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Wednesday, February 4, 2009
Davis on Slavery, Reparations and the Limits of Collective Justice
Friday, February 6: Adrienne Davis presents her paper on slavery, reparations and justice at the workshop, Larry May to discuss. Davis, "seeks to offer...frameworks for comprehending and articulating slavery's injury, including, critically, its on-going effects." Post here to continue the discussion.
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In the discussion, I raised the concern that neither the slaves nor the slave owners are alive today - a dilemma which complicates deciding who precisely is responsible for bearing the burden of providing reparations.
ReplyDeleteDavis responded by focusing the responsibility on the United States government as an institutional actor. Accordingly, living citizens must make good on the United States' moral debts.
But, doesn't using the United States to avoid dealing with the debts owed by long dead slave owners call into question why we are still focusing on debts owed to the likewise long dead slaves? I'm still left thinking that reparations should focus on the problems of living blacks attributable to the legacy of slavery.
-Greg Allen
What I liked about Adrienne's approach - and I think it came out even more in the discussion than in the paper itself - is that she's trying to capture the structural, historical and collective aspects of a situation, viz., not-yet remedied, albeit ended, slavery. So she is not talking about harms done to or by individuals, living or dead, though such harms were certainly done, but rather about collective harm, administered both individually and structurally. Similarly, she is considering the present in diachronic as well as synchronic terms. So (I think) she would have us look at the present in the freeze-frame present tense for the purpose of identifying those structural mechanisms set in place by slavery (and that, in part, constituted the complicated social relationships thereof) that have not yet been corrected. But she (I think) wants us to then un-freeze that frame, to connect the as-yet uncorrected mechanisms of the present to the mechanisms of the past.
ReplyDeleteThe problem, as I understood it, that she is having with the concept of "distributive justice" is that it does not allow her to work in this (technically speaking) dialectical fashion; rather, it lends itself to an a-historical assessment of the present.
The challenge, it seems to me, is going to be to find the right language to talk about collective subjects, structural mechanisms and history. To make matters even tougher, in terms of engaging with literatures/vocabularies/conceptual schemes that make such talk difficult if not impossible, is that she also wants to bring this kind of talk to the question of citizen-identity.
My only thought is that I think it will help for her (you -- hi Adrienne!) to be as self-conscious as possible about how the most readily accessible categories can't do the work she needs done.
Ruth
Let me try to state more lucidly and concisely the position I awkwardly articulated yesterday. The radical 'ahistorical distributive justice' critique of reparations finds fault with corrective justice for assuming the propriety of inter-generational transmission of advantage (and, therefore, of disadvantage). The case for reparations, in essence, it that we owe something to this generation of black Americans because they would not be in such a bad state if they had been able to 'inherit' various advantages that were unjustly denied to their ancestors. But the radical critique observes that all inheritances are fundamentally undeserved: a person no more deserves to have alcoholic parents than to be the descendant of slaves, and nor do people deserve to inherit the advantages of their ancestors, even if these were justly acquired. On this view of distributive justice, we should indeed ignore history, wipe the slate clean, and focus on assisting those alive today who suffer from undeserved disadvantage, whatever its nature and origins. Of course, this would mean in practice that many American blacks are entitled to extensive support because of the many forms of severe and undeserved disadvantage that afflict them. These disadvantages can often be traced to slavery, for sure. But our obligation to assist exists quite independently of this fact; it suffices that the disadvantages are undeserved.
ReplyDeleteIan MacMullen
I'm so sorry that I was unable to attend the paper presentation, but have a few thoughts. First, this is a very interesting and provocative discourse. Great paper, Adrienne! I should say up front that I have no expertise in this area and I could be completely off base. With that in mind . . .
ReplyDeleteFirst, I was sorry not to have seen the part of the paper on Adrienne's proposed transitional justice alternative view. This is where the paper has the greatest potential to make its contribution, I think.
As I've already said to Adrienne, I don't buy the modesty claim on p.4. I think this is an ambitious project and Adrienne does herself a disservice to suggest otherwise.
I did finish the paper, though, confused about how much value you - Adrienne - think the collective justice approach actually has. Toward the end, the paper says that "corrective justice may be closer to the philosophical underpinnings of reparative discourse than any other legal doctrine." (p. 36) [Perhaps this is where the modesty claim comes from.] Earlier on, the paper really seemed to much more skeptical and really seemed to critically "take on the doctrine."
The paper focuses much more on the collective rather than the distributive justice approach. It might tighten the paper to focus just on the former. Or - perhaps - take the brief discussion on distributive justice on pp. 34-35, move it up front and then put it to the side, focusing the remainder of the paper on collective justice.
The questions of desirability and defensibility of reparations are rather intertwined, as the paper acknowledges (p. 5) These notions are addrsesed only very briefly in one paragraph (pp. 4-5). If the distinction is important to the argument, I think this discussion should be expanded. On the other hand, I did not feel as I reading that the discussion had the cart before the horse. Perhaps this paragraph can be deleted altogether (?)
With regard to the point that monetary relief cannot really remedy injuries such as these that are really "beyond the market" (p. 31.) I agree. One response might be that monetary relief makes no sense at all. If so, we wouldn't be talking about reparations at all, which are essentially monetary. Perhaps the response should be government programs designed to remedy the continuing individual and societal harms resulting from slavery. If the concern is determining the appropriate amount of relief (valuation) - as I take it to be - how is the dilemma here different from other sticky valuation questions that arise elsewhere in the tort arena? For example, wrongful death - how does one value the loss of a loved one's life?
Small point: the paper twice refers to the Hohfeldian framework (pp. 34 and 36). A definition would be helpful here.
Cheryl Block