The Political Economy of Reparations: An Anti-Ethical Consideration of Atonement and Racial Reconciliation under Colonial Moralism
/From Southern University at New Orleans Race, Gender & Class 2011, Pg. 125 Vol. 18 No. 1/2
By Tommy J. Curry. Tommy J. Curry is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas A&M University and an Affiliate Professor in Africana Studies. His research interests include Critical Race Theory, specifically the use of racial realism as a political theory, Africana Philosophy, and Anti-Colonialist thought.
Address: Dept of Philosophy, Texas A&M University, 4237 TAMU, College Station, Texas, 77843. Ph.: (618) 203-2787, Fax: (979) 703-7496, Email: tcurry@philosophy.tamu.edu
Abstract: Over the last several decades, reparations theorists have continued to justify reparations as an amelioratory policy that fulfills America's democratic potential. Most recently, Roy L. Brooks has developed this optimism in America's democratic reformism into a theory of atonement. Unlike previous models, Brooks holds that reparations is justified solely by its ability to make America a racially reconciled society. This article argues that such hopes in America are illusory. Following the structural-colonial analyses of racism laid out by W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King Jr., and contemporary social scientists, I argue that America is not capable of moral transformation concerning racism, because racism is a permanent and necessary feature of our American society. While it is the position of the author that reparations is justified politically, it cannot be justified as a moral charge to an immoral white supremacist society. As such, I call for an anti-ethical deliberation on the issue of reparations-a consideration I hope will continue future debates on the subject.
In last decade, the academic literature analyzing the justification for and legitimacy of African American reparations has become prolific (Torpey & Burkett, 2010; Henry, 2007, 2003; Martin & Yaquinto, 2007; Yamamoto, Kim, & Holden, 2007; Brophy, 2006; Corlett, 2005, 2003; Salzberger & Turck, 2004; Martin & Yaquinto, 2004; Ogletree, 2003; Boxill, 2003; Brooks, 1999;Yamamoto, 1998, 1992). The arguments in favor of reparations range from articulating long standing legal concepts like "unjust enrichment," which holds that a person who has been enriched unjustly at the expense of others has an obligation of restitution to those they have disadvantaged, to the creation of concepts like "unjust impoverishment" to describe the moral obligation societies have for reparations towards those who have been historically oppressed by the exploitative relationships found between racial groups in America where the dominant race has benefited from the unjust theft of labor and resources from the subjugated group (Feagin, 2000:11). However, the debate over unjust enrichment as an actionable conceptualization of reparations in law journals (Sherwin, 2004; Feagin, 2004; Klimchuk, 2004; Sebok, 2003) and the viability of this conceptualization's effectiveness given statutes of limitation (Brophy, 2003) has renewed scholarly interest in the moralistic appeal reparations has to amelioratory racial conventions like reconciliation, community, and forgiveness. Largely motivated by Rhonda Magee's (1993) article entitled "The Master's Tools, From the Bottom Up," which formulated reparations under a cultural equity theory constituted by forward looking acts of transformative ethos that aim to bring into reality a new American dream where "America would live up to its promise of multicultural equality...[and] respect the unique contributions of various cultural groups...[through] a national commitment to tolerance, and acceptance and appreciation" (p. 874), current reparations theories take racial redress as a necessary step to the attainment of our ideal democratic society. This ideal society, largely understood to be epitomized by Dr. Martin Luther King's Beloved Community, has been historically tied to be the spiritual metamorphosis had by whites in giving reparations to African Americans for slavery (Cook, 2000).
Led more recently by the theoretical intervention of Roy L. Brooks' (2004) Atonement and Forgiveness: A New Model for Black Reparations, there has been a notable shift in how one speaks about the moral potentiality gained from reparations for slavery. When contrasted with other recent works on reparations, the extent to which Brooks' theory differs becomes readily apparent. For many reparationists, reparations are about the reclamation of voice, the (re) presenting of the suffering of the enslaved, and the assertion of the humanity lost by African descended people under racial oppression. This trend can easily be identified in the work of authors like Charles P. Henry (2007), whose writings tend towards a nationalist account of oppression which views Black reparations as a political demand for both citizenship and Black identity that "builds on the ideas of activists and scholars in the 1960's" (p. 32), or other scholars like Adrienne Davis' (2000, 1999), whose account of reparations looks to recover the vitiated "economic personality" of the enslaved. Brooks' atonement model, on the other hand, differs significantly because it is primarily forward looking-maintaining that "racial reconciliation should be the primary purpose of slave redress" (p. 141). Proposing atonement as a moderate racial policy continuing the much praised-politically accepted-social reformism of the civil rights era that (1) gets Blacks to stop alienating whites by talking about reparations purely in terms of money, and (2) enables both Black and whites to refocus on the moral potentiality contained within American political culture, Brooks claims to provide an orientation that allows Americans, both Black and white, "to see the modern Black redress movement for what it truly is-an expression of the post-Holocaust vision of heightened morality, identity between victim and perpetrator, egalitarianism and restorative justice" (Brooks, 2004:211).
It is not the purpose of this article to reconstitute the historical justifications for, or the political legitimacy of reparations. For the purposes of this analysis, I take the inexhaustible writings in favor of reparations presented by various Black, Native NdN, Asian and Hispanic thinkers dealing with this issue through legal, political and philosophical lenses to be sufficient proof of the position. Unlike previous reparations scholarship dealing with atonement and reconciliation, this work is not interested in asking the questions that seemingly concern every reparationist scholar, namely: who owes reparations to present day African descended peoples in America; who is owed reparations for slavery given the contemporary absence of this practice; and how can we assess the impact of past discrimination under slavery and Jim Crow given the civil rights movement? These questions have been answered and debated a thousand times over. In a much different vein led by the systemic analysis of American racism, this article is interested in assessing the reality of atonement scholars' belief in America's liberal democracy to deliver on the promises of racial and moral transformation. Stated differently, this article interrogates the fundamental, but nonetheless asserted assumption, that the white supremacist democratic order of the United States can in fact deliver its promises of racial reconciliation when confronted with its seemingly sempiternal racism.
I. THE CONSENSED APRIORI: RACE AND RACISM IN BROOKS' ATONEMENT MODEL
The application of atonement theory to the debate over reparations for slavery has placed the capacity America has for further moral and egalitarian transformation regarding race center-stage. For the advocates of this view, atonement for slavery is a social and moral reconfiguration of America's social political heritage. This reconfiguration is taken by atonement theorists like Roy L. Brooks to be a transformation in the political consciousness of Black and white Americans-a fundamental change in the ways that Blacks and whites interact socially and align themselves politically. According to Brooks, "the atonement model embraces the core belief that redress should be about apology first and foremost" (2004:142). By primarily focusing on the apology for slavery and Jim Crow-as a visible and pronounced articulation of remorse-Brooks distances himself from the "narrower tort" conceptualizations of compensation and punishment; ideas that do little to "foster racial reconciliation in a society like ours" (p. 142). Even redress (monetary compensation) without an apology showing genuine remorse is found wanting. Because slavery and Jim Crow were of such heinous and atrocious character where human degradation was enforced through bondage and government sanctioned segregation, redress-the act of simply throwing money or programs towards Blacks-without an apology would fail to "demonstrate new moral aspirations" (p. 142).
In Brooks' analysis, atonement can only be understood as "an apology plus reparations" (p. 143). Unable to be reduced simply to a formal apology, atonement is more than an expression of remorse for past transgressions; it requires restitution, the providing of reparation for the atrocity committed. Reparations are essential, according to Brooks, because "they make apologies believable," (p. 143)-adding a "meaningful, material reality [that] help to repair the damage caused by the atrocity and ensure that the atrocity will not be repeated" (p. 143). Upon the satisfaction of this criterion that defines an actual atonement, the victims(s) of the atrocity have a civic responsibility to forgive their perpetrators of the atrocity. Brooks is extremely careful in pointing out that the victim differs from the perpetrator in that the victim has no moral debt to pay the perpetrator, but argues nonetheless that the victims, insofar as they are described as such within an atonement model, have a responsibility to be forward looking beyond the harms of the past towards a racially reconciled future. The final calculus that emerges from Brooks' argument is straightforward: atonement, which is an apology and reparation for an atrocity, plus forgiveness, by those past and present victims of the atrocity, births racial reconciliation.
While Brooks' argument has gained an audience amongst social political theorists and legal scholars looking for new ways to justify reparations toward African descended people in America beyond the narrow concepts of retribution and compensation, there is nonetheless an ahistorical idealization necessary by an advocate of atonement theory to make the conditions that sustain this project viable. In Brooks analysis, racism is left purposely vague. Through his text, racism is alluded to be understood as: a number of negative perceptions and social circumstances intertwined with racial identity, racial discrimination (2004:6), and a social marker symbolizing racial difference and sustaining a type of privilege that was "laid down during slavery that continues to give white racial advantages" (p. 188). Allowing this ambiguity of racism to subtlety stand in for and implicitly define itself analytically allows for an overly optimistic reading of American race relations that fails to realistically deal with the complexity of racial oppression in America. Brooks presents racism to be commonsensical-a definition we can all agree upon without hesitation; a justifiable strategy given his attempt to cast atonement as moderate and "non-threatening" towards whites. However, without a rigorous structural and social analysis of racism, we are left with nothing more than a rhetorical strategy that idly appeals to the hearts and minds of white citizens. In other words, how are we to know how far reaching the goal of racial reconciliation can extend if we do not know the actual conditions that make racism irreconcilable in the first place?
Rather than being minute, abhorrent, or abnormal, racism has been the foundation and organizing principle of American society from its outset. In an effort to stave off alienating whites, Brooks has to ignore the materiality of racism and speak idealistically about American race relations without partiality. To be racially moderate, Brooks' proposal makes the issue of reconciliation the responsibility of Blacks and whites-appealing to them as Americans, who have an almost patriotic stake in bringing to America a moral transformation towards racial equality that is long overdue, but whose seeds have already been planted by the hard work and sacrifice of those who toiled during the civil rights movement. The possibility of this racial reconciliation is conducted by distancing his analysis from racism, and ironically, the demand for racial equality, which was once seen as too radical by most whites since it demanded a "restructuring of a social order that had been in place in form or another since about the time of Plymouth Rock" (Brooks 2004:xi). As Barbara Fields (2001) reminds us:
well-meaning scholars are more apt to speak of race than of racism. Race is a homier and more tractable notion than racism, a rogue elephant gelded and tamed into a pliant beast of burden. Substituted for racism, race transforms the act of a subject into an attribute of the object. And because race denotes a state of mind, feeling, or being, rather than a program or pattern of action, it radiates a semantic and grammatical ambiguity that helps to restore an appearance of symmetry (p. 48).
By making race the focus of the analysis, the actors, both Black and white, are seen to be equally culpable in their attempts to understand, reform, and in this case reconcile the lingering dynamics of racism. However, a more historically comprehensive analysis finds that
racism-the assignment of people to an inferior category and the determination of their social, economic, civic, and human standing on that basis-unsettles the fundamental instincts of American academic professionals who consider themselves liberal, leftist, or progressive. It is an act peremptory, hostile, and supremely-often fatally-consequential identification that unceremoniously overrides its objects' sense of themselves (Fields, 2001:48).
In other words, talking about racism unsettles the "moderate-ness" of discussions about race. To speak about racism as an intentional and deliberate organization of society destroys the possibility of "equal blame." In short, the moderate position of Brooks makes sense politically, but results in a type of intellectual conservatism that dilutes the real issue of racism within the borders of America and censors any actual conversation about the viability of atonement. Understanding racism through race, the difference of skin color and the personal antipathies that emerge from this difference act as a consensed apriori. This consensed apriori, then, is a belief seemingly grasped intuitively, claiming to be fact without any real investigation into the reality that demonstrates racism. Allowing race, the symmetrical and personal identification of individuals, to stand in for racism, the social, political, and deliberate confinement of peoples into inferior social positions, continues a false consciousness about the depth of racism in America and the commits students of race relations not only to the fictions of this account, but the imaginative fantasies that are advocated as solutions to America's race problem as well.
II. MORALITY WASTED: THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF WHITE SUPREMACY AND ITS CONSEQUENCES FOR ATONEMENT THEORY
In 1755, Jean Jacques Rousseau commented that a society's configuration, its organizing structure, its historical character, and its justifications for authority were derived through its elevation of the family from a domestic ritual to the governmental model (Rousseau, 2004). Citizens, then, like the children who both empower the government (father) and legitimate his authority through obedience (order), are taken to be both subjected to the decrees of their society and the makers of them. In 1849, Martin R. Delany extends Rousseau's analysis to include modernity's invention of race. Delany understood that
As it is with families, so it is with nations. Whatever characteristics distinguish a nation, each citizen or inhabitant thereof should more or less partake of this character. Each citizen of a nation should bear the same resemblance to the great leading traits which mark the enterprise of that people, as the individual members do to the family to which they belong (2003:149).
In Delany's 1854 essay entitled "The Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent," he recognized that races-being the great families of history-create nations in their image and interests, thus the great principle of political economy is that "no people can be free who themselves do not constitute an essential part of the ruling element of the country in which they live" (Delany 1972:197). Political economy emerges as a means to explain the character of nation-the dynamic that sustains the racial organization of society insofar as the complex interactions of economics, theology, politics, history, and philosophy naturalize the hierarchies of that society to be necessary to the nation(al) enterprise. Thus, the government acts as the protector of the (racial) nation; instilling in it the ideology of racial superiority that justifies both its existence as "state," and the domestic policy that allows its cultural cohesion as "country." Antenor Firmin (1884) recognized the relationship between race and nation in the late 1800's, explaining:
that the notion of country holds such sway over people's minds...can easily be explained. It entails an expanded understanding of the duties which each person morally has towards the land where he was born and raised, and to which he is beholden for everything-habits, education, mindset...Patriotism ultimately is defined as unequalled affection for our native land. But here we identify the land with those who have rejoiced and suffered with us, with those whose ancestors have rejoiced and suffered with ours, and with those who share with us common aspirations, identical customs, and a similiar physiological profile and psychological temperament which are perceived as distinct from those of all other collectivities. And this is where the idea of race comes in, influencing the actions of a people to the same extent as patriotism does and often overlapping with and completing the latter. The influence of [racial] ethnic consciousness on the political actions of nations is undeniable; it plays a role even in their assessment of issues, affecting their very reasoning (p. 380).
This too is the case of America. Because a country is defined by its cultural and historical cohesion, the racial aliens occupying that geography are incorporated into the nation only as bodies through government decree. When contrasted to the "natural citizen," the "racial citizen's" social existence is dictated by the government's recognition of them as descendents from a people distinct in character from "the people of the nation." Thus, the racialized peoples lack the historical and cultural connections that make the country a unified whole, and remain excluded from the spiritual and political sustenance of the nation. Their continuing presence and their incorporation into the nation are the product of negotiations between the white settler population that came to occupy the country and the government. In the case of America, it seems then appropriate to conclude as does Ahati N. N Toure (2006) that the much celebrated "13 th, 14th, and 15th constitutional amendments represented the continuity of imperial conquest" (p. 447), not its dissolution. The incorporation of Blacks into the American republic without any say or power to change the already established political practices of the country effectively reduces this population to a ruled people perpetually confronting what is eulogized as freedom but demonstrated as domination (Williams-Myers, 1995).
Racism is the overarching organizing ethos of American society; it exists not as an outlier to the social, political and economic life of the nation, but is in fact its sustenance. According to Sidney M. Willhelm, "America has been a racist society from its very beginning-adopting, modifying, and dispensing with tactics extending from complete acceptance of ethnic aliens in the form of acculturation and amalgamation to liquidation (1998:136). Because America was built to preserve the superiority of the white race, it seems naïve to assume that the continuing racial hierarchy in America that propagates racial subordination is coincidental. Willhelm's analysis is especially relevant here, because it insists that a change in the form of racism-the means used to dominate racial peoples-in no way lessens the presence of racism. Instead of being an accumulation of individual beliefs, misperceptions, or stated quite frankly white ignorance, racism is the concomitant ideal of America's liberal creed-where the guarantees of life, liberty, and the pursuit of property (happiness) are secured through the subjugation of those taken to be racial inferiors. Responding to the myth of white ignorance, Robert Allen (1970) continued in Black Awakening in Capitalist America: An Analytic History that
racism was not due simply to ignorance or deliberate maliciousness on the part of whites. These played a part, but more fundamental were the deeply ingrained habits which sprang from (frequently unconscious) economic motives. To white America, black people were a resource to be exploited ruthlessly-and racism facilitated this exploitation by degrading blacks in the eyes of whites thereby placing the former outside the pale of normal moral or humanistic compunction (p. 275).
The history of racism in which Blacks become nothing more than "things" in the world able to be used as whites please is not a matter subject to moral transformation. The conditions of oppression, as Frantz Fanon impresses upon us in his essay "Racism and Culture" (1967), seem natural and normal with our economic and social processes. Racism is no mere psychological quark under Fanon's colonial analysis, but the bringing about of a certain form of social existence that is necessary to, but birthed from, the exploitative economic relations of the colonial situation. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's White Supremacy and Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era (2001) accounts for this in the American context as a structural condition, where the "foundation of racism is not the ideas that individuals may have about others, but the social edifice erected over racial inequality" (p. 24). Under this view, the elimination of racism is not the reformulation of how individuals think, since individuals "participate in race relations as either beneficiaries (members of the dominant race) or subordinates (members of the dominated race or races)" (p. 11), but the "elimination of racial inequality and the practices that maintain it" (p. 22).
Despite the marginal changes in America's racial landscape, Black scholars have maintained for decades that America's racism has not changed. Robert L. Carter (1968) argued that despite Brown vs. Board
the pre-existing pattern of white superiority and black subordination remains unchanged; indeed, it is now revealed as a national rather than a regional phenomenon. Thus, Brown has promised more than it could give, and therefore has contributed to black alienation and bitterness, to a loss of confidence in white institutions, and to the growing racial polarization of our society...Few in the country, black or white, understood in 1954 that racial segregation was merely a symptom, not the disease; that the real sickness is that our society in all of its manifestations is geared to the maintenance of white superiority (p. 243).
Derrick Bell extends upon the analysis of Carter insisting that desegregation and the Civil Rights reforms that followed were nothing more than political decisions by whites in power to maintain America's soft power abroad, calm the forces of revolt that could potentially harm white property, and win the war against communism (Bell, 1978, 1992, 1993, 2004; Dudziak, 1988). In short, there are substantial reasons to believe that racism adapts rather than arrests, and evolves rather than subsides over time. Given this system of racism, one is hard pressed to understand how atonement persuades whites to change. In fact, implicit bias studies conducted over the last several years suggest that racism is so deeply ingrained into the white psyche that it resides in its unconscious (Goff, 2008; Picca & Feagin, 2007; Hanson & Hanson, 2006; Kang, 2005). Given this research it seems impractical to contend that the moral suasion of a governmental decree can actually undo racist impulses unknown to the individual themselves. As indicated by the dearth of this analysis, ending racism would require an actual reconfiguring of American society. Racism articulated as a deliberate and historical project launched in the name of empire demonstrates that racism has no moral content. It is not an issue of character that can be absolved through an individual's acceptance of past wrongdoing. The injuries sustained by racism are persistent, not past, thus they endure alongside the existence of whites, who owe their superior racial status to the legacies of Black inhumanity solidified by slavery, Jim Crow and segregation. As Christian Sundquist (2003) reminds us in his article entitled "Critical Praxis, Spiritual Healing and Community Activism: Preserving a Subversive Dialogue on Reparations," the benefit of speaking about reparations is not the assertion of rhetorical ideals, but resistance pursued through the "identification of white privilege coupled with an economic and political divestiture of the gains afforded by such privilege" (p. 696). However, Brooks' argument for moral transformation and his hope for racial reconciliation deserve closer attention.
III. CONFRONTING THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF RACIAL RECONCILIATION UNDER COLONIAL MORALISM
The atonement model of reparations takes itself to be a proposal of moral compulsion with such force that reparations for slavery become a necessary but natural continuation of the American civil rights movement's lingering spirit. Articulated as the completion of the civil right movement, atonement is thought by its advocates to be the final pieces of the puzzle, the resolving jigsaw in American race relations. Brooks contends that having the government apologize for slavery would allow Blacks to trust in the government for the first time, since being written into the citizenry of America. An apology would "give our government moral credibility and direction through the fog that often engulfs contemporary racial matters" (p. xi). The apology called for by Brooks far exceeds previous U.S government articulations of sorrow for slavery. This apology, which aims towards atoning, needs to be "an acknowledgment of guilt," (p. 144) that "confesses the deed, admits the deed was an injustice, repents, and asks personal forgiveness" (p. 144). Only by making this type of apology can personal responsibility be claimed and the road to atonement begun. The atonement apology must exceed its rhetorical force and convey the desire for the perpetrator(s) to be absolved of their past wrongdoing. This atonement apology serves both the perpetrator and the victim. For the victim, there is the articulation of the wrongness of the atrocity committed and for the perpetrator it is a freely bestowed admission of moral fault, bestowed without coercion that "comes from the heart and cleanses the perpetrator's character after the commission of an atrocity" (p. 146).
Solidified by reparations, which are considered to be both a slavery museum and atonement trust fund to be used for Black business ventures and a source of funds for higher education, the apology strives towards redemption for the evils of the past that appeals to the victims' desire to reconcile. Forgiveness, the willingness to respond affirmatively to the perpetrator's tender of atonement, (p. 163) "grows out of the reestablishment (or establishment) of a healthy relationship between the victim and perpetrator," but in America's racialized context one has to seriously think about the viability of said relationship. Brooks is careful to point out that forgiveness is not a moral or religious imperative for the victim, whereby the victim of the atrocity could be deemed immoral or culpable for wrongdoing for not accepting the perpetrators request for forgiveness, but a civic subpoena that "creates an unconditional civic obligation on the part of the victim to participate in the process of reconciliation" (p. 168). Brooks takes civic forgiveness to be necessary to Black progress in American society, and the foundation of what he calls the "Third Reconstruction," which finishes the "palace of justice that the civil rights movement began" (p. 169).
When the apology is reinforced with reparations, the healing effect is substantially enhanced...In healing old wounds, reparations can also help our society understand and resolve its damaged political culture-a culture in which whites and blacks deeply disagree on most policy issues involving race. Atonement provides an opportunity for whites and blacks to work together in a sustained effort to help our government redeem its humanity in the long aftermath of the atrocities that slavery and Jim Crow were. Far from being a threat to national unity, atonement can be a vehicle for civic republicanism. Healing old wounds and providing genuine racial opportunities are essential ingredients for social integration. They give blacks reasons to believe the system is fair and worth investing in heart and soul (p. 170).
Under Brooks' atonement model, the demand for Blacks to attempt reconciliation is founded upon a duty of citizenship. This "civic duty" seems to be especially burdening for Blacks. In a post-atonement America, racism still exists-just as it did in a pre-atonement America. The only difference is how Blacks feel about being racially assaulted. Since Blacks-or those Blacks who are descendents of slaves-have a trust fund to secure education and business opportunities despite their impoverishment, Brooks thinks that fewer Blacks will turn to drugs or crime to deal with their despair. "In a postatonement America, slave descendents should feel secure enough in their investment as citizens to overlook everyday sources of racial friction...[and have] more of a willingness to submit to industrial discipline fully-playing by the rules of the workplace" (Brooks, 2004:204). In a postatonement world, it seems that Blacks are told, just as in the preatonement world, that their being the victims of racism should not arrest their success one bit. What Brooks ignores in his model is of the utmost concern, especially since it is an idea, as American as apple pie, which maintains to this very day that Blacks should be treated differently based on their skin color. While atonement theory seems to suggest that we can soften the blow of a history saturated by racism, there still remains the blow-the unyielding impact of racism in a postatonement world. To be a Black citizen, unable to resist outside of civil rights legislation, duty bound to strive to succeed despite discrimination because the government secures finances for your endeavors, seems to suggest that rather than racial reconciliation being at the heart of the matter, the real issue is the extent to which Blacks continue to disassociate or separate themselves from American society as a means of "silent resistance." When confronted with the aforementioned challenge, Brooks' reply is disappointing to say the least.
After atonement, it will be difficult to justify the racial chip so many slave descendants wear on their shoulder, in some instances as a badge of honor. In a postatonement America, slave descendents will simply have no right to be angry about centuries of racial exploitation ... a postatonement U.S. government can legitimately respond: 'Get over it: for you now have the means and, hence, good reason to relinquish racial anger and resentment and, in turn, release yourself from an imprisoning life' (p. 202-203).
The narrowness of Brooks' understanding of racism becomes even more apparent here. To argue that Blacks have a responsibility to "get over" slavery and "let go" of their racial anger towards a country that was not only built on racism but continues to utilize the idea of race as a justification for its foreign endeavors and imperial interventions in Africa and the Middle East seems morally repugnant, since it requires the racially oppressed in America to relinquish their anger towards a government that has "paid them off." There is no bright line that determines the extent to which racial exploitation can be judged. If the racist justifications for exploiting immigrant labor, or profiling Africans or Muslims as terrorists simply extend the historically occurring ambient of racist domination, then it requires of Black Americans to maintain their "racial chip," since stating otherwise would demand that the victim, in an effort to secure their "civic duty," forfeit their moral duty to identify the same evil in the world that they were up to this point its longest victims. Racism still exists in a postatonement world, and the attitudes of those fellow (white) citizens come from the very same racist attitudes that defined, or better yet confined, Blackness. While there can be external reasons like financial security provided by the atonement trust fund that may diminish the impact of white racist attitudes in a postatonement world, there nonetheless remains the ideological obstacle to Black acceptance in America. Rather than fixing the racism of whites, Brooks demands that Blacks learn to better "overlook," or "ignore" the pronouncements of whites, as if the goal of reconciliation is not arrested by those whites who believe Blacks to be inferior, but only by those Blacks who hold whites accountable for those beliefs through socially deviant protests-be it Hip-Hop or the varying degrees of nationalist or un-American sentiments found in other aspects of Black culture.
In 1961, W.E.B. DuBois argued in an editorial entitled "American Negroes and Africa's Rise to Freedom," that the ideal of equality held in citizenship assuaged Black Americans to except the imperial conquest of Africa and other nations in the name of patriotism. DuBois continues, "Negroes slowly turned to a new ideal: to strive for equality as American citizens...however, from their environment they learned to think less and less of their fatherland and its folk. They learned little of its history...They began to despise the colored races along with white Americans and to acquiesce in color prejudice" (p. 334). For raced peoples, citizenship has this re-socializing function; it aims to bring into align those views, thoughts and ideals that run incongruent with the at large narrative of (white) American benevolence and demands as a condition of incorporation into white society that those ideals and myths necessary to the particular civilization created in America, for America to be America, must remain unchallenged. The civic dynamism that atonement depends upon to establish and incorporate Blacks into the community is an ideal in which the possibility of a reconciled racial community is predicated upon the extent to which the tyrannies of imperial conquest and histories of genocide are forgotten or defended as imperatives of civilization. This justificatory allure can never yield a real and actualized vision of legitimate governance and moral community, since it takes as its beginning the erasure of those voices inextricably tied to the raced bodies that presented an obstacle to the American settler and his contemporary progeny-the American citizen.
Racism is a global element of contemporary imperialist political economy, and it is double-edged. On one side it constitutes the historical foundation upon which the imbalance of power between the nations of the world was raised...On the other side, it fills an essential ideological function for imperial domination. It is the cement for the effort that seeks to make the Whites-on-top/Blacks-at-the-bottom hierarchy a permanent and "natural" feature of planet Earth. Across America, and from one end of Europe to the other, stereotypes of people of color, Blacks foremost, have become the building blocks of pathological white ego-structures. Looking down on and pitying "backward," "inferior" "color folks" in the "developing nations," is a social drug for white egos sick with a disease engendered by selfishness and mass white complicity in hogging and squandering the planet's unrenewable resources. Here the term racism describes the peculiar manner in which the non-white multitudes of Africa, Latin America, and Asia are subjected to systematic material exploitation by the white North (Munford, 1996:53-54).
Why then does such an analysis become necessitous rather than supererogatory to this discussion? If the reader takes seriously the understanding that Brooks offers as the basis of an atonement theory of reparations, then we are confronted by the immediate moral compulsions charged to us by this manner of argument. To demand civic responsibility at the expense of moral duty seems to run counter to the actual ideals espoused by Dr. Martin Luther King and against the reading of the civil rights movement presented to us by Brooks. Contrary to popular belief, Martin Luther King Jr. did not see the racism as an argument explained purely in terms of morality and personal belief. Like many of the Black thinkers of the sixties, Martin Luther King recognized that racism's reach was global in scope and that whiteness, could only be known as a whole; the worldwide identity held by all whites that justified war, rape and murder as a function of its "colonial imperialism" (DuBois 1996:671). King took the imperialist aspect of racism, which was initially conceptualized as the internationalist extension of DuBois's analysis of the colorline, to be fully within the purview of Black American's civil rights activism. "Racism," says King, "is no mere American phenomenon. Its vicious grasps knows no geographical boundaries. In fact, racism and its perennial ally-economic exploitation-provide the key to understanding most of the international complications of this generation (King, 1967:173).
As such, the civil rights movement was not a movement about American equality, it was a movement inspired by and part of the revolutions started by Africans, Latin Americans and Asians to overthrow the economic systems that cemented white supremacy the world over. The challenge taken up by King was not singularly dedicated to attaining social integration. King, recognizing the economic and militaristic reach of white supremacy, aimed to eliminate poverty, not through the mobilization of a people through classes, but through the elimination of war and the systems that sustain economic exploitation. King is crystal clear that the American civil rights movement cannot be understood purely in terms of Black America's needs, and must in fact be seen against the backdrop of the world.
In one sense the civil rights movement in the United States is a special American phenomenon which must be understood in the light of American history and dealt with in terms of the American situation. But on another and more important level, what is happening in the United States today is a significant part of a world development...All over the world like a fever, freedom is spreading in the widest liberation movement in history. The great masses of people are determined to end the exploitation of their races and lands. (King, 1967:169).
While atonement theory provides a possible avenue for the interpreting of race relations, it fails to account for the actual dynamics at work. To suggest as Brooks does that a governmental decree can inculcate a racist population with the notions of racial tolerance seems naïve. The complexities of the solution posited as atonement must reside beyond the realm of hope, since any un-actualized attempt towards racial reconciliation would require Blacks to legitimate an immoral government. In other words, the duty of citizenship that commands Blacks to trust in a government, who claims that it is in fact ashamed of its racist practices-slavery, Jim Crow and segregation-but continues to espouse the same racism in policies not specific to Black Americans like immigration, military intervention or war, demands of Blacks a surrendering to the tyrannies that birthed their opposition towards the government in the first place. Thus atonement becomes a type of apathy; an apathy that urges the raced citizen to consider their recent political victory and its rewards over and against the continuing transgressions of the government and its white populace against humanity. Stated differently, it demands from Blacks their allegiance to the myths of American benevolence as the price for their partial inclusion into the mainstream of American society, where the desired moral community becomes moral by political consensus rather than the demonstration of moral acts. Racial reconciliation cannot be had by a community that continues to act upon racism. Racism understood in its proper context, and within the full complexities that King himself saw in America requires a more substantial change-a change that supersedes the rhetoric and compassions of whites. The hearts and minds of whites have shown themselves to be dedicated to the preservation of that which supports their racial privilege. Racism must be considered as a systemic matter when dealing with the quality determining the "moral community," otherwise the community is judged by an act of contrition rather than its actual moral constitution.
Under atonement the moral community is established only in regard to the "moral relationship" of the victim and wrongdoer, it takes no issue with the immoral status of the community the victim seeks to enter. What atonement theorists ask of Blacks is the acceptance of the immoral conditions, past and present, that were taken to be necessary to the creation of the "moral community." Whereby the racial oppression of others, the indulging in an economic system that seeks to exploit foreign labor, or the support of a history and personal property system that seeks to negate the genocide of Native peoples becomes natural and acceptable-needed to establish the particular racially reconciled community between Blacks and whites. This pseudo-morality that displays itself as colonial moralism, a category of morality that takes past immorality as it basis, requires the questions concerning what is good or bad, just or unjust, and right or wrong to be of limited consideration. As a means to sustain the much needed day to day ethical discourses of our present day society, moralism under colonial/neo-colonial societies sector off the histories, practices, and agents able to be subjected to moral scrutiny. Whereas the past is the past, and may directly determine the present, the loyalty to the past cannot be held responsible for the immediate wrongdoings, which are taken as separate, that confront us currently.
So we may hail the atoning of a perpetrator in the case of theft, where a thief has stolen a precious family heirloom from another, and welcome that "thief" back into our great "moral" society, not as criminal but as person upon apology, reparation, and their appeal to the victim for forgiveness, but what we will not question is the legitimacy of the "moral community" to make this judgment, when it too was created on the basis of theft and the genocide of indigenous peoples. We pretend there is an oasis away, a safe haven for genuine moral contemplation amidst immorality in our world, a place where ethical deliberations can take place unsoiled by the conditions that brought about their need in the first place. In America, we pretend almost by delusion, that we have a moral responsibility to an-other and their ownership of property, even when that property and the moral obligation we say belongs to it, was created as a result of murder or slavery. How can we seek redemption for this travesty, if we claim to protect morality when we atone to the individual and institutions who possess it illegitimately? Are we truly sorry for slavery, when as a matter of necessity, we must enjoy, benefit from, and continue to profit from their exploitation. America simply would not be the prosperous nation is now is without enslaved Africans, so how can it repent for an act that it takes to be necessary to its very existence-can its government truly be sorry for slavery if the enslavement of Africans was the only way it could ensure this nation would have become America? This is the quandary of colonial morality; it forces the thinker to say, contrary to our atoning pronouncements, though unfortunate, the atrocity was necessary to our very being.
IV. TOWARDS AN ANTI-ETHICAL DELIBERATION: A CONCLUDING THOUGHT
In the debates over reparations, social political philosophers advocating reparations for slavery, usually philosophers of race, have tended towards more traditional formulations of equality in liberal theory which take as a given that there is morality (moral good) to be had in our striving toward social equality. Following liberal democratic theory, a democratic society should take those actions which seek to maximize the individual's self-development. This society, committed to freedom as a basis of its democratic ethos, seeks to secure the individual freedoms of its citizens and remove the obstacles that prevent the exercise of these freedoms within its borders. Derrick Darby's "Reparations and Racial Inequality" (2010) perhaps best conveys how liberal thought has impacted reparations theory in saying,
to the extent that the pursuit of freedom in a liberal society demands removing, or seeking to remove, obstacles to self-development, which leads to greater freedom, its normative obligation to diminish persistent racial inequalities can be based on its abiding commitment to individual freedom as self-development. A truly liberal society would be committed to eradicating racial inequalities-whatever their causes-in the interest of achieving a greater realization of individual freedom (p. 64).
This view, while politically acceptable-in the sense that it supports reparations for slavery, is unfortunately, empirically false when one seriously considers the structural cementation of racism in the United States. The danger of the liberal view does not stem from its existence, but rather from the strength of its resolve. Since the liberal interpretation functions purely as a hypothetical; an ideal as of yet, has never seen the light of day, there is a tendency to act proleptically, as if the normative valuations of liberal democratic societies are demonstrated in what we take to be our liberal democratic society. While it may be true that liberal societies should work to eliminate racial inequality because it stifles individual development, America, the liberal society analyzed in Darby's work, has never functioned in that way in regard to race. To assume so, demands of us an earnest dishonesty intent on making "moral and just," that which is "immoral and unjust." In other words, in order to create (by illusion) ethical deliberation, we must attribute moral standing or a just disposition to those entities, be they individuals or institutions, that have never demonstrated these cherished attributes through their actions. This case is even more concerning when analyzing the use and compulsory dictum of atonement theory-the moral community.
The relationship between atonement and reconciliation has gained a peculiar currency in contemporary debates about ethics and moral political philosophy. Linda Radzik's Making Amends: Atonement in Morality, Law and Politics (2009) is of especial import to reparations theory, especially those theories, like Brooks', which aim to make racial reconciliation or the establishment of a renewed moral American community the goal of slave redress. According to Radzik, "the kind of reconciliation that is the goal of atonement involves the restoration of a paradigmatically moral relationship...wherein the parties regard one another and themselves as equally valuable moral persons" (p. 81). This moral relationship is assumed to be established anthropologically, not politically. By this I mean to say, that Radzik argues that moral communities consist of equal persons with equal moral capacities and moral worth, where equality is not cultivated in the society through policy or tolerance, but present in the persons that make up the community. The moral community is the result of Radzik's attempt to synthesize two ideas: the first is Kant's understanding of the moral person as a moral agent able of discern right and wrong and make choices from that discernment and the second, what Radzik calls the pedestrian notion, which takes the moral person to be "someone who is not only capable of judging but likely to judge right or wrong correctly and be properly motivated by these judgments" (p. 82). Thus, the moral community is an adjudicating agent of moral conduct, or as Radzik says as a social entity in which "morality properly regulates the relations among the members" (p. 82). Because we are all (moral) persons, and hence moral agents in the Kantian sense, Radzik maintains we are all members of this moral community.
As this view of moral community is completely in line with Roy L. Brooks' view of racial reconciliation, I feel it necessary to respond to the Kantianism at work in these projects. First, it is not entirely clear that the reading of Kant suggested by Radzik remains viable if one looks at Kant's reflections on race and pragmatic anthropology. Since the publication of Emmanuel Eze's groundbreaking book, Race and the Enlightenment (1997) and his essay "The Color of Races: The Idea of Race in Kant's Anthropology (1997), Black philosophers have developed a particular area of research interested in assessing the effects of race and Kant's racism on his moral philosophy. In "Race: A Transcendental?," Emmanuel Eze (2001) argued
The moral quality Talent is what Kant believed guarantees for the white race a superior position, metaphysically and ethically, in the racial order. White skin, it seems, is only the concrete, physical evidence of this racial superiority; skin color reveals race as species class and, morally, as 'difference in character.' Skin color is therefore not only a code for, but proof of rational superiority or inferiority (p. 102).
Rational inferiority is of vital importance in a moral community constituted by rational agents, such intellectual deprivation would seem to entail some moral debasement of the racialized members of the community. Following Eze's analysis, Laurence Thomas' essay entitled "Moral Equality and Natural Inferiority"(2005) concluded "where we have demonstrable and unshakable intellectual inferiority on the part of a people, as Kant supposed was the case with blacks, then we have seen that showing such individuals the proper moral respect with stand as a most formidable task" (p. 402). Civilization missed the Negro in Kant's view. Kant, citing Hume as evidence of this alleged fact, believed the Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling...although many of them have been set free, still not a single one was ever found who presented anything great in art or science or any other praise worthy quality" (Kant, 1960:110-11). Some scholars have (Hill & Boxill, 2001) and will inevitably continue to argue that such statements have little to no effect on Kant's moral theory, but Kant's view of Blacks does not come from ignorance, he genuinely believes it is the result of philosophical observation. It is through physiognomy-"the art of judging a human being's way of sensing or way of thinking according to his visible form; [the art of judging] the interior by the exterior" (Kant, 2006:195)-that allowed Kant to say without hesitation that "this fellow was quite black from head to foot, a clear proof that what he said was stupid" (Kant, 1960:113). With this racist calculus at work in Kant's Anthropology, two problems emerge from a Kantian conceptualization of moral community: (1) the racial superiority of whiteness present both in Kant's moral philosophy and the racial ideology of American society and (2) the actual possibility of treating people taken to be inferior because of their Blackness as moral equals. These two problems cannot simply be wished away in atonement theories looking to justify their formulations of reconciliation with Kantian moral thought. How racialized members are treated and seen in a "racially reconciled" moral community is of the utmost importance for these theories to work.
Secondly and perhaps more importantly, there is nothing in Kant's understanding of a moral community that bars that community from being a racist imperial society. While we can surmise from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, his Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and The Metaphysics of Morals a series of pure moral codes that may arrest racism, these precepts are useless when speaking of human beings in a civil society. Kant is quick to remind us that the "nature within the human being strives to lead him from culture to morality, and not (as reason prescribes) beginning with morality and its law, to lead him to a culture designed to be appropriate to morality" (Kant, 2006:233), thus the rational individual we get from Kant's critical philosophy is of very little use in our empirical thinking about human societies. In sharp contrast to how we think about Kant's cosmopolitanism, Kant, like Hegel, actually insists upon the necessity of war and conquest as the driving force of civilization. He says quite explicitly that
each people seeks to strengthen itself through the subjugation of neighboring peoples, either from the desire to expand or the fear of being swallowed up by the other unless one beats him to it. Therefore civil or foreign war in our species, as great an evil as it may be, is yet at the same time the incentive to pass from the crude state of nature to the civil state. War is like the mechanical device of Providence... (Kant 2006:235).
In sharp contrast to the rational moral individual, the citizen has a "civic duty" to the preservation of their state constitution first and foremost. Citing the old Brocardian dictum: "Salus civitatis suprema lex esto (The well being of the state [not of the citizens] is the highest law)" (p. 236), Kant argues that the duty of the citizen, as a rational member of a society, is to preserve that society. From this analysis emerges an irreconcilable tension between the moral individual and the citizen in Kant's moral philosophy. While this may not be of concern in a just society, it seems to suggest as previously articulated that the obligation of white citizens remains inextricably tied to the racist ideology that made the nation the imperial power it is today. Here again, Kant's insistence on imperial conquest and the civic duty of citizens to their state makes the possibility of atonement for racism and the racist imperialist conquests of the United States beyond the capability of the government and its white citizens; thereby making our ethical hypotheses concerning the viability of atonement in America little more than fictive accounts of ethical and moral actions by traditionally immoral and imperial agents.
Asserted as axiom and sustained as a transformation in the "hearts and minds" of whites ad populum, the civil rights movement and its accompanying policy of integration continues to be understood as a fundamental shift in American race relations from an era of Jim Crowism and terrorism against Blacks during segregation to the more present day where racism is seen to be remnants of the past sustained by racial misunderstanding and collective ignorance. Following this logic, atonement theorists base the possibility of racial reconciliation on an unfounded optimism rooted in the continuation of civil rights era reforms. For these scholars, racism is a question encountered at the extremities of unethical behavior. As presently understood, racism is a choice-an act of free will-to believe that skin color demarcates a real difference about that person and to treat said person or persons as inferior based on that difference. The racist act, then, becomes an attempt to realize in the world one's privations, not as an imaginative act, but an act cultivated by the realization that the world can in fact accept and support one's privations as reality. Thus the racist, as Fanon (1967) maintains is normal, not constrained by ethical calculations of morality, but empowered by them to not only act, but to act for the sake of "their" others. Traditionally we have taken ethics to be, as Henry Sedgwick claims, "any rational procedure by which we determine what individual human beings 'ought'-or what is right for them-or to seek to realize by voluntary action" (1981:1). This rational procedure is however at odds with the empirical reality the ethical deliberation must concern itself with. To argue, as is often done, that the government, its citizens, or white people should act justly, assumes that the possibility of how they could act defines their moral disposition. If a white person could possibly not be racist, it does not mean that the possibility of not being racist, can be taken to mean that they are not racist. In ethical deliberations dealing with the problem of racism, it is common practice to attribute to historically racist institutions, and individuals universal moral qualities that have yet to be demonstrated. This abstraction from reality is what frames our ethical norms and allows us to maintain, despite history or evidence, that racist entities will act justly given the choice. Under such complexities, the only ethical deliberation concerning racism must be anti-ethical, or a judgment refusing write morality onto immoral entities. In the case of reparations, this would entail a prima facie rejection of atonement, because these theories assume the morality of historically immoral racist actors, be they governmental or individual. When morality is defined not by the empirical acts that demonstrate immorality, but the racial character of those in question, our ethics become nothing more than the apologetics of our tyrannical epoch.
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