The Reparation Generation: Truth Telling in Pursuit of Racial Justice in the U.S.
The Reparation Generation: Truth Telling in Pursuit of Racial Justice in the U.S.

Summary/Abstract: The Black reparations movement in the U.S. is a broad, diverse, ‎multi-pronged approach to securing redress for historical injuries, including ‎slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and their enduring legacies in American society ‎today. While reparations activism and advocacy tends to be associated with ‎demands of restitution and compensation, non-material forms of redress have ‎become an important tool of building racial reconciliation and healing. My ‎paper discusses recent truth telling initiatives which are rooted in the ‎restorative justice process and draw on the experience of the 1990s South ‎African Truth and Reconciliation Commission which investigated the ‎apartheid-era human rights violations. This overview of emblematic truth ‎telling projects at the federal, civic, and grassroots levels shows a growing and ‎widespread willingness among European Americans to engage in honest yet ‎painful discussions about the nation’s collective past and persistent structures ‎of white privilege. Whether an individual or a community-based process, truth ‎telling entails intellectual and emotional work on one’s own racial bias and ‎prejudice, one’s entanglement in webs of power and privilege, and a ‎commitment to social transformation. These multiple and dispersed civic ‎initiatives have, over the last decade, laid the foundation for a national truth ‎telling process, which may be the most powerful reparative justice measure that ‎Americans as a nation can accept today.‎

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