1. The Positive View

According to the positive view, heritage should be understood in terms of a range of features, united by their positive associations, that pick out important aspects of the cultural past. It has become common in the heritage literature to distinguish between ‘official’ and ‘unofficial’ heritage, where the former in particular is associated with a positive conception of heritage (Harrison Reference Harrison2013: 14–15). Official heritage is the kind of institutionally endorsed perspective on heritage typically found at museums and monuments and embraced by governments and cultural institutions. This view is aptly captured as follows: ‘This dominant Western discourse stresses materiality, monumentality, grandiosity, time depth, aesthetics and all that is “good” in history and culture’ (Smith Reference Smith2010: 63). For instance, paradigmatic examples of heritage according to this conception would be the Pantheon, the Bamiyan Buddhas, Stonehenge as well as diverse other artifacts. If you are visiting an art museum, a history museum, a monument, or a ruin, you are likely in the presence of official heritage. In recent decades, this material focus has given way to a broader understanding of heritage that includes ‘intangible’ elements of the cultural past as well, such as practices, traditions, and languages, while often maintaining the celebratory emphasis of the positive view (Bauer Reference Bauer, Samuels and Rico2015; Prott and O'Keefe Reference Prott and O'Keefe1992). The point is not that all instances of official heritage rely on or endorse the positive view, but that official heritage is especially likely to have a positive character.

Unofficial heritage, in contrast, typically concerns the grassroots ways in which individuals negotiate their relationship with the past, processes that may end up emphasizing aspects of history that can be in tension with the vision of heritage endorsed from the ‘official’ perspective (Harrison Reference Harrison and Harrison2009: 8). Unofficial heritage can include festivals, destinations, and practices that are off the map of officially recognized heritage activities and places, or it can manifest itself in the different ways in which individuals respond to and interpret for themselves officially endorsed heritage narratives. It is often in the domain of unofficial heritage that we find versions of the heritage concept that depart from the positive view. For instance, consider these remarks from a visitor to Montpelier, Virginia, the home of President James Madison, a slave owner: ‘I'm a southerner (sighs). We rebelled against our own nation to preserve state's rights. Slavery was a big part of my family's heritage and to see it abolished is a great joy. But to learn how it was conducted, you see very little of that in any other tour you get’ (Smith Reference Smith, Michael Hsiao, Yew-Foong and Peycam2017: 32; emphasis added). Here, the visitor identifies slavery as both part of her heritage and as explicitly negative (though it is worth remaking that she nevertheless mentions the joy of seeing slavery abolished, thus arguably still fitting slavery into a positive narrative). She also gestures at how uncommon it is to see the realities of slavery captured in official heritage discourses, reinforcing the prevalence of the positive view in that domain.

In contrast, though, due in part to the power of official conceptions of heritage to shape public perception, it is not uncommon to find the positive view espoused in unofficial conceptions of heritage as well. For example, consider this response from a visitor to an exhibit entitled ‘Slavery at Jefferson's Monticello: Paradox of Liberty’, at the National Museum of African American History, which, among other things, discusses how Jefferson had fathered some of the enslaved people he owned: ‘Yes, he gave the slaves a chance and that is what this country is about, giving people a chance and creating equality’ (Smith Reference Smith, Michael Hsiao, Yew-Foong and Peycam2017: 33). Despite the fact that this official heritage display is explicitly grappling with the tension between positive and negative conceptions of heritage and thus offers an example of official heritage that departs from the positive view, the visitor insists on fitting Jefferson's participation in slavery (and rape) into a positive narrative, implying that it should be excused, if not justified.

This widespread use of the positive view of heritage results in at least two moral problems, which we are now in a position to characterize. First, there is the problem of disowning historical injustice. Because the positive view requires first-order positive evaluation of the past, it rejects the potential for negative aspects of the past, such as historical injustices, to be regarded as heritage. Citizens of the United States who are beneficiaries of historical injustices do not often conceive of slavery or the killing of Native Americans, for instance, as part of their heritage. Democracy? Yes! Baseball and apple pie? For sure! Enslavement and genocide? That is in the past. As Ta-Nehisi Coates puts it: ‘“The past” is whatever contributes to a society's moral debts. “Heritage” is everything else’ (Coates Reference Coates2013). In other words, the heritage concept on this reading conceptually precludes histories of injustice, relegating them to a separate domain: they may be part of history, but they are not part of our heritage. The visitor to the Jefferson exhibit discussed above highlights this problem: even when confronted with evidence that Jefferson raped his slaves, she molds these facts into a perverse narrative about providing opportunity and equality. Even efforts to reconcile with aspects of the past can ultimately result in disowning them, as in the example from Macdonald's work, discussed below, where histories of injustice are confronted for the sake of being washed away.

Second, there is the problem of embracing historical injustice. Because the positive view construes heritage as an exclusively good thing, historical injustices can sometimes be swept up along with all the positive associations that heritage is heir to on this view. This is the phenomenon we see when people flying the Confederate battle flag proclaim in their defense: ‘Heritage, not hate!’ (Jones Reference Jones2015; Petri Reference Petri2015). If it is part of our heritage, it must be something good—that is the logic of the concept on the positive view. Or consider recent debates about how universities and cities honor figures who championed slavery, racism, and colonialism (Rini Reference Rini2015), a topic thrust into the public eye again following the demonstrations by white supremacists in Charlottesville, VA, on August 11 and 12, 2017. Independently of how these cases ought to be adjudicated, the exclusively positive valence of heritage does not leave conceptual space for sorting through the complexities involved in taking up a heritage that is entangled with a legacy of injustice. The logic of the concept on the positive view entails that if something is part of our heritage, it must be protected, preserved, and celebrated, as in Trump's call to protect our ‘great heritage’, the heritage of the Confederacy.

To be clear, the problems of disowning and embracing historical injustice describe extreme attitudes that the positive view of heritage can engender, and there is certainly room to have more complicated and nuanced understandings of heritage that do not embrace the positive view wholesale: for instance, a kind of ambivalence about the evaluative relationship between heritage and historical injustice, perhaps carefully individuating the good dimensions from the bad (Adams Reference Adams2006). However, it is philosophically useful to consider the extreme cases, not only because they are in fact manifested in the world, as some of the examples considered so far indicate, but also because they aid in characterizing the persistent moral problems with certain construals of heritage that might at first glance seem to step away from the positive view.

To see this, consider that apparent critiques of the positive view are not new to the heritage literature or even to official heritage practice. There is a range of documented sites and relics of past atrocities that are sometimes referred to as negative, difficult, or dissonant heritage, terms that seem to challenge the idea that heritage must be a good thing (Meskell Reference Meskell2002; Samuels Reference Samuels, Samuels and Rico2015; Jones and Birdsall-Jones Reference Jones, Birdsall-Jones, Graham and Howard2008; Logan and Reeves Reference Logan and Reeves2009; Sandis Reference Sandis and Sandis2014). However, many sites of ‘difficult’ heritage, which we might at first glance expect would subvert the positive valence of the positive view, still tend to tilt toward the problem of disowning injustice. For example, consider the case of Robben Island prison in South Africa, where Nelson Mandela was imprisoned, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Ashworth, Graham, and Tunbridge describe this as a site where ‘South Africa's conflicting myths of heroic resistance, in particular Afrikaner versus African, might finally be brought into a common focus of ultimate triumph over injustice’ (Ashworth, Graham, and Tunbridge Reference Ashworth, Graham and Tunbridge2007: 198). The authors read the dissonance of the site with respect to conflicting narratives but ultimately couch the site in terms of a celebratory overcoming of the past. Indeed, it seems that the dissonance of the site is in fact framed in terms of how to reconcile a negative past with an otherwise positive concept (even the conflicting narratives are each described as ‘heroic’), rather than being explicitly concerned with the possibility that the perpetration of injustice might be construed as part of one's heritage (Tunbridge and Ashworth Reference Tunbridge and Ashworth1996; cf. Harrison Reference Harrison2013: 192–94). This understanding of heritage, which shares some similarity with the German notion of Vergangenheitsbewältigung, (‘overcoming’ or ‘mastering’ the past), thus ultimately maintains the positive valence of heritage (cf. Macdonald Reference Macdonald2009: 9; Neumann and Thompson Reference Neumann and Thompson2015: 5). While it may make room for some explicitly negative appraisals of the past, this understanding of heritage foregrounds the positive valence of heritage by subsuming injustices in a triumphal narrative, thus ultimately reasserting the positive view.

Sites that focus on memorializing past injustices may step farther away from a positive construal of the past, but insofar as they represent an injustice as heritage, they often do so for victims as opposed to perpetrators, such as the Hiroshima Peace Memorial (Beazley Reference Beazley, Long and Labadi2010). Even public acknowledgement of injustice by the state or a complicit organization can maintain this positive gloss. For instance, in discussing an exhibition put on by the Austrian National Railway to acknowledge the organization's role in the Holocaust, Macdonald observes:

Thus, this variety of remembrance seems to be an effort to move past the past, so to speak, rather than regard it as one's heritage. That being said, Macdonald does also note that acts of public acknowledgment can provide an outlet for ‘expressing contrition’ that is not necessarily given the same positive construal as in the case discussed above. However, I would suggest that public acknowledgment is not itself what makes these aspects of the past count as heritage: as I argue below, seeing these aspects as heritage involves regarding them in a certain way, and apology or other forms of public acknowledgment might represent or express this but can also be part of a process of divesting oneself of the past, which is antithetical to the notion of heritage.

Finally, there are some rare official representations of heritage that do focus on negative aspects of the past without trying to fit them into a triumphal narrative, but they are the exception that prove the rule. For instance, the National Parks Service has recently begun designing a site that will commemorate Reconstruction for the first time in its history, in contrast with countless Civil War memorials. As two commentators note, this move is ‘departing from the convention of marking only those events that can be narrated as positive or heroic’ (Downs and Masur Reference Downs and Masur2015). As this comment suggests, loosening the grip of the positive view promises to make room for official representations of new aspects of our heritage, in particular those that resist a celebratory narrative.

Looking at work on the closely allied concept of nostalgia can fruitfully elucidate the different ways in which a positive evaluation of the past can enter our thinking about heritage. The first mode of evaluation involved in nostalgia is a first-order evaluation of the past that is internal to the concept. For instance, Ray Cashman's definition of nostalgia builds on the work of Stuart Tannock, who writes that ‘Nostalgia … invokes a positively evaluated past world in response to a deficient present world. … The “positively evaluated” past is approached as a source for something now perceived to be missing; but it need not be thought of as a time of general happiness, peacefulness, stability, or freedom’ (as quoted in Cashman Reference Cashman2006: 138). Thus, on this definition, it is internal to the concept of nostalgia that it treats the past as, if not good in itself, then at least as good for a purpose.

This first-order evaluation internal to the concept needs to be contrasted with a second-order evaluation, where it is the concept itself, not the past, that is the object of evaluation. For instance, after presenting this definition, Cashman adds the qualification that ‘the contemporary definition of nostalgia used here is intentionally value-neutral’ (Cashman Reference Cashman2006: 138). The concept is presented as value-neutral in the sense that the concept itself is not evaluated as positive or negative (in contrast with a long history of criticism that has given nostalgia a negative connotation, as Cashman notes). This second-order evaluation of the concept is distinct from the internal evaluations constitutive of how the concept operates.

We can make the same kinds of distinctions concerning heritage. On the positive view, it is internal to the concept of heritage that it involves first-order positive evaluations of the past, if not as good in itself, at least as good for a purpose (e.g., it is not good in itself to be a victim of injustice, but aspects of it, such as culture arising from it or common experience, can be evaluated positively for the purposes of promoting solidarity and a sense of identity). We can then ask the second-order question about whether a concept that operates in such a way should be evaluated positively or negatively.

For instance, Cashman ultimately offers a positive evaluation of the concept of nostalgia in virtue of its potential for criticizing modernity through nostalgia's positive evaluation of aspects of the past: hence the idea of ‘critical nostalgia’ at which he arrives. However, note that this is a second-order evaluation of the concept, and moreover, a critical or negative outlook is not part of the first-order way in which the concept itself operates: nostalgia does not construe the past itself in critical or negative terms (cf. Dawdy Reference Dawdy2016). By comparison, my concern with the positive view is precisely this: that, like nostalgia, it does not account for maintaining first-order negative evaluations of the past and thus can lead to disowning or embracing historical injustice.

The problems of disowning historical injustice and embracing historical justice are significant. They both represent morally and politically undesirable relationships with the past. The first encourages us to deny or ignore our connection to historical injustice, foreclosing on potential avenues for education, reconciliation, and reparation. Independently of where one stands on these issues, the positive view tends to put the very prospect of considering them off the table by making engagement with historical injustice optional—it is not part of our inheritance. The second encourages us to foster a positive connection with historical injustices, viewing them through a rose-colored lens that can cause new harms in the present, reinforcing or perpetuating legacies of injustice. In so far as the positive view of heritage facilitates these problems, it is subject to moral and political criticism. We thus have reason to rethink the relationship with the past that such a conception of heritage engenders.

2. Owning Up to the Past

At the heart of our common thinking about heritage is the core notion of inheritance: indeed, this is the etymological root of the word (Harrison Reference Harrison and Harrison2009: 9). The result of an inheritance is something that is yours; hence, heritage might be glossed as a history of one's own. The positive view of heritage is so common because it gets something right about how we relate to the past as an inheritance. We tend to think about inheritance in positive terms: as receiving something valuable from the past, perhaps even something that we have a right to, and so the positive view captures this important dimension of how we experience and think about heritage (cf. Shelby Reference Shelby2007: 172–76). The problem, as I have detailed above, stems from emphasizing this aspect of heritage to the exclusion of all others. In response, I now want to demonstrate how focusing on this more fundamental element of heritage, as a past that we regard as our own, in fact allows us to reject the common assumption that heritage must always have a positive valence and offers avenues for avoiding the problems of disowning historical injustice and embracing historical injustice. I call this the ownership view.

The ownership view emphasizes that heritage is a past that we regard as our own. As should be clear, by ownership I do not mean ‘property’ (for more on distinctions between ownership and property in a cultural heritage context, see Coleman [Reference Coleman, Turnbull and Pickering2010: 90]). To regard something as one's own can have at least three dimensions: cognitive, evaluative, and affective. In the case of heritage, these dimensions will typically be linked together, but the cognitive dimension, at least, is necessary: to regard something as one's own requires believing the proposition that it is one's own. That is, I cannot regard a particular past as part of my heritage if I do not believe that it is mine, broadly construed: part of my past, my story (a range of examples will be discussed below). If it is not mine, it is not heritage: it is just history. I take this to be a restriction on the concept of heritage that follows from its inextricable link with the idea of inheritance: it is a feature that the ownership view shares with the positive view. Further cognitive dimensions of regarding something as one's own may also be fitting in response to the evaluative features that something may have. For instance, following Raz, we might think an appropriate kind of ‘psychological acknowledgement … regarding objects in ways consistent with their value, in one's thoughts’ is part of the correct cognitive response to valuable things (Raz Reference Raz2001: 161).

Typically, regarding something as one's own will have an evaluative dimension. However, to regard something as one's own is not necessarily a positive attitude; rather, it can have different evaluative valences. For the purposes of exposition, we can begin by treating the attitude of regarding as one's own as straightforwardly bivalent. I will call positively regarding something as one's own valuing it as one's own. I will call negatively regarding something as one's own owning up to it. This is not to suggest the impossibility of heritage that is evaluatively neutral, that we regard as our own without evaluating it as positive or negative. Perhaps some quotidian aspects of our heritage are like this. But lacking a positive or negative value, these pieces of our heritage, I assume, will be of little practical importance to us. So we can begin with the positive valence. What does it mean to value something as one's own?

Consider, for example, valuing a child as one's own. To value a child as one's own typically involves a concern for that child, a concern that goes above and beyond one's concern for children in general. Of course, this does not imply that you do not value other children: I do not think the distinction here is simply the distinction between the things that you value and the things that you believe are valuable, but do not value yourself (Scheffler Reference Scheffler2010; Raz Reference Raz2001). There are children I value but do not value as my own. Nor do I think valuing as one's own is just the attitude you take toward things that have what philosophers sometimes call ‘personal value’. This term often mistakenly conflates claims about the scope of personally valuable things with the way we value such things (e.g., assuming what I value sentimentally is valuable only to me). For this reason, I think we do better to think of personal value as concerned only with scope (Matthes Reference Matthes2015). Even on this reading, this conception of personal value is an inadequate analysis of valuing as one's own. There may be things that only I have reason to value but do not value as my own, and there may be things that everyone has reason to value, but that all might value as their own (Earth, for instance).

This brings us to the affective dimension (cf. Smith and Campbell Reference Smith, Campbell, Logan, Craith and Kockel2015). To value something as one's own, I suggest, involves a special degree of emotional identification. Following accounts of the emotional vulnerability involved in valuing proposed by, for instance, Elizabeth Anderson, Sam Scheffler, and Niko Kolodny, we might think of those things that we value as our own as those to which we are especially emotionally vulnerable, roughly to the extent that we are emotionally vulnerable regarding what happens to us (Anderson Reference Anderson1995: chapter 1; Scheffler Reference Scheffler2010: 23ff.; Kolodny Reference Kolodny2003). The more we value something as our own, the more we identify with it. If something like these accounts of valuing is correct, then the difference between valuing as one's own and valuing in general is a difference in degree rather than in kind. This kind of emotional identification is characteristic of disputes over heritage, as evidenced, for instance, in the intensity of battles over control of heritage and in the kinds of rhetoric concerning the link between heritage and identity deployed in arguments over its possession (Coleman Reference Coleman, Herbrechter and Higgins2006). Consider, for example, a recent quotation from Hermann Arnhold of the Westphalian State Museum for Art and Cultural History, in response to government-mandated deaccession of museum holdings. ‘Would you sell the story of your family?’ he asks. ‘If you sell important artworks, that means selling a part of your history’ (Carvajal Reference Carvajal2015). Here we see the idea that we should identify with and care about our national heritage in the same way we identify with and care about our family.

However, what we regard as our own need not have a positive valence. I suggested above that valuing something as our own is characterized by a strong degree of emotional identification. This is also true for those things that we regard as our own in a negative sense. The same cognitive, evaluative, and affective dimensions are present as in cases where we value something (positively) as our own, but the valence of the evaluative dimensions is flipped. Yet, these burdens are often foisted upon us. We often acquire them through family and affiliations that we have not chosen (Scheffler Reference Scheffler2003). Siblings and ancestors commit wrongs; cities and nations are mired in structural injustice.

If these burdens are beyond our control, why not simply disown them? Why do we need to regard them as our own in the sense that I have described? The problem is that these burdens are tethered to things that we value as our own, that we do not want to give up. You love your brother; you are attached to your city. So we find that we cannot simply walk away from them. This may incline us to ignore the negative aspects of these associations, to disown them, but then we open ourselves to justified moral criticism. The source of these criticisms can be diverse, ranging from violation of associative duties to failures of virtue (for discussion of these issues in relation to the literature on moral luck, see Williams [Reference Williams1981], Wolf [Reference Wolf2001], Enoch [Reference Enoch, Heuer and Lang2011]). Perhaps more significant than these external criticisms is the internal discord that histories of injustice create when we are attentive to them. How do I reconcile my love for a sibling with his or her terrible act? How do I embrace my city when it harms so many? If I cannot disown or embrace the injustice, then what do I do with it?

One possibility is to engage in a kind of evaluative bifurcation, valuing the good aspect of a thing and condemning the bad, what Robert Merrihew Adams calls a ‘purely particularist way of valuing that would refuse to make “all things considered” evaluations, or to set a value on complexes that include both goods and evils’ (Adams Reference Adams2006: 247). However, while this view is not without its attractions, I am in agreement with Adams about its significant costs. As he puts it, such an approach ends up ‘leaving our loves surrounded with a cloud of attitudes that are consistent with them, not in substance, but only in being kept out of reach in a sort of emotional apartheid’ (Adams Reference Adams2006: 251). Beyond the struggles that might attend maintaining such an evaluative and emotional division, this approach can quickly come to seem morally repugnant when the positive and negative dimensions of the object are not just causally connected but parts of a whole. Adams is concerned with the kinds of connection that one often sees invoked in discussions of the nonidentity problem: he discusses the feelings it would be appropriate to have towards the First World War, for instance, if the war was a necessary causal antecedent to one's own birth (for further discussion of the attitudes it is appropriate to hold in this kind of causal antecedent case, see Smilansky [Reference Smilansky2005] and Wallace [Reference Wallace2013: chapter 3]). But the problem of emotional apartheid that Adams identifies seems all the more grave when considering the evaluative acrobatics involved in separating the ‘glory’ of the Civil War from the fact that it was a war to defend slavery. Here, the ‘positive’ and the ‘negative’ are not merely causally connected.

The Stoic philosopher Epictetus was sensitive to this conundrum and the difficulty of resolving it. In an evocative passage in The Enchiridion, he writes: ‘Everything has two handles: the one by which it may be carried, the other by which it may not. If your brother acts unjustly, don't lay hold on the action by the handle of his injustice, for by that it cannot be carried; but by the opposite, that he is your brother, that he was brought up with you; and thus you will lay hold on it, as it is to be carried’ (Epictetus: 43).

The passage is metaphorical and thus open to interpretation, but I see it this way. It is difficult to acknowledge that it is your brother who has committed a grave injustice if you focus only on the injustice itself. However, if you focus on the fact that it is your brother who has committed the unjust act, recognizing how you are already entangled with it through your emotional identification with him, then you open the door to owning up to that injustice—that is, to regarding it as your own. Epictetus thus offers a model for how we can approach the negative aspects of those things we value as our own. By focusing on the fact that they are already unavoidably ours in a descriptive sense, given that we already identify with the source of the injustice, we can come to resolve the resistance that we naturally (and justifiably) feel toward identifying with injustice by rethinking our attitudes toward it. We cannot identify with the injustice as an injustice—that is, ‘carry it by that handle’—for this would be to embrace injustice (erring in the evaluative dimension). By the same token, we cannot simply ignore it, disowning the injustice (erring in the cognitive dimension) because it is part of a whole with something that we value as our own (the two handles belong to the same thing!). Thus, our association with the injustice will persist so long as we are associated with its source. But rather than making the mistakes of embracing or disowning the injustice, we can own up to it—or carry it, as Epictetus would have it—by recognizing that it is already ours, part and parcel of something with which we emotionally identify (cf. Korsgaard Reference Korsgaard1996). Taking that relationship seriously will thus involve emotionally identifying with the injustice as well lest we trivialize it and fail adequately to recognize its inextricable link with what we value as our own (erring in the affective dimension). Owning up is thus ultimately about a shift in attitude—regarding what is ours as ours in the right way: cognitively, evaluatively, and affectively.

We can now see the power of a broader conception of heritage that need not have a positive valence. When we open up conceptual space to regard slavery, for instance, as part of our heritage in the United States, we (that is citizens of the United States) offer ourselves a handle by which to carry it. Slavery is an atrocity, and so it is no surprise that most people would disown it and prefer to ignore it or wash their hands of it, leaving it in ‘the past’, as Coates puts it. If heritage must have a positive valence, then if we do acknowledge that slavery is part of our heritage, we risk embracing it, like the antebellum atavists who rally behind Confederate symbols. In contrast, by adopting a conception of heritage as a past we regard as our own, we provide a framework for regarding slavery as our heritage—not as a good, but as a burden with which we emotionally identify, something we need to own up to in order to reconcile it with the other aspects of the past that we embrace. Return to the case of Confederate monuments. The problem with Confederate monuments is not that they are about the Confederacy, but rather that they overwhelmingly present the Confederacy as a positive aspect of American heritage, promoting the dismissal or embrace of the injustices of slavery. Opening up conceptual space for seeing the Confederacy as an important part of American heritage but one with a decidedly negative valence suggests not that there should not be official heritage sites devoted to the Confederacy, but rather, that they should have a very different character than the current offering of Confederate monuments, namely, one oriented toward owning up to the past rather than to valorizing it.

My focus here has been on the attitudes toward historical injustice that are precluded on the positive view and facilitated on the ownership view of heritage. What we ought to do once we find our way toward owning up to historical injustice is a difficult question, one beyond the scope of this article. But I would suggest that finding conceptual space to regard historical injustices as part of our heritage is an important antecedent to the possibility of reparative or reconciliatory action, whatever turns out to be appropriate—it is unlikely that people will seriously consider what they might or should do with regard to historical injustice if they have not yet come to regard that past as their own in the relevant sense. In virtue of the emotional identification that it is heir to, we typically regard what is our own, whether good or bad, as our responsibility, and so the ownership view promotes the idea that dealing with the legacy of historical injustices might be our responsibility as well, even if we are not responsible for perpetrating them—the common use of ‘own up’ or ‘take ownership’ as synonyms for taking responsibility is not incidental. By analogy (again borrowing from Epictetus) you might find your brother to be a burden, constantly getting into trouble, but because you regard him as yours, you feel moved to take responsibility for him, or ‘take ownership’ of his mistakes even though you are not literally responsible for what he does. One might think of this along the lines of Iris Marion Young's conception of political responsibility, which is not contingent upon attributions of causal responsibility (Young Reference Young2004). So while the ownership view does not require us to take responsibility for the past, it lays the appropriate emotional foundation for us to do so. We will plausibly be more sensitive and open to reparative or reconciliatory claims if we emotionally identify with historical injustices, independently of (though perhaps supplementary to) claims about our responsibilities for them.

Thus, approaching historical injustice via thinking about heritage, rather than by way of ancestral connections to perpetrators or providing justice for the dead, avoids some of the philosophical difficulties with which arguments about responsibility for reparations have struggled (Thompson Reference Thompson2001; Ridge Reference Ridge2003). It also offers a potential avenue for avoiding objections to reparations on the basis of supersession. For instance, Jeremy Waldron famously argues that claims for reparations can be superseded in favor of the current distribution of goods based on the centrality these goods have come to occupy in peoples’ lives (Waldron Reference Waldron1992). The argument is based on emotional identification with certain goods that might otherwise be the object of reparative claims. However, the view I argue for here also endorses the emotional identification with historical injustices, regarding them as one's own in a similar way, but with a different valence. Claims against reparation based on coming to value and identify with unjustly acquired goods may be significantly tempered by owning up to and emotionally identifying with the injustice of their acquisition, taking the injustice on which access to them depends as seriously as one takes the centrality of those goods to one's life. This view thus offers a counterweight of the same kind to the claims about the centrality of goods to one's life on which the supersession argument rests.

Of course, this is not to say that the meaning of regarding historical injustices as part of your heritage will not depend in important ways on various relations in which you might stand to the injustice (e.g., as a descendant of victims, as a contemporary victim of persisting injustice, etc.). Indeed, it is perhaps no surprise that the victims of historical and persisting injustices have been more likely to regard those histories as part of their heritage than the beneficiaries (cf. Darby Reference Darby2010). Take, for example, the prominent role that slavery plays in the Black Heritage Trail in Boston in contrast with the relative absence of slavery on the nearby Freedom Trail. This example also reveals why it is important that the ownership view not be inherently tied to taking responsibility for the past: it must leave conceptual space for victims of historical injustice to regard that past as part of their heritage, a relationship in which taking responsibility would be inappropriate, to say the least.

To be sure, the approach to owning up to historical injustices that I present here is conditional. It says that if you identify with a certain history, then owning up to injustices in that history as part of your heritage offers a way of reconciling the tension between those positive and negative dimensions. Another solution would be to give up the antecedent understanding of your heritage that tethers you to historical injustice and no longer regard that history as your own. And my approach has little to say to those who do not emotionally identify with the past of a place, city, nation, and the like as their own. Some will find this disappointing. They will wish that I had provided the resources to explain why everyone has an objective obligation to redress historical injustices or at least to take them seriously. However, I hope the account of heritage I present here is compatible with further arguments about obligations to redress historical injustices, arguments that may have a broader reach or different foundations.

Moreover, I want to emphasize the power of fitting our sense of ownership of historical injustices into the conceptual framework of heritage. After all, one might ask why we should not simply retain a narrowly construed understanding of heritage that has an exclusively positive valence and argue that our reasons for recognizing or redressing histories of injustice are separate and supplemental to what we regard as our heritage. Would such an approach be missing anything, normatively speaking, in comparison with the broader understanding of heritage that I endorse?

One response to this worry is to concede the point and grant that nothing is lost, normatively, if we retain a positive view of heritage, provided that we also avoid morally objectionably attitudes toward historical injustices. The methodological approach that I adopt in this article is friendly to this reply: I do not think there is much point in insisting that heritage ought to be understood one way or another independently of the relationship that definition bears to its moral and political consequences, provided it does not completely contravene all the core aspects of common usage. Thus, if a positive conception of heritage could be married to another relationship to the past that avoids the problems of disowning injustice and embracing injustice, then I could rest content with that, though I am skeptical about how such a relationship would not be in deep tension with the positive view.

That being said, my preferred response is to argue that the power of heritage as a concept favors retooling it from within, rather than supplementing it from without, to achieve the desired moral and political improvements. As we have seen throughout this discussion, there is a prevalent view that what is simply ‘the past’ is behind us and not in need of continued concern. In contrast, as we have also seen, inherent in the concept of heritage is the idea of an inheritance. An inheritance does not simply remain in the past: it follows us into the present. The concept of heritage thus has a built-in mechanism for making the past significant and salient in the present. Once we dispense with the assumption that heritage must be positive, we can exploit the internal logic of the heritage concept for demonstrating why histories of injustice should matter to us, just as past cultural achievements should. What is simply ‘the past’ can be acknowledged and then dismissed, arguments to the contrary notwithstanding, but to call something heritage is ipso facto to identify it as relevant in the present. Heritage, as some commentators have recently put it, ‘is one of the ways in which societies actively shape the meaning of the past in the present’ (Ireland and Schofield Reference Ireland, Schofield, Ireland and Schofield2015: 2; see also Harrison Reference Harrison2013: 14; Smith Reference Smith2006: 44). The concept of heritage is thus inherently invoked in order to indicate that some aspect of the past matters now, that it is an inheritance, whether of goods or, as I have argued, debts. That is a powerful aspect of how the concept is deployed that we would give up by sticking with the narrow, positive construal and supplementing it from without. By rethinking the exclusively positive dimension of heritage itself, we can exploit the logic of the concept for moral and political gain.

Moreover, making more room for negative histories in our understanding of heritage begins to soften aspects of the traditional distinction between history and heritage introduced at the outset of this article. Heritage critics such as David Lowenthal are quick to distinguish history from heritage with respect to how each handles the truth. He writes: ‘History seeks to convince by truth and succumbs to falsehood. Heritage exaggerates and omits, candidly inverts and frankly forgets, and thrives on ignorance and terror’ (Lowenthal Reference Lowenthal1998: 121). However, on the conception I have argued for here, history and heritage have a more intimate and productive relationship than Lowenthal suggests. I have argued that our conception of heritage should accept the truth of historical injustice and, moreover, that it should do so in a way that recognizes how the pain and continuing consequences of historical traumas are relevant to our contemporary relationship with the past and each other. To give it a slogan: history can keep heritage honest; heritage can give history a heart. It is ultimately ironic that so many critics of removing Confederate statues object that such actions ‘erase history’. The historical truth is that the erection of Confederate monuments peaked during the establishment of Jim Crow laws and during the civil rights movement; they are symbols of oppression more than acknowledgements of the Civil War (Souten Poverty Law Center 2017). More accurately, then, removal of these statues erases heritage, in particular, a heritage that embraced the injustice of slavery and used it for the contemporary purposes of continuing the oppression of Black Americans.