The Week Magazine
Sept 2 2014
Why reparations could prevent the next Ferguson
Countries can only move forward once they have come to terms with their past
By Belinda Cooper
Watching the events unfold in Ferguson, Missouri, I couldn’t help
thinking about the Holocaust and post-war Germany.
As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I’ve spent years watching
Germany wrestle with its dark past. It’s just one of many places that
have made efforts to understand and compensate for a difficult
history: For nearly three decades, countries as varied as South
Africa, Rwanda, and the nations of Latin America and post-Communist
Eastern Europe have been engaged in this process, often called
“transitional justice.” That’s a broad term for the ways in which
societies deal with the legacies of past injustice. Many believe that
countries can only move forward once they have come to terms with
their past in this way.
We’re accustomed to looking abroad for examples of such processes. But
maybe — especially in light of racial tensions once again revealed in
Ferguson — it’s time for us to begin thinking about what “transitional
justice” could mean for the U.S.
Like many nations, Americans are reluctant to see ourselves in the
same light as human rights abusers elsewhere. And yet our history
includes a number of glaring atrocities, including the genocide of
Native Americans and slavery and its aftermath. But the United States
lags behind other societies in its efforts to confront and make amends
for that legacy.
What, exactly would that entail? Justice means more than putting
perpetrators on trial. The transitional justice process also
encompasses methods focused on the victims and the wider society, such
as truthseeking, memorialization, education, institutional change, and
material compensation — that is, actions that seek not only to punish,
but to encourage a shared historical understanding, begin to repair
the damage done, and ensure that it can’t happen again.
A first step in the process seems simple: official acknowledgment. Yet
societies are often hesitant to admit historical wrongdoing. Armenians
have been trying for decades to get Turkish authorities to acknowledge
that they were the victims of an organized crime. To understand what
this means, I’ve tried to imagine what I would feel had Germany not
accepted responsibility for the Holocaust. Official silence negates
the experience of the victims, but it’s also damaging to perpetrator
societies; it feeds denial and false narratives of history that allow
tensions and resentments to persist.
Apology often accompanies acknowledgment. Both Australia and Canada
have recently apologized to their aboriginal populations for decades
of removing children from their families. German Chancellor Willy
Brandt’s famous gesture in Warsaw in 1970, when he fell to his knees
before a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, enraged many Germans
who preferred not to face questions of guilt and responsibility. But
this spontaneous gesture of atonement was enormously important to
Holocaust survivors. In recent years, the Polish government has
reversed decades of denial under its Communist government by
acknowledging the participation of some Poles in anti- Semitic
atrocities during World War II. Even the U.S. has managed an apology —
in 1988, after a long campaign by Japanese-Americans, President Reagan
apologized for the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War
II.
Yet the U.S. has never officially apologized for slavery or Jim Crow
(and a 2009 “apology” to Native Americans, slipped into a Defense
Appropriations Act, made little impact). Nor are there memorials to
slavery or to the Native American genocide on a scale similar to the
Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. That memorial,
imperfect as it is, represents a conscious public acknowledgment by a
perpetrator society of its own wrongdoing — both a rebuke to deniers
and a purposeful statement that memory should not only be the job of
victims.
One reason societies often resist officially acknowledging wrongdoing
is the fear of being held financially accountable. Even years after
the fact, victims or their descendants may ask for the return of
confiscated property, bank accounts, or uncollected insurance claims,
as they have in the case of the Holocaust, Eastern European communism,
and the Armenian genocide. Reagan’s apology for our treatment of
Japanese-Americans was accompanied by monetary compensation.
Financial reparations are in fact the most direct way to compensate
victims for past suffering.
Germany was able to pay millions to survivors of the Holocaust who
suffered quantifiable harm, and continues to do so (my father received
a small monthly check that made an enormous difference, especially to
a penniless new immigrant in the 1950s who had lost his entire family
in the Holocaust; my mother, not a survivor, still receives a widow’s
pension). Societies with fewer resources have offered other types of
reparation: scholarships to victims’ children, affirmative action
programs, and preferential housing, health care, and other
entitlements.
In the United States, however, we are more likely to insist that
existing institutions already provide a sufficient foundation for
improving conditions, as though we could erase the effects of past
atrocity without undertaking any difficult changes. Except in the
brief period following the Civil War, direct financial compensation
for slavery and Jim Crow has never had a serious place on the national
agenda. The most significant effort to compensate for the
institutionalized legal, economic, and social discrimination against
black Americans that persisted into recent decades — a modern legacy
of slavery and Jim Crow vividly described in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ recent
Atlantic piece “The Case for Reparations” — was affirmative action,
but it has largely been reversed by the Supreme Court. Very little has
been done to directly address ongoing racial injustices such as the
disproportionate incarceration of black Americans, which author
Michelle Alexander has referred to as “The New Jim Crow.”
Transitional justice demands recognition that fulfilling
responsibilities to the past requires more than merely lip service
from a perpetrator society. Crimes against minority groups in any
society bring benefits to the perpetrator group, and compensating for
them can necessitate material sacrifice. But remorse often ends where
personal sacrifice begins. Marco Williams’ 2006 documentary, Banished,
tells the story of several black towns in the American South that were
ethnically cleansed in the early 20th century. A black family from one
of these towns sought to have a father’s remains reburied near their
new home and was met with sympathy from the white residents of the
town — until they asked the town to pay the costs. As in Germany,
where polls over the years have shown significant minorities that deny
an ongoing financial responsibility towards the victims of the
Holocaust, many fail to see why they should be held individually
accountable for the acts of their parents or grandparents. The
benefits accrued through the injustices of the past are not always
apparent.
One of the most important aspects of successful transitional justice,
therefore, lies in illuminating not only the victims’ suffering, but
the ways in which an entire society continues to bear the burdens of
history. This helps elevate an important point: correcting injustice
may require affirmative steps. The U.S. government and society need to
recognize — and educate citizens on — the direct connections between
continuing racial disparities in this country and the wrongs that gave
rise to them, and to talk far more about the responsibilities we all
share for repairing the damage. Perhaps Ferguson — which has revealed
what can happen when we suppress these conversations — will finally
motivate us to think about how to address the harms, whether through
material reparations or otherwise. If we’re willing to start talking,
we’ll find no shortage of role models for transitional justice
throughout the world to help us take the next steps.
From: Baghdasarian
http://theweek.com/article/index/267269/why-reparations-could-prevent-the-next-ferguson