Democratic Reparations: Reimagining Reciprocity

• In Event: Moving Law Otherwise

Abstract

Debates about reparations for slavery and Jim Crow often take the form of disputes about justice. Among the many types of justice invoked—transitional, reparative, retributive, and restorative among them—one distinction, traceable to Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics 5.2-4), has dominated the philosophical and legal scholarship: corrective vs. distributive justice (Davis, 2021). Should reparations be conceived as a matter of corrective justice, of redressing the injuries of the past and making the injured whole (Burnham, 2022)? Alternatively, if the aim is to repair the entrenched racial disparities that are the product of historical wrongs, then perhaps distributive justice ought to be the guiding concept (Táíwò,2022). While many of these arguments (rightly) focus on the responsibilities of states or institutions that underwrote slavery and benefit from its legacies, attunement to another conception of justice—reciprocal justice—orients us toward reparations as a democratic practice.

Our aim is not to propose a new contender in contests over which form of justice is most appropriate for pursuing reparations. Instead, this paper takes as its points of departure a case study in activism and a novel that exemplify how different and unequal participants re-form social bonds in the aftermath of injustice. In the light and shadows cast by the movement for reparations for police torture in Chicago and a reading of a scene of repair in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, we return to Aristotle to ask whether his less-discussed conception of reciprocal proportionality (Nicomachean Ethics 5.5, 10) can offer resources for a democratic justice that reflects the visions that have inspired Black reparations activists since the revolutionary era. If “the work of reparations and remaking good relationships…requires nothing less than the transformation of the world” (Manjapra 2022), attending to local acts of reciprocal exchange may disclose how reparations enables a possible going on together in a polity where the commitment to democracy and the commitment to racial hierarchy have been entwined from the beginning.

Authors

• Jill Frank, Cornell University

• Lawrie Balfour, University of Virginia