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American Literature 74.3 (2002) 455-483



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The Verdict from the Porch:
Zora Neale Hurston and Reparative Justice

Philip Joseph

Well over a century after the emancipation of American slaves and the collapse of Reconstruction, the question of slavery reparations has again become the focus of a national discussion. Beginning with the passage of the Civil Liberties Act (1988), which granted reparations to Japanese Americans interned during World War II, a series of events around the world, all bearing on the necessity of publicly and appropriately responding to mass atrocity, has revived the African American claim and given it a new national urgency. 1 United States representative John Conyers Jr. has brought the issue directly into the political arena, introducing a bill to establish a commission on reparations. While the Conyers bill has never gotten a hearing, the success of class-action lawsuits in Germany and Korea, and the global proliferation of truth commissions and restitution agreements, has opened up precedents and possibilities for pursuing the African American claim. In law schools, college campuses, city councils, and editorial pages, Americans are debating the question that Harper's magazine poses in the Forum section of its November 2000 issue: "Does America owe a debt to the descendants of its slaves?"2

The explicit aim of a reparations lawsuit would obviously be material compensation—either money or some equivalent resource, such as scholarships. But as the Harper's Forum discussion makes clear, the significance of the lawsuit is well in excess of the actual award. "What's more important," asks lawyer Alexander Pires Jr., "to tell the real story of American slavery or to win specific damages from 1940 onward"? Dennis Sweet III points out that "a small part of [the lawsuit] [End Page 455] is going to be the money and the remedies. But the message that will be sent is so important."3 Telling the story of slavery and its aftermath is not simply a vehicle for acquiring an equal share of material resources. Rather, the goal, at least in part, is the process: telling the true story or setting the record straight has itself acquired a type of reparative currency. Charles Taylor helps to clarify why the court's authorization of a new narrative looms so large for the lawyers in this discussion. "Our identity," Taylor writes, "is partly shaped by recognition or its absence, often by the misrecognition of others, and so a person or group of people can suffer real damage, real distortion, if the people or society around them mirror back to them a confining or demeaning or contemptible picture of themselves."4 Taylor focuses here on the psychic damage caused by misrecognition or outright invisibility. For many who advocate reparations, a lawsuit promises to function as a corrective measure for exactly this kind of damage. By making official an intergenerational narrative of white-on-black persecution, a lawsuit would help to validate a range of cultural responses to the experience of being black in a white-dominated world. More importantly, it would help to invalidate the assumption of racial inferiority or deviance that has so often been used to explain differences in material circumstances and cultural orientation. In the minds of those who pursue such a lawsuit, justice would lead not only to economic but to psychological repair, to a collective identity bolstered by confirmation of systematic victimization.

In the aftermath of mass persecution, the struggles for a just distribution of resources and for adequate forms of recognition are almost always entangled. In trying to put the past in its place, those who represent victim groups seek compensation not only for an unfair economic situation, or for physical injury, but for the negative definitions that have denied these groups dignity in the past.5 While these spokespeople generally agree on the need to offset cultural as well as economic injustice, they often pursue redress with differing attitudes toward justice and repair. In the Harper's discussion, for instance, Richard Scruggs declares that "[w]e [lawyers] love to think of elegant solutions to major...

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