need of patriarchalprotection. Furthermore,as black feminist
scholarshaveamplydemonstrated,social science studies of slavery's terrible
toll on black families have produced a pathologizing discourse that condemns 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 reparationsprogramconceived as a means of
repairing black families and reaffirming the worth of black women could
become a mechanismfor reproducingmasculine authority.The dangeris put
with particularpointedness in WahneemaLubiano's adaptationof the Jeopardy answer-questionformat-"Answer: the romanticizedblack patriarchal
family and its disciplinary possibilities. Question: what is one way that the
state can mobilize blackness to do its repressivework and its policing of civil
society?"52
Brown is thus surely right to warn against the repressive possibilities that
inhere in any turnto the state-and its surrogates-as the ultimate source of
relief for centuriesof injustice. Yet even as her caution ought to inform reparations advocates,the reparationsmovement indicates the shortcomingsof a
politics thatabandonsthe aspirationto remake the state. In view of a history
in which the response of the demos to African American claims has proved
unreliableat best, Brown's apparentfaith in the collective engagement of the
people seems no less quixotic than efforts to seek change through state
action. Althoughany movement must confront the possible unintendedconsequences of its success, this history indicates why ceding the struggle over
the properuses of state power to the forces of the racial status quo is the
greaterdanger.53
First,the demandfor reparationsprovides a reminderthatthe dismissal of
the use of state power as an instrumentfor meaningful social change misreads history.In this light, MartinLutherKing, Jr.'scomment that "it was a
does not signal a belief in the benignity
great relief to be in a federal court"'54
or ultimatefairnessof the federaljudiciary so much as a sense of the impossibility of localjustice 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 turnto the courts representsan instance of the democraticpracticeof insisting thatthe governmentbe responsive to all of the peo-
799
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
CharlesOgletree,the cochairof the Reparations CoordinatingCommittee, makes a case for litigationas a tool for the
expression of "historical-politicalclaims of oppression."Reparations lawsuits, according to Ogletree, are not understoodas an alternativeto struggle
so much as an instrumentof struggle, and recognizing thedisciplinarypower
of law does not entail the refusal to engage it as an always limited and problematic ally in emancipatory political projects.56Shifting attention away
from legal outcomes to the importanceof public claim-makingin reparations
politics, Yamamoto suggests that it is useful to treat "law and court process . .. as generatorsof 'culturalperformances'andas vehicles for providing
outsiders an institutionalpublic forum.""'57
Further,by explicitly linking its claims to an internationalsystem of white
supremacy and global struggles for human rights,58the reparations movement offers an example of oppositional politics not content"torely upon the
U.S. nation-stateas a stable container of social antagonisms,and as the necessary horizon of our hopesfor justice."59And even as reparationsadvocates
turnto the U.S. government,their actions explicitly uncoverthe implication
of statepower in the institutionof slaveryandthe forms of racialinjustice that
succeeded it. They call attentionto the ways citizenship and anticitizenship
have been defined and uncover the multiple dimensions in which those categories persist.60For example, the "FreedomAgenda" of the Black Radical
Congress indicates how an explicitly "Black"politics canbe oppositional not
only in its attack on white supremacybut also in its simultaneousrefutation
of patriarchalpower and the exclusion of marginalizedsubcommunities.61
While it is possible thatreparationsprogramscould reinforceclass lines and
structuresof authoritywithin black communities, furthermore,such an outcome is not inevitable. In lieu of a single fund of monies managed by elites
and dispersed to individual claimants, many supportersof reparationsadvocate the development of multiple channels of funding. To that end, Manning
Marablesuggests thateconomic reparationsshouldmakeresourcesavailable
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,
arguingfor a democraticdecision-making structurethatwould give authority
over any compensation to ordinarycitizens.63
Finally, Brown's critique prevents her from recognizing, in the reparations movement, the ways in which identity claims can be mobilized to challenge capitalist ideals. "Whatwe have come to call identitypolitics is partly
dependent upon the demise of a critique of capitalismandof bourgeois cul-
800
tural and economic values," Brown explains (SOI, 59). And she ponders
whether politicized identity represents a particularversion of class resentment, whether"withoutrecourse 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 traditionof black political thought offers ample examples of critiques of racialoppressionnot tetheredto thatideal. And while therearearguments for reparationsthatreinforce Brown's point, one of the real contributions of some versions of reparationsdiscourse is the capacity to bring to
public attentionthe complex historical relationshipbetween American capitalism and white supremacy.64Unlike affirmative action programs, whose
aim is inclusion in the present order, reparations activism challenges the
legitimacyof thatorder.Thus RobertAllen observes, "Atits most radical,the
demand for reparationsstandsas a critiqueof capitalistpropertyrelations."65
As such, furthermore,the demandfor reparationssuggests 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
alternativemight look like, I consider reparationsand the politics of history
in the concluding section.
HLI.
PASTREPAIR?
We speakaboutexpense. Thereare several ways of addressingoneself to some attemptto
find out what the word means here. From a very literal point of view, the harborsand the
ports andthe railroadsof 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
speakingvery seriously,andthis is not an overstatement:I picked cotton, I carriedit to the
market,I built the railroadsunder someone else's whip for nothing. For nothing.66
When JamesBaldwin, in a 1965 debate againstWilliam F. Buckley, Jr.,told a

Cambridge University audience that he had labored under the whip "for
nothing,"his repetitionof thatsimple phrase"was an explosion." The speech
earned Baldwin a standing ovation and a gratifying 544 votes to Buckley's
184.67Rhetoricallyeffective it surely was, as the lopsidedness of the debate
attests. But the continuing power of the phrase resides equally in its substance-more specifically, in two distinct but related meanings. At first
glance, the literalism of Baldwin's formulation is troubling. What exactly
does he meanwhen he writes that he picked cotton and built the railroadsfor
nothing?Does he trafficin 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
Balfour / REPARATIONSAFTER IDENTITYPOLITICS
801
endorse? Can it help political theoriststo reimagine the presence of the slave
past in such a way thatmore raciallyjust futuresbecome possible? And how
do these contrasting readings illuminate the politics of reparations?
The first meaning of Baldwin's "fornothing"emphasizesthe 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.68This alone provides a forceful moral basis for
the demand for reparations,and a growing body of literatureattends to the
question of just how much is owed.69While such calculationsprovide testimony to the scope of slavery and the effects of decades of discriminationon
the lives of individuals andcommunities,however,argumentsfor reparations
tied primarily to this kind of calculus reveal several of the traps to which
Brown alerts her readers.First, insofar as the claims areframedas a returnof
resources stolen by white Americans from African Americans,with presentday individual whites and blacks standing in for their forebears, they risk
reinforcing precisely the kinds of identity against which Brown warns. As
RobertFullinwider notes, reparationsargumentsthattradeon notions of personal guilt and innocence can distractfrom questions of collective responsibility.70A second peril resides in the effort to build the case for reparations
from a notion of inheritance.Although a compelling argumentcan be made
along these lines,7 to do so requiresaccepting inegalitarianaspects 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 precludes a more complex analysis of slavery'sreach into all domains of American life. For example, the centralityof sexual slavery is not easily reckoned
with in this kind of accounting;nor is the worthof yearsof underpaiddomestic work performed by African American women susceptible to measurement in marketterms. Finally, even if advocateswere successful in obtaining
a substantialsettlement, a focus on the value of what was takenfrom African
Americans under slavery and in its aftermathhighlights the insufficiency of
any form of material redress. Because the value of reparationswill be far
smaller than the approximatevalue of what was stolen, argumentsorganized
around measurements of the debt inevitably highlight the ineradicabilityof
the loss. Thus although rectification of the patternof unjustenrichmentis a
significant part of the demand for reparations,too narrowa 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 unpaidsufferingto his distress thatthe aspirationto remakethe United States into somethingmore genuinely democratichas been continually thwarted.By this reading,Baldwin's
802
call to remembranceis not wielded as a weapon, intended to bludgeon a

white audience with repeated invocations of his own and others' victimization. Rather, he fashions his history in order that the suffering and the
achievementsof the men and women working underthe 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 demandfor reparationsis a
call to grapplewith the ways the past is lived and its object is the transformation of society as a whole. It compels public witness to the fact that "theinjuries not only perdure,but are inflicted anew."72
In this sense, it correspondsto
Brown's own argumentsabout redemptive uses of the past, and challenges
her condemnationof reparations.
Although it is beyond the scope of this essay to do justice to Brown's
recent writingson historicalconsciousness, and in particularto her extended
readings of Derridaand Benjamin, I think it is possible to tease from them a
sense of the way reparationsmight contributeto 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:
Sufferingthat is not yet finished is not only suffering that must still be enduredbut also
sufferingthatcan still be redeemed;it might develop anotherface throughcontemporary
practices.Makinga historicalevent or formationcontemporary,making it "anoutrageto
the present"and thus exploding or reworkingboth the way in which it has been remembered andthe way in which it is positioned in historical consciousness as "past,"is precisely the opposite of bringingthat phenomenato "closure"throughreparationor apology (our most ubiquitous form of historical political thinking today). The former
demandsthatwe redeemthe past througha specific and contemporarypracticeofjustice;
the lattergazes impotentlyat the past even as it attemptsto establish history as irrelevant
to the presentor, at best, as a reproachfulclaim or grievance in the present.73
Like Toni Morrison's ambiguous admonition that the story of slavery's

ghosts is "nota story to pass on," Brown's work shows how reckoning with
the afterlife of even ancient crimes is both necessary and dangerous.
Redemptivepolitics, she maintains,is not a matterof overcoming or domesticating the past. Instead, it requires "the connection of a particularpolitical
aim in the present with a particularformation of oppression in the past."'74
It
disruptsboth unthinkinglyprogressive narrativesof history that presumethe
impotenceof the past and business-as-usualpolitics that presume the impossibility of fundamentalchange.
Reparationspolitics can "redeemthe past through a specific and contemporarypracticeofjustice" in two ways: first, by providing a critical discourse
that serves as a counterweight to race-blind language and incorporates
acknowledgmentof the past into present practices; and, second, by offering
803
an avenue for concrete social change. As Bill Lawson observes: "ourmoral/

political vocabularyis morally unsatisfactoryandinadequatefor characterizThe most persuasiverepaing the plight of present-dayblack Americans.'7""
rations claims derive their power from reworkingthat vocabularyin 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,76and Marablesimilarlysuggests thatsuch a conversationmay be the
most significant contribution of the quest for reparations.77Robin Kelley
pushes the creativepossibilities of reparationsdiscoursefurther,likening it to
poetry. In Kelley's view, the experience of activists working collectively to
demand a reckoning with history can wed past horrorto future promise in
previously unimaginedways.78Argumentsfor reparationsmight thusbe seen
as a kind of genealogical politics, a departurefrom liberaldiscourse in which
equality is achieved throughthe suppressionof the past.79In this sense, they
hold out the promise thatAmerican racial history might be put to the service
of what Brown and Janet Halley call critique:
Critiqueoffers possibilities of analyzing existing discourses of powerto understandhow
subjects are fabricatedor positioned by them, what powers they secure (and disguise or
veil), what assumptions they naturalize,what privileges they fix, what normsthey mobilize, and what or whom these norms exclude. Critiqueis thus a practicethatallows us to
scrutinizethe form, content, andpossible reworkingof ourapparentpolitical choices; we
no longer have to take them as givens.80
Enacting such a practice,however,requiresresistingthe allureof closure.

In this regard, my argumentdepartsfrom Robert Westley's conclusion that
"the closure afforded by reparationsmeans that no more will be owed to
Blacks than is owed to any citizen underthe law. This is the effect of any final
judgment on the merits. Once reparationsare paid, Blacks will be able to
Given
function within American society on a footing of absoluteequality."81
the depth of societal denial about the significance and effects of slavery and
the pervasiveness of antiblack racism, about which Westley writes so eloquently,it is unlikely thatreparationsalone could accomplish so much. And
while my view is substantiallyinformed by Marable'sargument,I am wary
of his reading of the etymological kinship of reparationsand "repair"as a
promise "to make whole again."82The pursuitof finaljudgmentor wholeness
might well appeal to white Americans eager to put the ugliness of U.S. racial
history permanentlyin 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
thatcompose the groups in whose name the claims aremade.83By emphasizing struggles ratherthan outcomes,84by contrast,reparationsdiscourse can
804
provide an avenue for investigating the public meanings of a history long

suppressed and contesting received explanations of present racial
hierarchies.
Argumentsfor 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 imaginationby asking Americans to consider what democracy
demands when the "us"is understoodto be black. Yet in the pursuitof policies and programsthat focus specifically on the contributionsof and crimes
committed against African American citizens and their ancestors, reparations activismneed not proceed by "renderingsuspect the language and possibilities of collectivity, common action, and sharedpurposes.""85
Instead,taking the reparationsmovement seriously requiresattending to the question of
whose interestscan and cannot standfor the common good and shifts the burden of argumentto those who would characterizeall demands for redress as
an outrage.Highlighting the historical imbalance between black Americans'
sacrifices andtheirenjoymentof the benefits of citizenship exposes both the
regularitywith which all citizens are asked to subordinatetheir interests to
the greatergood andthe disproportionatelosses thatAfrican Americanshave
borne in the name of that good.86For political theorists, grappling with the
question of reparationsmay provoke a reorientationof vantage-point, displacing presumptivelyrace-blindaccounts of U.S. democracy and giving priority to the perspectivesof its black citizens.87Reparationsclaims might even
be a mediumfor the resurgenceof the "blackworldliness" that Nikhil Singh
finds in the work of radicalblack activists of the 1940s. This democraticproject 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 reparationsas a critical discourse is always linked to
effortsto makematerialchange in the lives of African Americans. Heretoo, it
is importantto note that specific commitmentsto African Americancommunities need not benefit them exclusively. The example of Reconstruction,
which targetedthe welfare of the freedmen and women but also creatednew
educationalpossibilities, social welfare programs,and more democraticstate
constitutionsthroughoutthe South, indicates the broaderdemocraticeffects
thatmight follow from attendingto the lingering impact of slavery.89Indeed,
one of the central contributions of reparations activism is its capacity to
underminethe idea thateffecting improvementin some of the most neglected
U.S. communitieswould 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
Balfour / REPARATIONSAFTERIDENTITY POLITICS
805
primarily,about the money. The demandfor reparationswas aboutsocial justice, reconciliation, reconstructing the internal life of black America, and
eliminating institutional racism."90
It is not necessary, finally, to see in the quest for reparationsan example of
"left melancholia,"a brooding antipoliticsthat stands accusingly "to the left
of the possible."91Although Brown paintsa recognizablepictureof a kind of
radical posturing that focuses on unsatisfiable grievances, and her account
aptly captures some elements of the reparationsmovement, the dismissal of
all reparationsdemands as examples of this kind of posturingdisguises the
ways in which the idea of redress for slavery has been, since the nineteenth
century,figured as outside "the possible." It elides those reparationsclaims
thatgo beyond good and evil, thatcontest the assumptionsof liberallegal discourse and imagine how to evoke the complex haunting of the American
present, that aspire to obtain redress without requiringthat African Americans 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 movementthathas galvanized
a range of actors, including grassrootsactivists as well as lawyers, lawmakers, and academics. The rejection of reparationsper se--rather than critical
assessment of different, specific argumentsfor 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 generatedin the pursuitof reparationsdoes
not representa promising example of democraticpolitics, then what does?
NOTES
1. ToniMorrison,quoted in Paul Gilroy,"LivingMemory:A Meeting with ToniMorrison,"
in Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures(London: Serpent'sTail, 1993), 178.
2. Roy L. Brooks, "The Age of Apology," in WhenSorry Isn't Enough: The Controversy
overApologies and Reparationsfor HumanInjustice,ed. Roy L. Brooks(New York:NYU Press,
1999), 3-11.
3. Bill Clinton, quoted in KatharineQ. Seelye, "ClintonCommentaryon Slavery Draws a
Republican's Ire,"New YorkTimes,March 28, 1998.
4. For a list of apologies offered by Clinton himself, see Alfred L. Brophy,"Some Conceptual and Legal Problems in Reparationsfor Slavery,"New YorkUniversityAnnual Survey of
American Law 58 (2003): 501. Helpful surveys of apologies and redress for historic injustice
include MarthaMinow, Between Vengeanceand Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide
and Mass Violence (Boston: Beacon Press, 1998); Eric K. Yamamoto,"RacialReparations:Japanese American Redress and African American Claims," Boston College Law Review 40
(December 1998): 483-84; WhenSorry Isn't Enough;and ElazarBarkan,The Guilt ofNations:
Restitutionand Negotiating Historical Injustices (New York:Norton, 2000).
806
5. I use the term"left"loosely to encompass a rangeof radical,progressive,and liberalpositions that are orientedtowarddemocracyand critical of the forms of inequality and domination
that define the statusquo. PerhapsSusan Bickford's term "leftish"most effectively capturesthe
difficulties of characterizingsuch a diverse group. Susan Bickford, "Anti-Anti-IdentityPolitics:
Feminism, Democracy,and the Complexities of Citizenship,"Hypatia 12 (Fall 1997): 112.
6. See Vincene Verdun,"If the Shoe Fits, WearIt: An Analysis of Reparationsto African
Americans,"TulaneLaw Review 67 (February1993): 600-07.
7. These efforts include: H.R. 40, legislation introducedby RepresentativeJohn Conyers,
calling for the establishmentof a commission to study the idea of reparations;the 1988 founding
of the NationalCoalition of Blacks for Reparationsin America (N'COBRA); the publicationof
RandallRobinson's TheDebt: WhatAmericaOwes to Blacks (New York:Dutton,2000); the initiation of lawsuits against the U.S. government,corporations, and individuals who benefitted
from slaveryby a groupof prominentcivil rightslawyers and academics; andthe passage of reparationsresolutionsin several cities and the state of California. This essay follows many of these
efforts in linkingreparationsto slaveryand JimCrow.In doing so, I do not disputethe conclusion
of thinkerssuchas Boris BittkerandRobertFullinwiderthatthe crimes of the JimCrowera alone
are substantialenough to warrantredress. Rather,I concur with Charles Ogletree that strategic
reasonsfor focusing solely on the morerecentcrimes of segregation ought not to overshadowthe
moral and political interconnectionsbetween slavery,Jim Crow, and present injustices. Boris I.
Bittker,The Casefor Black Reparations(1973; reprint,Boston: Beacon Press, 2003); RobertK.
Fullinwider,"TheCase for Reparations,"Philosophy and Public Policy 20 (Summer2000): 1-8;
CharlesJ. Ogletree,Jr.,"Repairingthe Past:New Efforts in the ReparationsDebate in America,"
Harvard Civil Rights-Civil LibertiesLaw Review 38 (Summer 2003): 279-320.
8. Hawley Fogg-Davis, "The Racial Retreatof ContemporaryPolitical Theory,"Perspectives on Politics 1 (September2003): 555.
9. For a critical account of some of the distinctions between "left" and "right"race blindness, see LaniGuinierandGeraldTorres,TheMiner's Canary: Enlisting Race, Resisting Power
TransformingDemocracy(Cambridge:HarvardUniversity Press, 2002), 32-66.
10. Bickford, "Anti-Anti-IdentityPolitics."
11. Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1995), 27 (hereaftercited 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?: ReparationsEnshrine
Victimhood, Dishonoring Our Ancestors," in Should America Pay? Slavery and the Raging
Debate on Reparations,ed. RaymondA. Winbush (New York:Amistad/HarperCollins,2003),
198; John McWhorter,"Blood Money: Why I Don't WantReparationsfor Slavery,"TheAmerican Enterprise(July/August 2001): 19-22.
14. For a succinct overview of these arguments,see Michael C. Dawson andRovanaPopoff,
"Reparations:Justice and Greed in Black and White," Du Bois Review 1 (2004): 47-91. Roy
Brooks offers a thoughtfulexaminationof 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 recurrentclaim madeby opponentsof reparationsis that the bloodshedof the Civil
Warconstitutesadequaterecompensefor slavery.I think it is crucial to resist the Civil Warargument for severalreasons. Among them are two questionable historical assumptionswhose widespreadacceptance intimates something of the political power of historical narratives.First, the
Civil-War-as-reparationsargumentoccludes the fact that the Union did not go to war with the
807
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 Northernersis to obfuscate the interracial
characterof the Union effort, in which thousandsof AfricanAmericansriskedtheir lives as fugitives, "contraband,"and soldiers. On black contributionsto the war effort and the North's reluctance to embrace abolition, see W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstructionin America: An Essay
Towarda History of the Part WhichBlack FolkPlayed in theAttemptto ReconstructDemocracy
in America, 1860-1880 (Cleveland: Meridian, [1935] 1964); and William W. Freehling, The
South vs. the South: How Anti-Confederate SouthernersShaped the Course of the Civil War
(New York:Oxford University Press, 2001). For an example of an argumentthat misreads Du
Bois to supportthe claim that the sacrifices of the Civil Warconstitutesufficient reparations,see
Algis Valiunas, "Paying for Jefferson's Sins," Commentary114 (November 2002): 42-43.
16. ThomasMcCarthy,"Comingto Termswith OurPast,PartII:Onthe MoralityandPolitics
of Reparationsfor Slavery,"Political Theory32 (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
reparationsfrom state, local, and corporatesources.
17. Wendy Brown and Janet Halley, "Introduction,"
Left Legalism/LeftCritique,ed. Wendy
Brown and Janet Halley (Durham:Duke University Press, 2002), 3.
18. Wendy Brown, "At the Edge," Political Theory30 (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 (January2001): 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 argumentthatit is not possible to identify who counts as "AfricanAmerican"for
the purposes of reparations.They take as a startingpoint the ease with which we employ racial
categories in everyday life, particularlywhen it is to the disadvantageof black Americans. For
example, police officers in Charlottesville,Virginia,appearto have hadlittle difficulty in identifying African American men when they instituteda "dragnet"to collect DNA samples from
nearlytwo hundredmen who were said to resemblea composite drawingof an alleged serial rapist. Carlos Santos, "DNA Dragnetto Become More Strict,"RichmondTimes-Dispatch,April 16,
2004.
23. MarlonB. Ross, "Commentary:PleasuringIdentity,or the Delicious Politics of Belonging,"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 Theoryand the Predicament of Postmodernism,ed. Paula M. L. Moya and Michael R.
Hames-Garcia(Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 2000), 312-44; Shelby, "Foundations
of Black Solidarity."
25. Bickford, "Anti-Anti-IdentityPolitics": 117.
26. Charles P. Henry, "The Politics of Racial Reparations,"Journal of Black Studies 34
(November 2003): 140.
27. Forinstance, Ogletree cites RandallKennedy'sresearchon the gap between U.S. judges'
solicitude for the feelings of white Americans andrelative indifferenceto the feelings of blacks.
Ogletree, "Repairingthe Past":289.
28. Thomas Dumm, A Politics of the Ordinary(New York:NYU Press, 1999), 104.
29. Joel Olson, "Whiteness and the Participation-InclusionDilemma,"Political Theory 30
(June 2002): 390.
30. Patricia J. Williams, The Rooster's Egg: On the Persistence of Prejudice (Cambridge:
HarvardUniversity Press, 1995), 97.
808
POLITICALTHEORY/December 2005
31. Eric Lott, "AfterIdentityPolitics: The Returnof Universalism,"New LiteraryHistory 31

(Autumn 2000): 677.
32. Brown appearsto underestimatethe ferociousness of this opposition when she includes
"WhiteHouse apologies to AfricanAmericansfor enslaving or mistreatingthem"as examples of
the contemporaryrushto apologize in spite of the fact that no U.S. presidenthas issued an apology for slavery.Brown, Politics Out of History, 140.
33. Dawson and Popoff, "Reparations":62.
34. Dawson and Popoff, "Reparations":88.
35. Thomas McCarthy, "Vergangenheitsbewiiltigungin the USA: On the Politics of the
Memory of Slavery,"Political Theory30 (October 2002): 623-48.
36. Derrick Bell's "interest-convergence"theory of civil-rights law and Cheryl Harris's
genealogy of "whitenessas 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 Permanenceof Racism
(New York:Basic Books, 1992); CherylI. Harris,"Whitenessas Property"HarvardLaw 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 understandingof the dynamics of ressentiment provides a powerful philosophical 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 resentmentin U.S. politics.
Donald R. Kinderand LynnM. Sanders,Divided by Color: Racial Politics and Democratic Ideals (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).
38. PatchenMarkell,Bound by Recognition (Princeton: Princeton UniversityPress, 2003),
22. For a psychoanalyticalexplorationof this point and its relationship to reparations,see Isaac
D. Balbus, "ThePsychodynamicsof Racial Reparations,"Psychoanalysis, Culture& Society 9
(August 2004): 159-85.
39. "Increasingly... whites experienced themselves as oppressed victims of an uncaring
authorityandcited effortson behalfof Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, andotherethnics as
'reverse racism,'" according to David Gresson. Quoted in Henry, "Politics of Racial Reparations": 148.
40. Sheldon S. Wolin, The Presence of the Past: Essays on the State and the Constitution
(Baltimore:Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, 1989), 34.
41. KimberldWilliams Crenshaw,"Color Blindness, History, and the Law,"in The House
ThatRace Built:.'Black Americans, U.S. Terrain,ed. WahneemaLubiano (New York:Pantheon,
1997), 287.
42. PatriciaJ. Williams, TheAlchemyof Race and Rights: Diary of a Law Professor (Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press, 1991), 156.
43. Daryl Michael Scott, Contemptand 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 suggestionthatreparationsbe thoughtof as a kindof social welfareprogram analogous to programslike the New Deal or the G.I. Bill misses Scott's point. Brophy,
"Some Conceptualand Legal Problemsin Reparationsfor Slavery":520.
45. Barkan,The Guilt of Nations, 306. My argumentdeparts substantiallyfrom Barkan's,
which relies on the language of "victims"and "perpetrators"and describes guilt approvinglyas
"a powerful political tool."
46. LawrieBalfour,"UnreconstructedDemocracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Reparations,"American Political Science Review 97 (February2003): 33-44.
47. Yamamoto,"Racial Reparations":499-501.
809
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 Breakdownof Black
Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
49. Brooks, Atonement and Forgiveness, 161.
50. MarthaBiondi and Dawson and Popoff note this absence but do not develop the point.
Martha Biondi, "The Rise of the ReparationsMovement,"Radical History Review 87 (Fall
2003): 17;Dawson and Popoff, "Reparations":55. RobinKelley exploreshow reparationsactivism can providean avenue for coming to termswith the genderedcharacterof racial exploitation.
Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination(Boston: Beacon Press,
2002), 131-32.
51. Naming slaveryas a sexual as well as racialregimeis criticalto thiseffort. See AdrienneD.
Davis, "TheCase for Reparationsto AfricanAmericans,"HumanRightsBrief7 (Spring2000).
52. WahneemaLubiano, "Black NationalismandBlack 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. MartinLutherKing, Jr.,quotedin DanielleAllen, Talkingto Strangers:Anxietiesof Citizenshipsince Brown v. Board of Education(Chicago:Universityof ChicagoPress, 2004), 192, n. 12.
55. Brown, Politics out of History, 154.
56. MariMatsuda'sconception of reparationsas a "criticallegalism"capturesthis idea. Mari
J. Matsuda, "Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations,"Harvard Civil
Rights-CivilLiberties Law Review 22 (1987): 323-99.
57. Yamamoto,"Racial Reparations":492.
58. Biondi, "The Rise of the ReparationsMovement":5. See also Sam Anderson andMuntu
Matsimela, "The Reparations Movement: An Assessment of Recent and Current Activism,
Socialism andDemocracy 17 (Winter-Spring2003): 255-76; andMichaelT. MartinandMarilyn
Yaquinto,"Reparationsfor 'America's Holocaust': Activism for Global Justice,"Race & Class
45 (2004): 1-25. For a classic accountof the black strugglein the U.S. as a humanrights struggle,
see Malcolm X, "The Ballot or the Bullet," Malcolm X Speaks: Selected Speeches and Statements, ed. George Breitman (New York:Grove Press, 1965).
59. Nikhil Pal Singh, "Culture/Wars:Recoding Empirein an Age of Democracy,"American
Quarterly50 (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, TheAbolition of WhiteDemocracy
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 31-63.
61. Black Radical Congress, "TheFreedomAgenda,"LetNobody TurnUs Around:Voicesof
Resistance, Reform, and Renewal, An African AmericanAnthology,ed. Manning Marableand
Leith Mullins (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000), 627-33.
62. Manning Marable, The Great Wellsof 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 adoptedby the National Black Economic
DevelopmentConference in April 1969 and, notoriously,deliveredby JamesFormanduringservices at the Riverside Church, New York City, is premised on a critiqueof capitalism, and the
demandfor reparationsis understoodas partof a broadersocial, economic, and political restructuring.The text of the Black Manifesto is reprintedin Bittker,The Casefor Black Reparations,
159-75.
65. Robert L. Allen, "Past Due: The African American Quest for Reparations,"The Black
Scholar 28 (Summer 1998): 13.
810
66. James Baldwin, "The AmericanDream 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 anaccountof causallinks in the racialwealth gap from slavery to JimCrowto the contemporaryU.S., see Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, Black Wealth/WhiteWealth:A
New Perspective on Racial Inequality(New York:Routledge, 1997). For an explorationof the
moral and political implicationsof such links, see McCarthy,"Coming to Termswith Our Past,
Part II."
69. See TheWealthofRaces: ThePresent ValueofBenefitsfrom Past Injustices,ed. RichardE
America (Westport,CT: GreenwoodPress, 1990).
70. Fullinwider,"The Case for Reparations."
71. See BernardR. Boxill, "A Lockean Argument for Black Reparations,"The Journal of
Ethics 7 (2003): 63-91.
72. SaidiyaHartman,"TheTimeof Slavery,"SouthAtlantic Quarterly101 (Fall 2002): 758.
73. Brown, Politics Out of History, 171.
74. Brown, Politics Out of History, 165.
75. Bill E. Lawson, "MoralDiscourse and Slavery,"in HowardMcGaryandBill E. Lawson,
Between Slavery and Freedom:Philosophy andAmerican Slavery (Bloomington:IndianaUniversity Press, 1992), 72.
76. Ogletree, "Repairingthe Past":284-85.
77. Marable,The Great Wellsof Democracy, 250.
78. Kelley, FreedomDreams, 9-10.
79. See Wolin, The Presence of the Past, 32-46.
80. Brown and Halley, "Introduction"26-27.
81. RobertWestley,"ManyBillions Gone: Is It Time to Reconsider the Case for Black Reparations?"Boston College Law Review40 (December 1998): 476.
82. Marable,The Great Wellsof Democracy, 251.
83. MarthaMinow, "Not Only for Myself: Identity,Politics, and Law,"OregonLaw Review
75 (Fall 1996): 697.
84. My argumentechoes McCarthy'semphasis on the "public-pedagogical"role of the reparationsmovement.McCarthy,"Comingto Termswith OurPast, PartII":765. It is also informed
by James Forman'sunderstandingof reparationsas "an intermediatestep on the path to liberation," ratherthan an end in itself. James Forman, The Making of Black Revolutionaries(1972;
reprint,Seattle: University of WashingtonPress, 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 "languageand politics thatpermit people to be for themselves, but also for others."Minow, "Not Only for Myself': 676.
86. This understandingof citizenship and sacrifice is substantiallyinformedby Allen's Talking to Strangers.
87. To focus on African Americansas I have suggested is not to disallow the rightfulnessof
other reparationsclaims or to supportthe kind of comparativejudgment embodied in J. Angelo
Corlett's observationthat providingreparationsto Japanese Americans "seems morally appalling" 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 orientationis also present in the BRC's "FreedomAgenda."
89. Du Bois, Black Reconstructionin America.
90. Kelley, FreedomDreams, 114.
91. Brown, Politics out of History, 170.
811
Lawrie Balfour is Associate Professor of Politics at the Universityof Virginia.She is the

author of The Evidence of Things Not Said:James Baldwin and the Promise of American Democracy, and is currently workingon a book manuscripton W E. B. Du Bois's
political thought.

Reparations & Identity Politics - Balfour

Încărcat de

Informații document

Titlu original

Drepturi de autor

Formate disponibile

Partajați acest document

Partajați sau inserați document

Opțiuni de partajare

Vi se pare util acest document?

Este necorespunzător acest conținut?

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Reparations & Identity Politics - Balfour

Încărcat de

Drepturi de autor:

Formate disponibile

Reparations after Identity Politics

Author(s): Lawrie Balfour

REPARATIONS AFTER IDENTITY POLITICS

reparations,slavery, race, identitypolitics, WendyBrown

Modern life begins with slavery.

with the tenor of an age in which victims of identity-basedinjustices around

POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005

increasingly addressquestions of identity, observes Hawley Fogg-Davis, the

POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005

It would require another full-length essay, at least, to do justice to the

I. WHATIS THE "IDENTITY"IN REPARATIONS

ical progresshave been discreditedbutnot replaced;andleft politics has been

POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005

journalists simultaneouslyreinforcedthe suggestion thatAfrican Americans

POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005

POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005

Americans as victims can become justifications for furthermarginalization.

POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005

in severalrespects,but I will focus on two. On the one hand,gender is central

POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005

When JamesBaldwin, in a 1965 debate againstWilliam F. Buckley, Jr.,told a

Balfour / REPARATIONSAFTER IDENTITYPOLITICS

POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005

call to remembranceis not wielded as a weapon, intended to bludgeon a

Like Toni Morrison's ambiguous admonition that the story of slavery's

an avenue for concrete social change. As Bill Lawson observes: "ourmoral/

Enacting such a practice,however,requiresresistingthe allureof closure.

POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005

provide an avenue for investigating the public meanings of a history long

Balfour / REPARATIONSAFTERIDENTITY POLITICS

POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005

Balfour / REPARATIONSAFTERIDENTITY POLITICS

31. Eric Lott, "AfterIdentityPolitics: The Returnof Universalism,"New LiteraryHistory 31

Balfour / REPARATIONSAFTERIDENTITY POLITICS

POLITICALTHEORY/ December 2005

Balfour / REPARATIONSAFTERIDENTITY POLITICS

Lawrie Balfour is Associate Professor of Politics at the Universityof Virginia.She is the

S-ar putea să vă placă și