What Counts as Harm? Evaluation of Racial Harm and the Limits of Reparations Policy

• In Event: Economic Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Roundtable 12: Intersecting Inequalities

Abstract

Since 2020, the question of racial reparations in the United States has moved from the margins to the center of American policy debate: as of December 2024, at least 40 localities across the U.S. (including seven states, four counties, and thirty city-level commissions) have established reparations commissions (Moore and Marvin 2025), while at the federal level, H.R. 40 was reintroduced to the 119th Congress in February of 2025 by Representative Ayanna Pressley (Pressley 2025). Importantly, the goal of these commissions is not to provide direct reparations themselves, but to study the harms caused by slavery and its legacies in their jurisdiction, and provide recommendations for public policy and other interventions that the governing body can provide. This process serves as a particular site of moral and legal claims-making and meaning construction, in that the task of these commissions is to define racial harm, and engage in a process of commensuration and quantification to provide concrete policy interventions to address it. Using keyword-in-context (KWIC) and collocate analysis as well as BERTopic topic modelling on a novel textual dataset of materials produced by the California Reparations Task Force (CRTF), this paper investigates what frameworks of harm and justice are used by various actors engaged in the commission's work to conceptualize and create the meaning of racial harm. I find that while the plurality of frameworks available for conceptualizing and evaluating racial harm are represented in commission language, outcome-focused conceptualizations and legal evaluative frameworks dominate the discourse in both the commission's language and that of the expert testimonies; public comment indicates an even stronger orientation towards outcome-focused understandings of racial harm. This is relevant because as reparations initiatives proliferate across the U.S, understanding the definitional politics embedded in commission discourse is essential for understanding whether the policy recommendations that emerge from these processes are capable of addressing the full scope of harm that affected communities articulate, and for identifying where those recommendations fall short.

Author

• Hannah Judson, Stony Brook University