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.
Coates’s House testimony—like his breakthrough article—articulated a powerful argument about the need for material and symbolic reparations premised on the ongoing harm perpetuated by laws, institutions, and social practices that continue to condemn African Americans to second-class citizenship. African Americans, in other words, continue to be victims of slavery and its aftermath. As Coates told the House, McConnell “was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion. Victims of that plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they’d love a word with the Majority Leader.” Here we get into one of the thornier sides of the reparations debate. While it is clear—or should be clear—what it means for African Americans to be victims of plunder and violence, it is less clear how to talk about the parties responsible for that plunder and violence. Note that Coates does not declare McConnell a perpetrator but merely someone who “was alive” as this history of disenfranchisement unfolded. Without doubt, McConnell could be said to hold a great deal of personal responsibility for the sorry state of American politics, but that is a different claim from making him directly responsible for slavery or its posthumous impact. Even once we have established the real ongoing harm suffered by African Americans in the wake of slavery, then, and have—as Coates and others have done—carefully traced that harm through the 150 years since emancipation, this question still remains: how to think about responsibility for that harm.
My book, The Implicated Subject, interrogates the question of responsibility in the manifold cases where we need to expand the cast of characters beyond victims and perpetrators. The problem of responsibility raised by the reparations debate resonates widely, and, indeed, my book ranges across a number of historical contexts, including the aftermath of the Holocaust, the transition from apartheid to a flawed multiracial democracy in South Africa, and the ongoing crisis of Palestine and Israel. In these quite different instances, historical and political responsibility for suffering and inequality far exceeds the category of the perpetrator. I argue that we need a new vocabulary to describe the heirs, beneficiaries, and perpetuators of injustice, who are, despite bearing political and historical responsibility, not well described as perpetrators: I thus introduce the category of the “implicated subject” and the related notion of “implication.” Derived from the Latin implicāre, meaning to entangle, involve, and connect closely, implication, like the proximate but not identical term complicity, calls attention to how we are folded into (im-pli-cated in) events that at first seem beyond our agency as individual subjects.
Long a marginalized concern, reparations have become almost mainstream—although we’re still a long way from their actualization in any meaningful form.
Implicated subjects occupy positions aligned with power and privilege without being themselves direct agents of harm; they contribute to, inhabit, inherit, or benefit from regimes of domination but do not originate or control such regimes. Less “actively” involved than perpetrators, implicated subjects do not fit the mold of the “passive” bystander either. Although indirect or belated, their actions—and inactions—help propagate the legacies of historical violence and prop up the structures of inequality that mar the present.
How does implication manifest itself in the afterlives of slavery? Despite the historical distance, we know that there are people who are genealogically implicated in the crimes of slavery because their ancestors took part in the slave trade or owned slaves, generating socioeconomic advantages from which subsequent generations would—and continue to—benefit. In fact, after the House hearings, NBC News discovered that two of Mitch McConnell’s own great-great-grandfathers had been slave owners, suggesting that 150 years is no great distance at all. To evoke a distinction that Hannah Arendt made in the aftermath of the Holocaust, we can say that people like McConnell who are genealogically implicated in slavery are not guilty of those crimes but that surely such family connections create certain responsibilities, just as they do in the case of the children and grandchildren of Nazi perpetrators.
Yet the question of what such implication entails remains open and the practical issue of restitution in those instances arguably needs to be addressed on a case-by-case basis. What is ultimately much more significant is the far greater number of people who are structurally implicated in the aftermath of slavery by virtue of their integration into the category of whiteness. Most people in this position have not “inherited” implication in slavery’s crimes from their family histories. Indeed, their families may—like mine—have immigrated to the US decades after slavery was formally abolished. We are nevertheless heirs to and beneficiaries of a society built on white supremacy. We, too, are responsible, though not guilty, because we have been—to reprise Coates’s term—alive in the afterlives of slavery. We are, I argue, implicated subjects.
I honestly do not know what reparations for slavery should look like, but I agree with Coates that they will have to include “making amends,” “direct redress,” and the reconfiguration of a racialized citizenship—a racialized citizenship that, as the confrontation between Trump and “the Squad” illustrates, has become increasingly explicit in recent times. The contribution my book makes is to shift our conception not just of moral roles but of social action. We need to move from an understanding of responsibility premised on a severely delimited cast of victims and perpetrators to one that acknowledges the many implicated subjects who enable and legitimize violence and inequality—and who continue to benefit from the historical depredations of generations past.
Comments