As I'm sitting here preparing for a plenary panel on "Reparations in the Era of Obama" at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, which is meeting over in Raleigh at the end of the week, I feel somewhat like Rip Van Winkle. Reparations talk has declined in the legal academy since I last worked on this topic in a serious way a few years back. It's a pleasure to return to the field after a little time away and read the work of new scholars and people who've kept the subject alive and expanded the discussion to lots of new areas.
The field has changed since the election of Obama. Partly this is, I suppose, that the goals of the movement have been somewhat achieved. There's Obama's election itself; and there have been a number of apologies for the era of slavery and Jim Crow. The cultural issues that the reparations movement sought to bring to discussion have been achieved, somewhat. Then there are the financial issues, which our nation is not in a position to address given our current financial problems. There was a moment in the late 1990s and early 2000s when our affluence opened up the possibility of serious expansion of social welfare programs. For those of us who thought about reparations not as single claims of descendants of enslaved people but a way of talking about social welfare programs, the financial crisis has made those kinds of programs even more remote than they were in the late 1990s. However, one might recall that the health care legislation (aka Obamacare) was labeled as reparations by some (like Rush Limbaugh).
Part of reparations has also become more mainstream, as the US Senate's 2009 apology for slavery suggests. I guess at the point at which the Senate unanimously approves an apology for slavery the apology can't be seen as wildly radical. Kaimi Wenger's been talking about this in particular. Then you get to the more controversial parts of the reparations movement — money. And here the movement breaks into two pretty distinct camps — those who see some kind of individual claims and those who see reparations as movement for social welfare. The later seems to be dominant now.
While some are predicting the end of the reparations movement, I think the academic literature on reparations will continue to deal with (1) the case for addressing historical injustices — there's no shortage of this kind of work and (2) the moral case for addressing injustices, particularly using a social welfare model. I hope that the second set of literature will do more of the hard work of making the case to people who are not already converted.
I talk about some of this in a short essay, "Realistic Reparations," which appeared in 2008 in Cincinnati's Freedom Center Journal. The essay was more or less finished in the fall of 2007, even before many people thought that Obama might be the Democratic nominee. While I have a few citations to things happening in 2008, it doesn't deal with Obama at all. Or the financial crisis, either.
I predict the movement will result in more local action — like local investigations and apologies. I suspect that nationally calls for reparations will be employed as moral arguments in favor of expanded social welfare programs. We'll see where all this goes.
Update as of February 12, 2011: Here's a podcast of my talk at the Association for the Study of African American Life and History last September.