To confront the legacies of slavery we need a new theory of historical responsibility
When I wrote about the question of reparations for slavery in my new book, The Implicated Subject, I did not expect to see the US House of Representatives holding hearings about that issue before my book even appeared. But on June 19, 2019, the House took up the perennially vexed and still controversial question of whether and how the descendants of America’s enslaved people should be compensated for slavery’s crimes against humanity.
On the eve of the hearing, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell voiced a familiar objection to the idea of redress: “I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom [sic] none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.” McConnell’s comments provided an opening for the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, speaking to a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee the next day, to make a powerful case for reparations. Calling McConnell’s objection “a strange theory of governance,” Coates described the problem of reparations as “a dilemma of inheritance”: “It’s impossible,” he asserted, “to imagine America without the inheritance of slavery.” The rest of his testimony traced how the afterlives of slavery have manifested themselves in all realms of American life: in state and federal laws, banking practices, and forms of physical violence that have ensured the ongoing subordination of people of African descent well into Mitch McConnell’s lifetime and indeed up until the present.
Reparations have been a recurrent demand of enslaved and freed people since the eighteenth century—and of their descendants in the decades since Emancipation—as scholars such as Ana Lucia Araujo have documented. Yet, national debate on the issue has seemed to reemerge with an astonishing suddenness. Long a marginalized concern, reparations have become almost mainstream—although we’re still a long way from their actualization in any meaningful form. In addition to the recent House hearings, no fewer than eleven Democratic presidential candidates have expressed support either for reparations or for studying their feasibility. The current discussions have not come out of nowhere, of course. Recent years have seen greater visibility for the issue, not least because of Coates’s widely read 2014 Atlantic essay, “The Case for Reparations.” Nor is the discussion limited to the US; it is a distinctly transnational conversation emerging from various points across the Black Atlantic.
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