Dear White Christians by Jennifer Harvey

Author:Jennifer Harvey
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.

The Moral Logic of Reparations

As already suggested, the moves white Protestants made to avoid whiteness were a response to the Black Manifesto’s call for reparations. This call explicitly highlights whiteness because it historicizes our racial identities and relationships. To successfully dodge the issue of white moral agency and accountability, therefore, reparations talk must be avoided at all costs.

Reparations as a paradigm necessarily and immediately invokes a perpetrator and a victim, an unjust beneficiary and an aggrieved party in ways reconciliation simply does not. Recognizing this truth, one student at Union Theological Seminary put it this way: reparations are not “a guilt offering or stewardship. . . . [Reparations are] a simple call to begin paying back what has been stolen, what is justly owed to those stolen from.”14

In other words, the moral logic of reparations is justice. A debt has been incurred, it remains owed, and repayment of that debt is (morally) due. The moral logic of reparations is decidedly not charity or compassion.

A reparations paradigm assumes that unjust material conditions structure the relationship between perpetrators and victims. As a result, it calls for bi-party participation in a process seeking justice. It insists that healing the relationship between perpetrators and victims requires restructuring the material conditions through which the parties relate to one another (repairing and redressing the specific conditions that caused and continue to cause harm). Such healing work is particularly incumbent upon the harm-creators.

Indeed, given that our reconciliation-based attempts at authentic interracial relationships have, by most meaningful standards of assessment, failed, this is the reason a reparations paradigm is so hopeful and inviting. Instead of vague calls to appreciate difference or recognize essential sameness while assuming the goodwill or intentions of the offending party, a reparations paradigm focuses our attention unflinchingly on the structural relationships to which we can and must attend.

Finally, in the context of US racial history, a reparations paradigm makes it impossible to obscure the painful truth of race today. Black Americans are not disadvantaged in some natural, preexisting manner. They have been systematically oppressed and suppressed by white people. The effects of that subjugation remain pervasive in our life together, both within and beyond Christian communities.

Accepting the legitimacy of a reparations paradigm, therefore, means fundamentally recognizing that the offending party has no grounds on which to dictate or influence how the victimized party uses the redress. In fact, any attempt on the part of the perpetrator to do so serves as evidence that the party has already rejected the moral logic of reparations as a justice response. Any attempt to exert control or presume the right to have some say is to step away from full admission of guilt and acceptance of responsibility. (At this point it is helpful to recall J. Angelo Corlett’s focus on oppressors’ responsibility and his clarity that anything less or other than this unduly burdens victims and diverts into irrelevancies.)

Precisely this tendency toward control permeated the response of the third group of institutions. Stringfellow addressed precisely such issues:

The white

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