In this post Lawrie Balfour expands on her 2003 American Political Science Review article ‘Unreconstructed Democracy: W.E.B. DuBois and the Case for Reparations‘.

Reparations are making a comeback, but in what form and at what cost? Demands for material redress and a national acknowledgement of the crimes of slavery and ongoing racial terror and exploitation are not new. Black activists and political thinkers have debated what the U.S. owes to the enslaved and their descendants since at least 1829, when David Walker published his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. What is new is the frequency with which “reparations” is uttered across racial and ideological lines. Where Michael Dawson and Rovana Popoff reported near-unanimous white opposition to compensation for slavery in a 2000 survey, several candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination declared their support for reparations. On June 19, 2019, a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee held a widely publicized hearing on H.R. 40, a bill to establish a commission to study reparations that has languished since it was first introduced by John Conyers (D-MI) in 1989. Perhaps the most telling indicator of reparations’ recent respectability is New York Times columnist David Brooks’s op-ed on “How to Do Reparations Right” (June 4, 2020). Brooks specifically names the work of Black women activists, whose knowledge of local conditions is essential to the wise and just implementation of structural change, and he identifies several creative program ideas. Yet even as he calls for neighborhood-level control of funds, Brooks ties reparations to integration (into what? James Baldwin might ask) and asserts his authority to discern which plan is “the way to go” and which is “the wrong way.” The reparations measures he envisions, though promising, are relatively slight in relation to the saturation of racial injustice into every dimension of the polity.

There are alternatives. The long arc of African American political thought has produced a deep reservoir of arguments and proposals, not all of them couched explicitly in the language of reparations, for reckoning with the past and envisioning multiracial democracy. In “Unreconstructed Democracy: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Case for Reparations” (2003), I argued that Du Bois’s studies of Reconstruction lay out three lines of argument for meaningful repair. First, Du Bois decries the failure to implement land reform and economic policies that would have enabled enslaved workers to support themselves as independent citizens after the Civil War. His argument echoes those of Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and others who regarded the abandonment of the freemen and women as a crime as great as slavery itself; and it anticipates such imaginative proposals as Martin Luther King Jr.’s plan for the abolition of poverty, the Black Manifesto’s reparations demands of 1969, and the Movement for Black Lives Policy Platform in 2016, all of which tie historical consciousness to a broad restructuring of Black Americans’ working and living conditions. Second, Du Bois’s account of the “gifts” of enslaved and free African Americans emphasizes their essential role in the economic, cultural, and political development of the nation. It reverses white presumptions, still operative today, about who is indebted to whom. Finally, Du Bois insists that the U.S. must come to grips with the centuries-long denial of Black humanity. As Toni Morrison would later say, we all need to consider the price of “living in a nation of people who decided that their world view would combine agendas for individual freedom and mechanisms for devastating racial oppression”.

Since that APSR article appeared, much has changed, and too much has not changed. Du Bois has achieved canonical status in disciplines where the scandal of his absence should have been rectified decades ago. And questions he raised about the dependence of the U.S. founding on the slave trade and slavery, about the kinship of racism and capitalism, and about the nonwhite lives destroyed by U.S. and European colonialism now shape research agendas in multiple fields. The old truism that “Lincoln freed the slaves” has been rethought in light of Du Bois’s account of the “general strike” of enslaved people who turned the tide of war by fleeing southern plantations and fighting to free themselves and the nation from racial slavery. Du Bois’s observation that white Americans have accepted a “public and psychological wage” in exchange for racial loyalty and his historical investigation of the lost promise of “abolition democracy” inspire contemporary antiracist inquiry and abolitionist movements. And his scathing condemnation of “the propaganda of history,” which painted Reconstruction and Black citizenship as disasters, animates arguments against public histories and spaces that prize Confederate generals over the lives of nonwhite children, women, and men.

Beyond his most famous contributions, furthermore, Du Bois’s Reconstruction history yields equally important insights about what meaningful reparations would entail. When he details the forms of white supremacist violence that ravaged Black communities after emancipation in Black Reconstruction (1935), Du Bois also documents how black workers, voters, and office holders rewrote southern constitutions during that period. He recasts Reconstruction as a democratic highpoint, an era when citizens and legislators instituted intelligent governance, established free public schools, and enacted new forms of “social legislation” that undercut the power of the propertied. In these less-studied chapters, Du Bois investigates specific plans to reorganize the U.S. on a more equal basis and analyzes the persistent demand for land that would have prevented the rise of debt peonage and inter-generational theft of African American life, liberty, and property. If Reconstruction was a “splendid failure,” he concludes, it failed because it because “the country would not listen to such a comprehensive plan.”

Today’s conversations about the form and the cost of reparations often get stuck on issues of guilt and innocence (My ancestors didn’t own slaves!) or on the dangers of looking to the past when present-day inequalities are so staggering. Returning to Du Bois and to the tradition of black reconstructive thought indicates why a framework of reparations can be transformative. But only if it is part of “a comprehensive plan.” These writings advance a conception of democratic repair that insists on confronting the ongoing power of centuries of racial oppression, exposing the continuously innovative character of white supremacist policies, and plotting concrete steps toward a different future. Du Bois may not have used the language of reparations but, as King remarked in 1968, “he would have wanted his life to teach us something about our tasks of emancipation.” Learning from Du Bois means relinquishing the fantasy that reconstruction can be controlled by white citizens or the illusion that a one-time program will be anything but an alibi for ongoing injustice. It reminds all of us — as the generations of protesters now occupying U.S. streets and taking down racist monuments attest — that it is long past time to take seriously the proposals advanced by Black women and men who have understood that reparations worth fighting for are those that contribute to a full-blown project of democratic reconstruction.

– Lawrie Balfour, University of Virginia and Editor of Political Theory

– The author’s APSR article is currently free access on Cambridge Core