Demands for Reparations and White Freedom Dreams

• In Event: Disappointed Hopes: Reclaiming the Promise of Resistance

Abstract

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. observed that the first phase of the “civil rights revolution” had been comparatively cheap. Although passing the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act was a remarkable accomplishment, and the bravery of the demonstrators who rushed to Selma in 1965 was inspiring, King expressed little hope for the next, far more costly phase of political and social change. At a moment of apparent triumph, King narrated loss. This paper considers how King’s assessment that “there is not even a common language when the term ‘equality’ is used” resounds in debates about reparations today.

On the one hand, discussions of reparations for slavery and its legacies have become respectable in ways that were unimaginable only a few years ago. In March 2019, New York Times columnist David Brooks published “The Case for Reparations” and acknowledged the power of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 article in The Atlantic; three months later, Coates appeared with other reparations advocates at a high-profile Congressional hearing on H.R. 40, a bill to establish a commission to study reparations that had made little headway in Congress since it was first introduced in 1989. When white protestors poured into the streets in 2020 to declare that Black Lives Matter and Democratic presidential candidates expressed support for reparations, commentators observed that perhaps the US was finally ready to confront the ongoing effects of centuries of racial oppression. Perhaps, they speculated, the lost promise of earlier phases of the black freedom struggle would be realized at last.

On the other hand, King’s assessment that too many Americans “proceed from a premise that equality is a loose expression for improvement” captures the hidden costs of success. That Brooks moved so seamlessly from expressing support for reparations to proclaiming that there is a “right way” and a “wrong way” to “do reparations”—and that the right way involves national service programs and community centers but not “disruptive agitators”—offers just one indication of the ease with which radical demands can be translated into “improvement.” Brooks is not the first conservative white columnist to advocate reparations: over 20 years ago, Charles Krauthammer proposed a one-time pay-out to African American families in exchange for the permanent end affirmative action and other race-conscious policies. Yet, I argue that Brooks’s embrace of reparations reveals persistent features of white freedom dreams, features that cross ideological lines. Dreams of change without loss.

By re-examining reparations as a social movement and as a framework for far-reaching social and political transformation, I approach the contemporary debate as a window into the prospects for meaningful racial redress. King’s concerns in 1967 suggest that there are obstacles deeper than the gap between legal and substantive change, obstacles that cannot be fully accounted for in terms of white self-interest. Is there is a “common language” when the term reparations is used today? Does the new openness to conversations about reparations suggest that 200+ years of black activism and critique have made significant inroads? What does it mean to embrace reparations today—is it a cry for reconstruction on a grand-scale, or a new version of the old dream that the worst excesses of antiblack oppression can be improved away?

Author

• Lawrie Balfour, University of Virginia