In the Name of History 9633863481, 9789633863480

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The Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lectures

In the name of hIstory Joan Wallach Scott

I n t h e N a m e of H i s t or y

The Natalie Zemon Davis Annual Lecture Series at Central European University, Budapest Series Editor: Gábor Klaniczay

I n t h e Na m e of H is t or y

Joan Wallach Scott

C ent ra l Eu rope a n Universit y Pre ss B u d a p e s t – N e w Yo r k

Copyright © Joan Wallach Scott 2020 Published in 2020 by Central European University Press Nádor utca 9, H-1051 Budapest, Hungary 224 West 57th Street, New York NY 10019, USA www.ceupress.com All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the permission of the Publisher. ISBN 978-963-386-348-0 ISSN 1996-1197 Library of Congress Control Number 2019952923

Printed in Hungary

Ta b l e o f C o n t e n t s

Introduction: The “Historical Operation”1 Chapter 1. The Nuremberg Tribunal, 1946

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Chapter 2. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, 1996

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Chapter 3. The Movement for Reparations for Slavery in the United States

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Epilogue: The “Lessons of History”95 Endnotes105 Bibliography117 Index125 Index

Introduction T he “H i stor ic a l Oper at ion”

Almost every day someone invokes the idea that his-

tory is the final arbiter of right and wrong, that if we can line up on “the right side of history,” our actions will achieve their ultimate legitimacy and a better future will be secured for all. Thus Fidel Castro, standing before the court that would send him to prison in 1953, challenged the judges to “Condemn me. It does not matter. History will absolve me.”1 Telford Taylor, a prosecutor at the Nuremberg Tribunals, writing a critique of the Vietnam War many years later, noted that “it may be unlikely that our leaders will be called upon to answer at the bar of some future international tribunal, but there is also the bar of history.”2 This belief in the independent role of history as moral arbiter and spur to action is tied, of course, to eighteenth and nineteenth-century Western notions of universal history: its telos is linear and progressive, characterized by a singular temporality, bringing the entire world into its orbit.

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Despite qualifications, challenges, and transformations of this view—despite a whole industry of the critical philosophy of history that argues that history is not a simple record of what happened in the past, that it is neither linear nor continuous, that it is characterized by multiple temporalities—the idea that history is a singular, unidirectional unfolding of events remains an important factor in popular and political thinking. Of course, in this view, history doesn’t act alone; human actions bring it into being. But human actions are fallible and somehow need the independent agency of history as their guide. The job of historians is said to mediate these two different meanings of “history.” In popular and political usage, “history” refers to an agency with its own telos, a direction of things to which humans must learn to conform, a secularized version of theological teaching about God’s will and His last judgment. But this same word, “history,” also designates what is said to have actually happened in the past: human actions and events that are no longer with us, but from which “lessons” can be learned. The lessons are conveyed by historians, those who make history in another sense, by creating a representation of the past that chooses and organizes what will count as history. Those lessons, of course, will enable us to distinguish past from present and so to make our own history—that is, to create futures different from the ones

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we live with, but that somehow (if the lessons teach us well) will conform to history’s necessary direction. This triple aspect—history as the universal and necessary direction of things, history as the events of human action in the past, and history as the selective transmission of accounts of that action—informs what Michel de Certeau, writing critically of the discipline of history, calls the “historical operation.” The “historical operation” addresses the third definition of history—that which is written by historians. Certeau insists that it is historians who create the past they write about, even as they refer it to an objective happening that can be documented by an archive. The conflation of what actually happened with what the historian chooses to write about is an “historical operation.” Certeau puts it this way: The past is first of all the means of representing a difference. The historical operation consists in classifying the given according to a present law that is distinguished from its “other” (the past), in assuming a distance in respect to an acquired situation, and thus in marking through a discourse the effective change that precipitated this distancing.3

The operation, he says, has “a double-edged effect. On the one hand, it historicizes current time,” and, on the

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other, it represents “what is lacking” and in this way makes “a place for a future.”4 “The old slogan about the ‘lessons of history’ acquires new meaning in this perspective, if . . . we can identify the ‘moral of history’ with this interstice created within the events of the day through the representation of differences.” 5 Certeau, of course, takes the “historical operation” to be a human creation. For him it is not a product of history’s autonomous will (not an operation of History itself), nor simply the record of what “really happened,” but an effect of historians’ writing, a writing which brings into being the very notions of past, present, and future, the relationships between them, and the lessons to be drawn from those relationships. There is an unresolvable tension in the very word history between moral imperatives and political practicalities: the “lessons of history,” after all, not only expose errors that demand correction, evils that require repudiation, but also remind us of human imperfection, of the necessary compromises of politics, and the impossibility of securing peace on earth. The tension is evident in popular and political thinking which invokes “history” as its legitimation and its aim. When politicians say they are acting “in the name of history,” we can see Certeau’s “historical operation” at work in its double sense: as a way of repudiating a certain (constructed) past in order to cre-

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ate an opening to the future and as a way of providing moral legitimation for the operation itself. How does the “historical operation” work as a politics? How do selective representations of the past create differences upon which visions of a future are built? What are those visions? What is occluded by these representations? How does the “historical operation” itself reveal its own investments, its own limits, its own contradictions of the very meaning of history upon which it rests? These are the questions I ask in these chapters. I examine three different instances in which repudiation of the past was conceived as a way to a better future. In the case of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg (1946), this was to be a future without aggressive warfare and crimes against humanity. For the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (1996), establishing the truth of the past meant securing a future without the oppression and inequality associated with the apartheid state. For the advocates of reparations for slavery in the United States (an ongoing movement), the issue was (is), I argue, less about financial restitution than about a demand for recognition of the foundational importance of slavery for capitalism and democracy and its ongoing impact on racial inequality in America—no future is imaginable without a rewriting of that past. In each case, the

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past being produced has different futures in mind, yet both past and future are defined in terms of moral absolutes which are often at odds with the political realities they are meant to address. In this way, I explore the “historical operation” in action as it constructs the very meaning of the “history” in whose name it acts. An exploration of what might be called the political uses of history inevitably leads to questions about ethics, accountability, and what David Scott refers to as “moral and reparative histories.” 6 I take up those issues in the epilogue.

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Chapter 1 T he Nu remberg Tribu na l, 1946 Yes, it would be worthwhile to study clinically, in detail, the steps taken by Hitler and Hitlerism and to reveal to the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century that without his being aware of it, he has a Hitler inside him, that Hitler inhabits him, that Hitler is his demon, that if he rails against him, he is being inconsistent and that, at bottom, what he cannot forgive Hitler for is not crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the niggers of Africa. —Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

I start with this quote from Aimé Césaire because it is

an argument about history, about a particular version of history produced in response to the Holocaust. It exposes the limits of the triumphant European powers’ “operation of history” as they located their difference, and so their claim to the future, in contrast to the now-defeated Nazi regime. Césaire is not saying that the “Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century” are Nazis, just that the distinction between themselves and the German National Socialists is not as clear as it would be when “colonialist procedures” are

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made part of the story. In fact, I will argue, the history produced at Nuremberg was meant to preclude taking into account the colonial part of the story. Acting “in the name of History,” the European powers offered themselves as the embodiment and future guardians of “civilization.” In this chapter, I focus on the first Nuremberg trial held by the International Military Tribunal (IMT), the judicial inquiry that began in 1946 into the actions of twenty-four former top Nazi officials and six organizations. The trial was meant to expose the unprecedented evils of Nazism and so to confine them to the past from which they had come and where they rightly belonged. It sought to secure the memory of evil deeds as a way of forever banishing them. Convicting the perpetrators, the US prosecutor promised, would permanently render their “sinister influences” politically and morally unacceptable. “Civilization can afford no compromise with the social forces which would gain renewed strength if we deal ambiguously or indecisively with the men in whom those forces now precariously survive.”1 The Nuremberg trials “for the first time called history itself into a court of justice.” So argues Shoshana Felman in an essay on Walter Benjamin. At Nuremberg, history itself was on trial she writes. “The function of the trials was to repair judicially not only pri-

vate but also collective historical injustices.”2 The judgment rendered would bring the revelation of the “meaning of history,” (that is, the meaning of the past) forcing it to “take stock of its own flagrant injustices.”3 History, in this view, was not the subject but the object of judgment at Nuremberg. The death sentences handed down were meant symbolically to confirm that justice had been delivered (evil recognized as such and eliminated), even if no ultimate compensation were possible for the crimes that had been committed nor any guarantee established that their underlying causes had been eradicated. The trial judges saw as their task the protection of the future from the pernicious influences of the past. They offered voluminous evidence upon which to deliver the “ultimate verdict of history,” documenting the evil “so painstakingly and with such clarity that the world could never forget.”4 “Never again” was the promise made. The documents also established the indisputable record of individual guilt, the legal basis upon which punishment would be administered. Individual responsibility was a major theme of the trial: statesmen who had “used their powers of state to attack the foundations of world peace” had to be brought before the law and made to “pay for it personally.” 5 The combination of the ineradicable memory of atrocities and their

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severe punishment was to be an enduring lesson for the future. “We must never forget that the record on which we judge these defendants today is the record on which history will judge us tomorrow.”6 Those were the words of the chief prosecutor, US Associate Supreme Court Justice Robert H. Jackson, who was adamant about holding a proper trial, despite objections from some of the allied leaders (France, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union), most of whom would have preferred summary executions. The case against the Nazi leaders must rest on impeccable evidence, he insisted. If I should recite these horrors [plans for the extermination of the Jews] in words of my own, you would think me intemperate and unreliable. Fortunately, we need not take the word of any witness but the Germans themselves. I invite you now to look at a few of the vast number of captured German orders and reports that will be offered in evidence to see what a Nazi invasion meant.7

Documenting the crimes of the past would demonstrate the historical importance of the allied war victory not only as the triumph of good over evil, but as a means of differentiating the present and future from the past. The Nuremberg Tribunal made history in two senses: as the culminating victory of the Sec-

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ond World War and as a way of writing into popular consciousness the very meaning of “history” in Certeau’s sense, as an operation that brought a relationship between past, present, and future into being. A close look at this “operation” exposes its limits, especially the way in which moral judgment worked to reduce the complexities of politics. The Civilizational Standard Whether he described the Nazi state as a corruption of civilized standards or as an anachronism, Jackson depicted it as out of step with the international order—the order established after the First World War that was meant to regulate relations among “civilized” nations. In 1928, the Kellogg–Briand pact sought to establish norms for their interactions and for the disciplining of “savage” political entities. Jackson described the Nazis as one of those savage entities, a state that had been transformed by outlaws into a criminal enterprise. The criminal enterprise was a throwback to earlier “barbaric” times, marked by unconstrained aggression against its own people and against other nations. It was as if the Nazis had fallen into a state of nature, outside the boundaries of law as they had been established by modern, law-abiding nations. The

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use of the terms barbaric and savage echoed the civilizational claims of colonial powers whose mission was to bring history to those people considered to be without it. Yet the valence was reversed here: it was the civilizers who were said to be the targets of barbaric Nazi aggression. The Soviet prosecutor went so far as to charge that “in reality the German fascists are not nationalists but imperialists, whose main and decisive aim was the seizure of foreign land so as to further the expansion of militant German capitalism.”8 This was not the view of his colleagues, who condemned the Nazi conquest and colonization only of other ­European territories—justified as a need for lebensraum—as illegal, aggressive warfare. But in all cases, the contrast between the Nazi past and the present that repudiated it enabled the Tribunal to represent the victors in the war as law-abiding nations, the embodiments of the future. Jackson presented the case against the Nazis in the name of international law which distinguished civilized from uncivilized warfare. Wars of aggression were deemed unjust, criminal, and uncivilized, whereas “honestly defensive war is, of course, legal and saves those lawfully conducting it from criminality.” “Honestly defensive war is not a crime.”9 International law, Jackson explained, was the “outgrowth of treaties and agreements between nations and of­

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accepted customs”—customs that were, like common law, the accretion of historical evolution. It was true, he admitted, that the Kellogg–Briand pact of 1928 failed “to define a war of aggression.”10 Nonetheless, the distinctions operated to define the meanings the prosecution deployed. In a report to President Truman in 1945, Jackson explained the distinction between just and unjust war: “War necessarily is a calculated series of killings, of destructions of property, of oppressions. Such acts unquestionably would be criminal except that International Law throws a mantle of protection around acts which otherwise would be crimes, when committed in pursuit of legitimate warfare.”11 By definition, legitimate warfare was “civilized,” “aggressive warfare” was not. The London Charter listed aggressive warfare as one of the counts against the Nazis. It was signed by the Allies on August 8, 1945, the day the United States bombed Nagasaki, two days after the bombing of Hiroshima; earlier in February, the British and Americans had fire-bombed the city of Dresden—many thousands of civilians were killed in those raids. As for intervention in another sovereign nation, the Soviets had invaded Finland, Poland, Romania, and the Baltic states; Britain had invaded Norway. (And nothing was said about the long history of unprovoked imperialist incursions into Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the

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former Ottoman territories. Indeed, that kind of colonialism was off the table at Nuremberg.) Were these defensive operations or instances of aggressive warfare? And was it possible to insist that all war was a crime? For the purposes of Nuremberg, the planning and implementing of aggressive warfare—violations of the sovereignty of other nation-states, allied with crimes against humanity—became the test; the scale was international, not domestic. But what counted as international applied only to other established “civilized” nation-state entities. The colonial appropriation of non-state territories didn’t count as unacceptable “aggressive” warfare; that was a matter of civilizing the natives, bringing them into the forward march of history. Judith Butler, citing Adorno, puts it this way: “And here we have to see—as Adorno cautioned us— that violence in the name of civilization reveals its own barbarism, even as it ‘justifies’ its own violence by presuming the barbaric subhumanity of the other against whom that violence is waged.”12 It is in that light that we might read Jackson’s distinction between civilized warfare and criminal warfare, one attributed to the victors, the other to the losers; one the prerogative of legitimate states, the other outside the boundaries established by custom and covenant; one justified in the name of the progress of history, the other its deplorable past.

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The Anomaly of the Nazi State Jackson and his colleagues argued that the National Socialist regime had defined itself out of the community of civilized nations by engaging in aggressive warfare, committing “crimes against humanity” on an international scale. The domestic treatment of the Jews itself would not have warranted intervention, Jackson conceded; what made it actionable was that it constituted “part of a plan for making illegal war.”13 In pursuing illegal war, Germany displayed its unlikeness to the other European powers. If it had once been a modern nation (and that was questionable for some), it was no longer. It had been captured by a “band of criminals”—among them the individuals whose cases were before the Tribunal.14 These men put into place a party—the National Socialist party—that was not in any sense a political party, even if its leader had been elected to office: “In discipline, structure, and method . . . [it] was not adapted to the democratic process of persuasion. It was an instrument of conspiracy and of coercion”—in short, a criminal organization composed of “overlords” and their followers.15 These men were described as brigands, gangsters operating outside the law. “The principle of individual responsibility for piracy and brigandage, which have long been recognized as crimes punishable under In-

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ternational Law, is old and well established. That is what illegal warfare is.”16 The failure to take responsibility was attributed to the abnormality of the Nazis: they were depicted as psychotic, deluded, demented—pathologies associated with primitive peoples.17 Lecturing to a popular audience, Hans Morgenthau noted that “Germany has been compared to a mental patient, a problem child . . . a case of retarded development, or a young girl led astray.”18 Jackson referred to “diabolical barbarism,” an evil that he said was fundamentally anti-Christian.19 Christianity, in his view, was associated with a commitment to moral conduct and to peace; Christianity was taken to be the moral philosophy underpinning the superiority of modern secular European nation-states. The French prosecutor, François de Menthon, put it this way: In the middle of the 20th century Germany goes back, of her own free will, beyond Christianity and civilization to the primitive barbarity of ancient Germany. She makes a deliberate break with all universal conceptions of modern nations.20

Historic underdevelopment (as in Morgenthau’s words, “a case of retarded development”) was the most frequent explanation given for the rise of Nazi Germany; Germany could not be considered a state by the stan-

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dards of the evolution of civilization. Menthon pointed out that there were traces in Nazi character of “the youthful primitivism of the German spirit,” of “the primitive barbarity of ancient Germany.”21 In this the Nazis were an archaic remnant of another age, a relic of the state of nature for which the founding of states had been a cure. Whitney Harris, who had served on the staff of the US prosecutor, noted in his 1954 history of the trial: “Despotism no longer has any place in civil society. . . . It is archaic, and of other times. . . . The age of empires has passed. And the time of emperors is gone”—thereby ruling out Western imperialism (by no means long passed!) in the catalogue of despotisms.22 Despotism belonged to the East: Jackson considered that Germany was “more Oriental than Western”; it had engaged in a “despotism equaled only by the dynasties of the ancient East.”23 Its alliance with Japan proved the Eastern connection: “they were brothers under the skin.”24 It was now time to relegate this remnant of past times to the dustbin of history; with the conviction of the Nazi defendants, evil would be permanently left in the past and the future progress of humanity assured by the laws of existing nation-states. Interestingly—and not surprisingly—the argument about German underdevelopment was echoed by some historians attempting to account for the Nazi state as an anomaly, a deviation from the normal process of

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state-formation. Their argument became known as the Sonderweg—the idea that Germany had followed a special path, some maintained since the time of Luther, others only since the nineteenth century. Germany’s deviation from the true path of history served to confirm what was the true path. William Shirer, for example, wrote that Germans were predisposed to militarism and to the call of authoritarian leaders: “the course of German history . . . made blind obedience to temporal rulers the highest virtue of Germanic man and put a premium on servility.”25 There were historians who diagnosed the Third Reich as a symptom of the rejection or failure of modernity; those who pointed to the persistence of preindustrial economic norms or to the discrepancy between industrial development and the emergence of a substantial middle class; those who cited the absence of a successful bourgeois revolution and the failure to develop free markets. Max Weber wrote of the “feudalization” of the upper bourgeoisie. Ralph Dahrendorf put it this way: [German society] did not become bourgeois, but remained quasi-feudal. Industrialization in Germany failed to produce a self-confident bourgeoisie with its own political aspirations. . . . As a result, German society lacked the stratum that in England and America, and to a lesser extent even in France, had

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been the moving force of a development in the direction of greater modernity and liberalism.26

The historians’ depiction of German deviant development contributed to and/or followed the lines of distinction evident in the Nuremberg trial. There is one path that history takes: whether called civilization or modernity or liberalism, its highest form is the liberal democratic nation-state. This operation of history associated Nazi policies with a discredited past and the victorious powers with a future cleansed of “evil.” This history set aside what Jackson at least glancingly acknowledged: the traits shared by the victorious powers with Germany and, especially, the role of nationalism in the process of state formation. The phenomenon of nationalism, the ways in which national identities are constituted as modes of inclusion and exclusion (their basis in racialized worldviews), did not figure prominently—if at all—in the analyses offered by these historians. Nationalism The question of national sovereignty was important to the Nuremberg prosecutors. Jackson repeatedly noted that the Tribunal’s intervention was based on the en-

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forcement of international law. Its actions did not violate respect for national sovereignty in general and did not involve moral judgments of a country’s internal affairs. Early in his speech, he referred to the National Socialist party program which, in the name of the German people, “made a strong appeal to that sort of nationalism which in ourselves we call patriotism, and in our rivals, chauvinism.”27 This was especially true in relation to minorities. “How a government treats its own inhabitants generally is thought to be no concern to other governments or of international society. Certainly, few oppressions or cruelties would warrant the intervention of foreign powers.”28 Jackson even acknowledged some regrettable circumstances at times in our country in which minorities are unfairly treated. We think it is justifiable that we interfere or attempt to bring retribution to individuals or states only because the concentration camps and the deportations were in pursuance of a common plan or enterprise of making an unjust or illegal war in which we became involved. We see no other basis on which we are justified in reaching the atrocities which were committed inside Germany, under German law, or even in violation of German law, by authorities of the German state. Without substantially this defi-

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nition, we would not think we had any part in the prosecution of those things.29

German aggression against other countries in Europe was the ground on which these crimes could be prosecuted. Let there be no misunderstanding about the charge of persecuting Jews. What we charge against these defendants is not those arrogances and pretensions which frequently accompany the intermingling of different peoples and which are likely, despite the efforts of government, to produce regrettable crimes and convulsions.30

Indeed, Jackson ruled out consideration of Nazi prewar atrocities on these grounds. As Elizabeth Borgwardt comments, “There was no principle available that could capture the crimes of Kristallnacht in Germany and yet spare from scrutiny the lynching of thousands of African-Americans in the American South.”31 In this connection, a recent book by the law professor James Q. Whitman documents in stunning detail the importance for Nazi jurists and policy makers of American race law. America served as a model for addressing immigration, miscegenation, second-

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class citizenship, and segregation. Its “distinctive legal techniques” were carefully studied and, in some cases, implemented—although the Germans considered the one-drop rule for determining racial identity too harsh.32 But the treatment of Native Americans during the American conquest of the West was a model for German pursuit of lebensraum in the territories of Eastern Europe.33 Whitman concludes that American white supremacy, and to some extent Anglophone white supremacy more broadly, provided . . . some of the working materials for the Nazism of the 1930s. . . . But in Nazi Germany supremacist traditions and practices acquired the backing of a state apparatus far more powerful than anything to be found in the world of the daughters of British Imperialism and far more ruthless than any that had ever existed in Europe west of the Elbe.34

There was surely a difference between racial discrimination per se and “racial persecution carried to the point of extermination,”35 but did that make the Nazi state an extreme example, or an exception, to the policies and practices of other nation-states? Was Nazism a “historical parenthesis” (as Croce had deemed Italian fascism), an unfortunate “accident” (as Friedrich Meinecke described it), or was it something else? The

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Nuremberg Tribunal emphasized its exceptionalism, returning repeatedly to the Nazi violation of international precedent and law and underplaying the ways in which ethno-nationalism had been used to rally support for National Socialism. The opening speech of François de Menthon is instructive in this regard. He condemned the “diabolical barbarism” of National Socialism: This monstrous doctrine is that of racialism: . . . Race is the matrix of the German people . . . the individual has no value in himself and is important only as an element of the race. [Racism was] the gulf that separates members of the German community from other men. The diversity of the races becomes irreducible, and irreducible, too, the hierarchy which sets apart the superior and the inferior races. The Hitler regime has created a veritable chasm between the German nation, the sole keeper of the racial treasure, and other nations.36

Race or “racialism,” in other words, is an exclusive aspect of Nazi Germany; the hierarchy of difference that underwrote French colonialism (to take only the example of Menthon’s nation) had nothing to do with race! What Menthon referred to as “the common heritage of western humanism” was defined as civilized

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and free of racism in contrast to the “barbarity” of the National Socialist regime. (Long after the Second World War, in France racism was associated exclusively with anti-Semitism.) I’m not sure the historian A.J.P. Taylor had race in mind when he noted, referring to the documents assembled by the prosecution, that they “were chosen not only to demonstrate the war-guilt of the men on trial, but to conceal that of the prosecuting Powers.”37 But the comment applies well to the “operation of history” being performed by the Nuremberg prosecutors: racialism was an attribute of “the most primitive ideas of the savage tribe,”38 an anachronism, now happily past; their difference from the Nazis made the American and European powers, by definition untainted by racism, the rightful heirs to the future. The historical operation evident at Nuremberg involved a careful distinction between nation-state sovereignty and its violation. Nation-state sovereignty had been violated by the German National Socialists; its future protection was at issue in the trial. So, for example, even as Jackson acknowledged that “the avowed purpose [of the Nazis] was the destruction of the Jewish people as a whole, as an end in itself,” he added other reasons: it was “a measure of preparation for war . . . , a discipline of conquered peoples.”39 Jackson was at pains to distinguish between domestic

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treatment of minorities and the “crimes against humanity” perpetrated by the Nazi state. What made the treatment of the Jews criminal, Jackson said, was not so much the desire to rid the nation of them, as it “enabled the Nazis to bring a practiced hand to similar measures against Poles, Serbs, and Greeks,” and so prepared the way for “the precipitation of aggressive war.”40 “The reason that this program of extermination of Jews and destruction of the rights of minorities became an international concern is this: it was a part of a plan for making illegal war.”41 The violation of other nations’ sovereignty and not internal politics was the issue. In this thinking, crimes against humanity and aggressive warfare become synonymous. Jackson tacked back and forth between justifying and denouncing the monumental “savagery” of the Germans. There was a moral dimension that compelled other nations to act, lest by their “silence [they] would take a consenting part in such crimes.”42 But he quickly returned to the argument that it was preparation for aggressive warfare that constituted the crime, not the domestic treatment of minorities. Here we see him grappling with the fact—at once acknowledging and denying it—that, as Robert Meister puts it, state sovereignty “assumes the continuing existence of territorial rule by national states. . . . [It] rests on the simultaneous existence and repression of the geno-

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cidal thoughts, both active and passive, that founded the nation.”43 Meister cites Michael Mann’s thesis that “genocide is the dark side of the notion that legitimate rule by the people over territory presupposed the absence (physically or culturally) of other peoples occupying that territory.”44 By associating genocide (crimes against humanity) with aggressive warfare (violations of international law and precedent), Jackson attributed the dark side of nationalism exclusively to Nazi evil. Victory in war had consigned that evil to the past; the death sentences meted out to individual Nazi leaders symbolically proclaimed the death of the evil itself. In this “operation of history,” a moral judgment was effected. It was a judgment that occluded consideration of colonial practices as “aggression,” and that made domestic discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or religious minority status a matter of protected national sovereignty, outside the purview of international law. To put it in other terms, the ethno-nationalism at the heart of German National Socialism was condemned as a purely German product. Discounting its existence as a feature of other nation-states assured its perpetuation. As Meister puts it nicely: “Believing that the past was evil does not mean that evil is past.”45

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Conclusion Nuremberg’s equation of Nazi evil with the past— as a remnant of an earlier barbaric age—sought to protect a moral vision of the victorious powers as enforcers and embodiments of the progressive direction of history. It was their national sovereignty that the Nazis had failed to respect. The operation of history conducted by the Tribunal left in place the ideas that the nation-state is the highest achievement of human political organization and that violence (defensive, “civilized” warfare) is the expression of sovereign state reason, as affirmed by international legal conventions. The fact that some form of nationalism—an exclusionary principle of membership in the nation—was also a feature of the victorious powers was underplayed or ignored. Racialism, or malignant ethno-nationalism, was taken to be an exclusively Nazi phenomenon, thereby preventing consideration of its existence elsewhere. The inattention to the pervasiveness of ethno-nationalism guaranteed its survival, indeed its legitimation as an aspect of nation-state identity. Hannah Arendt was prescient about the dangers of “race-thinking” for “political nationhood” when she wrote critically of the founding of the state of ­Israel:

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After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—namely by means of a colonized and then conquered territory—but this solved neither the problems of the minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish question merely produced a new category of refugees, the Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated in India on a large scale involving millions of people.46

Writing about the postwar regime of human rights (one of the direct results of the Nuremberg trials), Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon endorse Arendt’s view: “The same form of political organization that was historically responsible for the most egregious human rights violations was, in turn, elevated to the protector of human rights.”47 Even with the caveat that the rules of international law are meant to restrain the worst impulses of nations, the nation continues to be represented as an autonomous entity enforcing its domestic (private) rules. The particular concern of Perugini and Gordon (like

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Arendt’s) is Israel, where they demonstrate that the protection of Jewish human rights has come at the expense of Arab human rights. During the Eichmann trial (1961)—which asserted the sovereignty of the new nation of Israel, acting in the name of the long history of the victimized Jewish people— “the Holocaust’s threat was projected into Israel’s current present and into a new territorial setting different from the one in which it had originated.”48 With the “nazification” of Arabs, Israel’s “conquest and colonialization were normalized and legitimized as a sort of preemptive measure against the rematerialization of Auschwitz.”49 In an ironic twist, the achievement of their place in history came, for the Jewish victims of the Nazi genocide, in the form of an ethnically defined nation-state, which (as the quote from Michael Mann I cited earlier maintains) rests on “the notion that legitimate rule by the people over territory presupposed the absence (physically or culturally) of other peoples occupying that territory.”50 This insistence on ethnic homogeneity as the fulfillment of a people’s history is not peculiar to Israel but is, as Wendy Brown has argued, increasingly the way in which national identity is being defined in the face of globalization. She explains the frenzied building of walls by states across the world as a response to declining political sovereignty in the new global eco-

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nomic order, and she notes that this decline has unleashed the powers of “capital and religiously legitimated violence.”51 I would add ethnically-legitimated violence to that list: the desire to secure sovereignty by protecting and delimiting the homogeneity that establishes who counts as a member of a nation seems to have returned with a vengeance in the face of the socalled crisis of immigration confronted by the nationstates of the West. The legacy of Nuremberg, then, was not only the depiction and denunciation of the worst ways in which the nation-state form could be realized (and I want to be clear here that, unquestionably, genocide constitutes an extreme form of ethno-nationalism), but also a refusal to question the ethno-nationalism at the heart of the form itself. The difference established between past and present was formulated in terms of barbarity versus civilization: the one a vestige of the past and morally unacceptable, the other taken to be the fruit of a morally progressive history. The operation of history performed by the Nuremberg Tribunal protected ethno-nationalism (and, indeed, imperialism) from the kind of scrutiny Aimé Césaire was calling for, in this way guaranteeing not its extinction, but the possibility for its recurrence.

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Chapter 2 S out h A f r ic a’s Tr ut h a nd R e c onci l iat ion C om m i s sion (1996 ) The language of forgiveness, at the service of determined finalities, was anything but pure and disinterested. As always in the field of politics. —Jacques Derrida, Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness

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the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa (TRC) was established in 1996, its mandate explicitly rejected the “Nuremberg model.” Although any number of commentators likened apartheid’s implementation of ideologies of racial supremacy to those of the Nazi regime, they all rejected the idea that criminal trials were an option. Retributive justice was simply not conceivable when there were no clear winners and when key institutions of the state were still in the hands of the oppressors. A negotiated settlement between the enforcers of apartheid and the resistance movements called for practical measures that would enable the two warring sides to find some common ground. “Neither side could impose victor’s justice,” explained Desmond Tutu, the chair of the TRC, “because neither side won the decisive victory that would have enabled it to do so, since

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we had a military stalemate.” The state security forces retained their power and, as Tutu noted, they “still had the guns . . . and never would have negotiated if they had to face trial.”1 “While the Allies could pack up and go home after Nuremberg, we in South Africa had to live with one another.”2 The period between 1989/90—the unbanning of the African National Congress (ANC) and the release of Nelson Mandela from prison—and Mandela’s election as president in 1994, was the most violent in the history of apartheid.3 Even as they negotiated an interim constitution, the National Party (NP) leadership unleashed its forces in the townships and the cities and enlisted the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) to attack its ANC rivals, claiming that black on black violence was the real threat to the nation. Chris Hani, head of the armed struggle branch of the ANC (which had called off its warfare now that a new order was at hand), was assassinated in 1993 by two white activists, who hoped, they claimed, to foment race war and thus prevent what they believed would be a communist takeover of the country.4 Still controlling the parliament, the NP legislators passed a series of indemnity acts; some of them applied to all parties in the conflict, others, secretly decreed by the president, applied only to state agents who were granted impunity for actions that had exceeded the bounds of legali-

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ty even under the old regime.5 At the same time, there were revelations of the torture and killing of suspected spies at ANC camps in exile while violence continued among black youth and criminal gangs in the townships. The TRC was the attempt to find a way to “live with one another” in the tumultuous present. But what “operation of history” could be performed, not just to close the chapter on apartheid, but to establish its difference in anticipation of a radically new future? In the long struggle against the regime, there were repeated charges—by the ANC and by international organizations—of criminality, of crimes against humanity, of injustice so brutal that it exceeded the worst practices of other authoritarian regimes. The chief enforcers of apartheid continued to object to these accusations well after they had conceded defeat. Former president D.W. de Klerk insisted that there was nothing criminal about his behavior both during the negotiations and again when he successfully petitioned a court to suppress parts of the Commission Report that documented his criminal actions.6 He asserted that the future unity of the nation required “non-condemnation of past history,” and “understanding” of the fact that diverse perspectives had informed the motives of the conflicting sides in the struggle.7 De Klerk’s moral relativism was echoed by former NP

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member Wynand Malan, the one person on the TRC to dissent from its final report. He denounced the report for its “lack of empathy with certain groups living within traditional or nationalistic value systems who were party to the conflict.”8 They could not be blamed, he insisted, for adhering to the rules of another “value system.” Apartheid is “dead and buried,” Malan said repeatedly, so why judge those who, in good faith, had participated in it. And yet, in the eyes of the ANC and its supporters, there could be no going forward without an acknowledgment and repudiation of the apartheid past. The system would not be “dead and buried” until its crimes had been revealed, until some measure of recognition was offered to its victims—if only in the form of exposing and thereby confirming the truth of their suffering. In the absence of being able to mete out justice (to punish the wrong-doers), the Truth and Reconciliation Commission could reveal the truth; indeed, “truth” was the synonym of history for the commission. The revelations of what had happened and had long been denied would establish incontestably that apartheid had been an evil, criminal system to which there could be no return. But unlike Nuremberg, where the presentation of the facts of Nazi crimes against humanity served to legitimize retributive justice, the revelation of histo-

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ry’s truth in the TRC proceedings was meant to be redemptive. At the bar of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, perpetrators were to confess their sins, victims to detail their trauma and then (it was hoped) grant forgiveness to their oppressors. “It has become a cliché of the post-apartheid dispensation,” writes Jacqueline Rose, “to say that, in order to secure the transition to democracy, the new South Africa opted for truth rather than justice.” 9 Forgiveness was the instrument that was meant to effect the trade-off, enabling that “living together” demanded by the circumstances of the transition. And the quasi-judicial nature of the TRC gave the impression that justice was being dispensed. TRC leaders hoped that evoking the evils of the past would bring about a collective exorcism, thus clearing the way for the future. The difference between past and present was still being constructed; the TRC was looking to put in place the materials with which an “operation of history” could be performed. En Route to the Promised Land Among TRC proponents, there were two different conceptions of how to use history to get to the new South Africa, one Marxist, the other Christian. Both rested on the idea that subjective transformation was a

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prerequisite to social, economic, and political change, but one stressed collective subjectivities, the other individual psychology. The idea for the TRC came from Kader Asmal, a human rights scholar and political activist. Inspired by Latin American precedents from the 1980s and by Gramsci’s notion of catharsis, Asmal saw the Commission as a means of effecting collective subjective transformation.10 For Gramsci, catharsis was “the starting point for all the philosophy of praxis.” Peter Thomas notes that according to Gramsci, “the philosophy of praxis was not concerned to exercise ‘hegemony over subaltern classes,’ but, on the contrary, to encourage the subaltern classes ‘to educate themselves in the art of government,’ thus making the ‘ruled intellectually independent from the rulers. . . .”11 It was in this sense, Asmal wrote, that “The Truth and Reconciliation Commission should be a final cathartic damburst, unleashing tides of reconstruction.”12 The process worked by recounting the lived experiences of the system’s victims in order to expose in concrete detail the “truth” of a history that the white minority either denied or did not fully comprehend. “The gist of genuine reconciliation is that apartheid’s beneficiaries must be persuaded to accept unwelcome facts about their past.”13 The testimony would come from “the previously excluded [who] speak at last for themselves

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and . . . join the South African family for the first time.”14 Giving voice to their suffering would “affirm the dignity and the personhood” of the victims, thus affirming their role as agents of a future history.15 The point was to create a collective understanding of the structures that produced individual experience. “Reconciliation, accurately conceived, must bring about a rupture with the skewed ethics of apartheid, and so upset any possibility of smooth sailing on a previously immoral course.”16 In contrast to Asmal’s insistence on the collective nature of political transformation was the Anglican Bishop Desmond Tutu’s emphasis on individual responsibility. For Tutu, the TRC was a “deeply theological and ethical initiative.”17 The title of his book was No Future without Forgiveness. He defined the work of the Commission as implementing forgiveness—the forgiveness exemplified by Jesus, and also (to strike a culturally appropriate note) the forgiveness inherent in the African notion of ubuntu, an understanding of the self as inextricably bound up with others. Under Tutu’s leadership, his view became the Commission’s. In his writings and in the Commission’s Report, Tutu stressed individual accountability; he talked (in the language of medicine and psychoanalysis) of the trauma victims had suffered, of the need to heal their psychic wounds. In the defini-

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tions established by the TRC, victims were those with direct experience of harm, not the collective targets of apartheid’s punitive social and political organization. As Mahmood Mamdani points out, “victims of apartheid [were] . . . narrowly defined as those militants victimized as they struggled against apartheid, not those whose lives were mutilated in the day-to-day web of regulations that was apartheid.”18 Tutu maintained that “the act of telling one’s story,” had a “cathartic, healing effect.”19 But his notion of catharsis had less to do with establishing political agency than it did with purging an individual’s passions of anger and sorrow. The TRC publicized dramatic moments of forgiveness (e.g., the mothers of murdered boys forgiving their police assailants) as a way of stressing the imperative to staunch the desire for vengeance with the balm of forgiveness.20 “We cannot go on nursing grudges even vicariously for those who cannot speak for themselves any longer,” Tutu warned.21 “Forgiveness is letting go of your right to retaliation. It is like opening a window to let the fresh air rush into a dank closed room, it is drawing the curtains apart to let the light stream into a dark room.”22 The TRC Report concluded with these words: “It is only by recognizing the potential for evil in each one of us that we can take full responsibility for ensuring that such evil will never be repeated.”23 In this

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comment, the need to forgive the sinner refuses any structural account of how evil’s potential is elicited, and it equates perpetrators and victims as equally vulnerable—differentials of actual power are beside the point. Asmal’s notion of collective memory becomes, in this representation, a series of individual reminiscences that are meant to furnish the material that establishes the difference of the past as a way to a better future. But it sets aside the question of state structures; the new nation will be born from the repentance of individual victims and sinners. The punishment dealt out to individuals at Nuremberg here becomes the redemption of corrupted individual souls. The Metaphor of the Bridge Forgiveness was the instrument of redemption, the way of equalizing the terrain upon which compromise and reconciliation would be achieved. Forgiveness was often referred to as paving the way for a “bridge” to the future. “Forgiveness declares faith in the future of a relationship and in the capacity of the wrongdoer to make a new beginning on a course that will be different from the one that caused the wrong.”24 As the architects of the new South Africa employed it, the metaphor of the bridge was a way to

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talk about moving from a situation of conflict to one of agreement about the evil nature of the past, from that past to a present characterized by some kind of consensus. Establishing this difference would then make it possible to move from the old South Africa to the new. The bridge was the edifice in the present that would enable leaving the past behind; Asmal described the past as “the gulf that must be crossed.” It was the difference of history itself. Most mentions of it depicted a bridge under construction.25 The TRC Report described its job as putting in place pillars that were part of a “process of bridge-building.”26 Dullah Omar, the Minister of Justice in the interim government, described the legislation which created the TRC, the 1995 Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act, as a pathway, a stepping stone, towards the historic bridge of which the Constitution speaks whereby our society can leave behind the past of a deeply divided society characterised by strife, conflict, untold suffering and injustice, and commence the journey towards a future founded on the recognition of human rights, democracy and peaceful coexistence, and development opportunities for all South Africans irrespective of colour, race, class, belief or sex.27

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Amnesty—the forgiveness of individual criminal action in individual cases—was, in the words of the judge who defended the procedure against claims that it was unwarranted and unconstitutional (made by, in this instance, the family of murdered ANC activist Steven Biko), the mechanism by which the “historic bridge” to democracy had to be constructed. “If the Constitution kept alive the prospect of continuous retaliation and revenge, the agreement of those threatened by its implementation might never have been forthcoming and, if it had, the bridge itself would have remained wobbly and insecure, threated by fear from some and anger from others.”28 The process of bridge-building was located in a temporal space between past and future, what I would simply designate as the present and what Robert Meister terms “the now.” He calls “the now . . . a time of exception.” Evoking Tutu’s Pauline Christian inspirations, he writes: “Living in the now . . . means living as not—not still in the past, not yet in the future— ‘but in the time it takes for time to come to an end.’”29 The now is taken to be a unique moment, at once dangerous (because the sins of the past have yet to be fully expiated) and full of the promise of salvation. In theological terms, building a bridge establishes a “period of grace between past and future”; it is a way of “buying more time” for those who still need to repent

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and to accept the sacrifice of the martyred Christ.30 Bridge-building is, in this sense, a way of establishing the historical conditions for the distinction between past and present. The concept of Purgatory may be relevant here, as Brian Connolly pointed out to me. It is “a place of purification and forgiveness attained after physical death but before ascension to heaven. . . . In a sense, South Africa as envisioned by the TRC was a kind of purgatory, stranded between apartheid and liberation. And . . . they all seemed to know it.”31 Historical Accountability If forgiveness was an instrument of bridge-building, it required establishing a record, a history, of past crimes—this was the “truth” the Commission set out to recover. Truth was produced by the accounts of victims and by the confessions of perpetrators. But would these constitute a collective memory of a past (a history) that must be repudiated as a precondition for a more just future? Asmal thought so: “The creation of shared memory . . . is not post-apartheid volk or a stifling homogeneous nationhood; nor a new Fatherland. . . . Shared memory, in the intended sense, is a process of historical accountability.”32 By this I think he meant an analysis of apartheid as a system that pro-

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duced its agents and its victims, an account of ideological and institutional structures of oppression. The TRC’s position was more confused. Was “historical accountability” the same as individual accountability? Yes and no. The TRC took as its mission the creation of the understanding that would encourage forgiveness (of the self and of others), and this revealed an often-contradictory notion of historical causality. Despite its evocations of the individual propensity to evil as the source of historical abuses, the Commission also repeatedly gestured to apartheid as a “system” of rule. “The apartheid system in South Africa was a crime against humanity, in spite of the fact that it was perfectly legal within that country, because it contravened international law.”33 The Commission’s Report began with an account of the history of apartheid, depicting it as colonialism’s legacy and its excess.34 The testimonies it solicited added up to an indictment of the laws and customs of the white supremacist state. Its vision of the state of the future conceived it as the antithesis of the apartheid state, the fulfillment of justice as both a morally driven and innovative legal/juridical project. Its recommendations, calling for the nurture and implementation of “a human rights culture,” extended across the gamut of societal institutions both public and private.

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Yet when it came to assigning responsibility for gross human rights violations, the “policies of apartheid” were gestured to only as “the broader context within which specifically defined gross human rights violations had taken place.”35 The emphasis instead was on the need for individual victims to forgive their oppressors and for individual perpetrators to avow their crimes. The report put it this way: A key pillar of the bridge between a deeply divided past of “untold suffering and injustice” and a future “founded upon the recognition of human rights, democracy, peaceful co-existence, and development opportunities for all” is a wide acceptance of direct and indirect, individual and shared responsibility for past human rights violations.36

The structures within which “crimes against humanity” had been legitimated were not, as Greg Grandin (writing of earlier Latin American commissions) put it, “presented as a network of causal social and cultural relations but rather as a dark backdrop on which to contrast the light of tolerance and self-restraint.”37 And yet, to further complicate the issue of causality, the question of amnesty for perpetrators seemed to grant the influence of political institutions. The possibility of amnesty was offered only to those individuals

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who were said to be acting on behalf of organizations defined as “political” in a very narrow sense. The assassins of Chris Hani, for example, were refused amnesty on the grounds that the Conservative Party to which they had belonged and on whose behalf they had apparently acted, did not have a policy advocating violence. Here the comments of Adam Sitze, the author of a compelling genealogical study of the links between the colonial apartheid state’s practice of indemnity and the TRC’s amnesty committee, are apt. “Like the negotiated settlement of which it was a metonym,” he writes, “the TRC Report is best read as a disjunctive synthesis of incomplete repetitions and insufficient differences, as an acutely unstable composite of incommensurable epistemic demands.”38 Perpetrators In pursuit of historical accountability, the Commission sought to document and to convey to a wide public (the proceedings were televised) the criminality, the lawlessness, and the vicious racism of the individuals who formulated and delivered the violent policies of the apartheid state. This was the evidence that could establish, in Certeau’s terms, the difference between

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past and present. In the absence of official records— most had either never been kept or were destroyed as the end neared—the testimony of victims provided, in horrific detail, accounts of the human rights violations they had endured: their property stolen, their children slaughtered, their bodies defiled. Not all victims or their survivors could be heard, however; some cases had been bargained away in the secret negotiations that established the terms for the transition. The (very few) accounts by perpetrators—most of whom were minor figures in the state apparatus—were no less horrifying, even when (and often because) they were delivered with little or no affect, and even when they were justified as being in compliance with the orders of the apartheid state. In the light of the resistance to historical accountability by some of the key players, the TRC turned ever more insistently to the importance of victims’ forgiveness and to the need to stem the anger this resistance would inevitably produce in apartheid’s victims. Even if they failed to acknowledge their crimes, a generous population—recognizing its own propensity to evil—might forgive them “for they know not what they do.” The bridge of forgiveness required both remembering and forgiving the truth of apartheid’s history.

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Beneficiaries The TRC’s attention to individual criminal responsibility drew a sharp distinction, as Meister points out, between the passive beneficiaries of the system and its active enforcers. With it, the question of what counted as historical accountability came to the fore: was it required only of those who actually killed and maimed, or also of those who assented to and benefited from the system of white minority rule? Did the prevalence of a different “value system” exempt individuals from culpability (as de Klerk and Malan insisted)? The TRC’s response (reflecting its refusal to directly take up the impact of structures on individuals) was exemplified by its explicit rejection of one woman’s appeal for amnesty on the grounds of her “apathy,” that is, her “lack of necessary action in time of crisis,” her failure to actively oppose what she knew to be a criminal regime.39 In the eyes of the Commission, there was no actual crime for which she could be forgiven. In effect, the distinction between beneficiaries and perpetrators enacted the very general amnesty the ANC had opposed in negotiations with the NP, absolving of criminal responsibility those who had accepted pass laws and property confiscations as their legal entitlements, but who had committed no “gross violations,” that is, no excessive or discernable harm

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to black bodies. Since these people were said to have no victims, there could be no justified claims made against them. The criminality of the systemic violations against which the liberation movement had fought for decades and which was acknowledged (morally, abstractly) by the TRC was, in this way, in practice (legally, formally) denied since only individuals were held responsible for it. And the motivation of the revolutionaries—to reverse their collective victimhood once and for all— was denied as well. Writes Meister: By accepting the distinction between individual perpetrators and collective beneficiaries of injustice as essential to the “rule of law,” the formerly revolutionary victim becomes “reconciled” to the continuing benefits of past injustice that fellow citizens still enjoy. He would thus appear “undamaged” in the sense that he has now put his victimhood firmly in the past.40

Meister argues that the repair of these damages meant relinquishing (or at the least infinitely deferring) some of the goals that revolutionary justice had sought to attain. “The rule of law in the aftermath of evil is expressly meant to decollectivize both injury and responsibility and to redescribe systemic violence as a

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series of individual crimes.” 41 In this way some of the structures of inequality were left untouched, even as the wheels of a more equitable system of justice had begun to turn. The Rule of Law Adherence to the liberal ideal of the rule of law was a guiding principle for the TRC. The description of apartheid as a crime against humanity defined it as a violation of standards of international law. This had long been understood by observers and institutions such as the United Nations and the International Labor Organization; the liberation movements were not alone in their condemnation.42 It thus was crucial that the juridical practices of the new South Africa restore the legitimacy of legal institutions, many of which had come to be associated with protecting the criminal violence of the apartheid state. But the liberal premises of the rule of law also required ignoring the power differentials (political and economic) established and enforced by state violence, that is, ignoring what the TRC testimonies had revealed to be the truth of history. The TRC’s mandate was addressed to “conflicts of the past,” specifically, to the years from 1960 to 1994,

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the period between the Sharpeville Massacre and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president. This was a long, thirty-year struggle pitting the liberation movements against an increasingly militarized and punitive regime, the “last chapter in the struggle for African decolonization,” as the TRC Report put it. In the deliberations of the TRC, the infractions of ANC members were equated with those of the enforcers of apartheid. Tutu described this as the “even-handed” determination of victims, “because the political affiliation of the perpetrator was almost a total irrelevance in determining whether a certain offense or violation was a gross violation or not.” It was the individual act that established the guilt. “Thus, there was legal equivalence between all, whether upholders of apartheid or those . . . who were seeking its overthrow.” 43 Legal equivalence, he insisted, was, of course, not the same as moral equivalence; nevertheless, the condemnation of apartheid as a crime against humanity and the endorsement of the liberation struggle as a “just war in a just cause” did not obviate the need to enforce the rule of law as embodied in the Geneva Conventions. “A just cause must be fought by just means; otherwise it may be badly vitiated.”44 But legal equivalence (between agents of the apartheid state and those who resisted it) effectively denied the history that the TRC was trying to document.

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Asmal, who had by now become a critic of the TRC, pointed out that the power imbalance in the apartheid state was the source of all the violence: “While decades of white supremacist violence assaulted the very ideas of the rule of law and constitutionalism, the anti-apartheid resistance was the dutiful safe-house of these ideals.”45 Moreover, he said, any violence committed by the ANC was a function of the apartheid state and not of criminal individuals. “It needs to be emphasised again that the oppressed majority had no access to normal democratic channels, no vote and no right to peaceful protest. In these conditions, armed struggle was not a choice but a necessity, a burden taken up with reluctance, but also with integrity and dignity.”46 The occasional lapses that occurred, he insisted, had to do with a few rogue members of the movement and could not be compared with the systemic violence of the apartheid state. Despite these objections, the Commission refused to locate blame for all the violence in the state apparatus and its agents; it held the liberation movements equally culpable, demanding that they “issue a clear and unequivocal apology to each victim of human rights abuses . . . ” and that they “seek to reconcile with and reintegrate the victims of [their] abuses.”47 In this way, reconciliation came to mean a minimizing, if not a denial, of the unequal relations of pow-

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er that characterized the parties to the conflict. In effect, the conflict was decontextualized and, thus, depoliticized: the defenders and resisters were denied their different histories. The imposition of the rule of law, taken to be objectively unconcerned with inequalities of power, was here at odds with the particular vision of history that the repudiation of apartheid was meant to achieve. It also removed from the table scrutiny of the ongoing power imbalances in the new regime, especially the capitalist organization of the economy. Property Rights As part of the negotiated settlement, the bill of rights in the new constitution left in place “established” property rights. Their recognition was taken to be an instance of fealty to the rule of law, enshrined in the new constitution. But the assumed universal applicability of the rule of law clashed with the specific history of the acquisition of property under apartheid. Was property that had been acquired under laws which sanctioned theft, dispossession, and discrimination legitimately protected in the new regime? Asmal argued for an interpretation of the new constitution that would take this history into account.

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We must keep in mind that property, in the strict sense of a legitimate and settled entitlement, is very different from the pillaged belongings that many people took under apartheid. The right to property now has a place in the final constitution. But properly understood the ideas of rectification and redress, not stasis, are at the heart of the new, legitimate, concept of property.48

The TRC’s final recommendations on this matter did not follow Asmal’s thinking; there was no possibility of negotiating what would have been a revolution—a redistribution of wealth so radical as to overturn the prevailing relations of ownership and production. Instead, the TRC defined the problem and the solution in individual terms and left the capitalist organization of society in place. They called upon the business community and local and regional governments working with the Land Commission, to “undertake an audit of all unused and underutilised land, with a view to making this available to landless people. Land appropriated or expropriated prior to 1994 should also be considered in the auditing process, with a view to compensating those who lost their land.”49 But the Land Commission (established in the 1990s) not only worked with the idea of private property as a test of ownership (when communal property was often the

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rule among local groups), but was massively underfunded. The head of the commission complained that “we are the Cinderella of the commissions. . . . If the government will deny me the 20 million rand I need to do my job . . . then they are not taking [land] restitution seriously.”50 The result of this was, as Mamdani puts it concisely: “Where property rights clashed, as in the case of white settlers and black natives, the former received constitutional protection, the latter no more than a formal acknowledgment in law.”51 No amount of forgiveness could rectify this continuing injustice. Conclusion The TRC’s mission was to build a bridge to a new South Africa imagined as a nation of equality in difference. Asmal had spoken glowingly of a “heterotopia” of “multiple idealisms,”52 forged from diverse narratives, that was not “a new Fatherland” of “stifling homogeneous nationhood.”53 Tutu cited Jesus: “And when I am lifted up from the earth I shall draw everyone to myself.” . . . There is no longer Jew or Greek, male or female, slave or free—instead of separation and division, all distinctions make for a

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rich diversity to be celebrated for the sake of the unity that underlines them.54

The constitution heralded nonracialism as the principle of the new nation. This was the “political nationhood” Arendt had imagined—the coexistence of diverse kinds of people on terms of “the great principles of equality and solidarity” within national boundaries. But how to realize this vision in the confusion of the historical moment of “the now”? On the one hand, the TRC recognized the imperative of redistribution: “It will be impossible to create a meaningful human rights culture without high priority being given to economic justice by the public and private sectors.”55 On the other hand, the means of achieving “a meaningful human rights culture” was ultimately a matter of individual responsibility at the moral and material levels: “It is up to each individual to respond by committing ourselves to concrete ways of easing the burden of the oppressed and empowering the poor to play their rightful part as citizens of South Africa.”56 Here the question is not one of securing economic equality, but of “easing the burden” and “empowering the poor” as citizens—that is, accepting the fact that the poor are “always with us” even when they have achieved formal political emancipation— the perfect neo-liberal conceptualization. This state of

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things led one critic to comment that “reconciliation was the Trojan horse used to smuggle unpleasant aspects of the past . . . into the present political order, to transform political compromise into transcendent moral principles.”57 There is another way to think about the tension between political compromise and moral principle: as a refusal of the neat divisions constructed by the operations of history, as the record of the inextricable interconnections of past and future, the impossibility of establishing a sharp distinction between them. It again involves the image of a bridge, but a bridge in active use, and it comes from Michel de Certeau. I read it as his alternative to the “operation of history.” The bridge is ambiguous everywhere: it alternately welds together and opposes insularities. It distinguishes them and threatens them. It liberates from enclosure and destroys autonomy. . . . As a transgression of the limit, a disobedience of the law of the place, it represents a departure, an attack on a state, the ambition of a conquering power, or the flight of an exile; in any case, the “betrayal” of an order. But at the same time as it offers the possibility of a bewildering exteriority, it allows or causes the re-emergence beyond the frontiers of the alien element that was controlled in the interior, and gives ob-jectivity

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(that is, expression and re-presentation) to the alterity which was hidden inside the limits, so that in recrossing the bridge and coming back within the enclosure the traveler henceforth finds there the exteriority that he had first sought by going outside and then fled by returning. Within the frontiers, the alien is already there, an exoticism or sabbath of the memory, a disquieting familiarity. It is as though delimitation itself were the bridge that opens the inside to its other.58

The bridge, in this depiction, is not uni-directional; travelers move back and forth across it. It permits the “betrayal of an order” by re-admitting exiles and aliens, by opening “the inside to the other.” The inside is profoundly altered by this opening but, at the same time, elements of its prior existence remain intact. The “exteriority” of the other remains even in its inclusion. There is stability and instability in this feat of engineering. The singular linearity of historical progress is confounded by the fact that these insiders and outsiders have lived very different histories, which recombine in relation to one another as the bridge is repeatedly traversed. I think that Certeau’s notion of a bridge that is a site of movement back and forth is a better characterization of what the TRC was engaged with than the

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linear one they espoused and that imagined a oneway path to a better future. The confusion and messiness of the TRC’s deliberations, its “incommensurable epistemic demands,” resulted from having opened the inside, the minority white supremacist nation-state, to its majority black others, bringing those “exiles,” that “alien element” back into the fold. To this day, their “disquieting” presence carries with it their “exteriority,” even as they are now considered to be “inside,” in the sense of being admitted as citizens “within the frontiers” that had once excluded them. Forgiveness was the name given by the TRC to the instrument of bridge-building; it was supposed to open the way to a better future by achieving consensus about the crimes and suffering under the old regime, and in this way establish stark lines of difference between an evil past and a hopeful future. Instead, the bridge functioned as Certeau describes it: those brought back from exile did not entirely lose their “exteriority,” and elements of the past (structures of inequality based on race, on the racialization of class, and the residue of psychic trauma) even today retain their “disquieting familiarity.” The impossibility of definitively consigning the past to the past is surely in part attributable to the specific conditions of the South African transition, but it also suggests the practical difficulty of the effort. The operation of history,

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in Certeau’s critical discussion of it, is meant, after all, to provide moral cover for what are always more complex and troubling political realities, realities that defy the easy distinctions between past and present in order to provide an opening to the future. In the case of South Africa, that future necessarily carried with it elements of the past.

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Chapter 3 The Movement for Reparations for Slaver y in the United States The slave went free; stood a brief moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slavery. —W.E.B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America

There is a long history—dating back to well before the

Civil War—of the demand for reparations for slavery in the United States. And, of course, the United States is not the only country in which demands have been made for some kind of reparation for what has been deemed evil. Demands of this kind were made (and some compensation offered) after Nuremberg and in the process of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s deliberations. But unlike those examples, on the matter of slavery in the United States there was no official focusing moment for the demands, no trial, no commission of inquiry that sought to compensate for the toll taken by slavery and, in that way, to assign it firmly to the past. There was one effort, made first in 1989 by the African American congressman from Michigan, John Conyers. Conyers introduced a bill in the House of Representatives which called for the appointment of

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a commission to study the ongoing effects of slavery and racism.1 The bill (HR 40) was introduced in every subsequent legislative session while Conyers was in the House (he served until 2017).2 The 2017 bill would have established a “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans to examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.”3 Needless to say, in all those years HR 40 never received any consideration— a sign, perhaps, of Conyers’s colleagues’ belief that slavery was a thing of the distant past, its victims (like the institution itself) long dead and buried, and anyway already atoned for by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the US Constitution.4 The reparations movements take a different approach to history from the one I have described in earlier chapters. This is not an attempt to consign evil to the past, but instead to demand recognition of its persistence in the present. It is a critical look at histories that have told consoling stories about racial progress in America; it is a demand for a different kind of historical accounting—a demand for historical accountability. The reparations movements insist that the wounds of slavery were not staunched by the cessation of hostilities in 1865, and that decades of legislative and judicial pronouncements have not dealt with its effects.

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Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose 2014 article in the Atlantic helped reopen the conversation, noted that “racism remains, as it has been since 1776, at the heart of this country’s political life.”5 Because the wounds remain open, these movements for reparation demonstrate—in a way more compelling than Nuremberg or the TRC—the limits of their demands for repair, even as they seek compensation for the violence they and their ancestors have suffered, an “unforgivable” violence whose effects can never be undone. Citing a British abolitionist writing in 1787, Stephen Best and Saidiya Hartman note that “in his account, justice is beyond the scope of the law, and redress necessarily inadequate. . . . How does one compensate for centuries of violence that have as their consequence the impossibility of restoring a prior existence, of giving back what was taken or repairing what was broken?”6 Their answer cites David Scott’s call for a reparatory history of the present, which they say is concerned with “the contemporary predicament of freedom, with the melancholy recognition of foreseeable futures still tethered to the past.”7 I want to suggest that the proponents of reparations movements answer that call not as professional historians—although history is a key element in their set of claims—but as political activists. They do this above all by defining reparation as restitution—in its dictionary defi-

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nition “returning to the rightful owner what has illegally been taken from him.”8 From the earliest days as a demand for payment of wages and pensions for unremunerated work, reparations have meant restoring to the enslaved the status of free laborer and thus the status of human. There is a psychic dimension to the meaning of reparation. In concrete terms, restitution seeks compensation for the collective loss of income and for the persisting poverty of African Americans. It is, as many of its critics have insisted, an impossible demand. But the power of the movements rests precisely on that impossibility: no market value can actually be assigned to the immeasurable losses this history has accrued, the attempt to do so demonstrates its futility. At the same time, the movements force a recognition of the enormous debt owed to African Americans for the work that ensured economic prosperity for the entire nation. In this way, they critique the operations of racial capitalism, whether in the form of slavery or its continuing aftermath. Their object is no less than the rewriting of American history. In effect, the reparations movements demand something other than an “operation of history” in Certeau’s sense. They are insisting on the insufficiency of that operation when it declares slavery past, a closed chapter in American history. Instead they are demanding a new critical history, which acknowledges the ongoing pres-

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ence of past evil (racism), its persistence in the present. A different future will become possible only if that history is brought to light, recognized, and repudiated in both concrete and symbolic ways. The appeal for reparations, unlike the imposition of retribution or the call for redemption, cannot assume the past is past. Coates puts it clearly: “The sins of slavery did not stop with slavery. On the contrary, slavery was but the initial crime in a long tradition of crime, of plunder even, that could be traced to the present day.”9 It is this history—one that renders “untenable” the progressive narrative of American democracy—that legitimizes the demand that reparations be made, even when the sums demanded are but a token of the accumulated debt. Debt Slavery effectively came to an end in the United States in 1863, the third year of the Civil War; Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation declared the enslaved free in many of the Confederate states and invited those fit to do so to join the armies of the North. Slavery continued, however, in many parts of the United States, including all of the Union slave states.10 Slavery was abolished throughout the land with the pas-

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sage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1865. That amendment was followed by two more “Reconstruction Amendments”: the Fourteenth in 1868, which grants citizenship to anyone “born or naturalized in the United States” and stipulates equal protection of the law for them; and the Fifteenth (in 1870) which prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or previous condition of servitude.”11 Yet these formal pronouncements, while declaring illegal the institution of slavery and discrimination based on race, did not signal the end of the oppression of black Americans. A minority of the country’s population, their fate was subsumed to other considerations, primarily the reconciliation of the opposing forces in the war. The vision of the reunified nation did not include black people as primary citizens; indeed, many proponents of emancipation—Lincoln included at one point—thought black men and women should be given their own state or sent to Africa. After the Civil War, local and national legislation addressed the needs of white Southerners first, these were the slaveholders who had lost the human capital upon which their wealth was built. The evils associated with slavery did not come to an end, but continued in new forms, debt being chief among them. Following the period of Reconstruction which opened a brief window of opportunity for some freed-

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men to participate in government, reaction set in. W.E.B. DuBois, Eric Foner and others have detailed the amazing accomplishments of Reconstruction, the postwar, postslavery euphoria in which black churches and schools flourished. In as many as twelve states, coalitions of white and black candidates led to bi-racial state legislatures.12 But even as these developments unfolded, the reaction was strong and harsh. At the official level, gains were reversed when Andrew Johnson succeeded to the presidency after Lincoln’s assassination. He overturned General Sherman’s order to distribute confiscated Confederate lands to freedmen (400,000 acres to 40,000 ex-slaves, which gave rise to the expectation that freedmen would be granted “40 acres and a mule”) and instead restored the land to its former owners.13 Former slaveholders were compensated for their lost property, with little attention to the economic plight of their now-freed slaves. The Bankruptcy Act of 1867 allowed property owners to retain land despite financial insolvency. And crop-lien laws established terms of contract that favored planters and that enabled them to borrow against anticipated harvests—that is, debt to be repaid by exploiting the labor of freedmen. Many Southern states passed laws restricting voting; this was the period, too, of the founding of the Ku Klux Klan and of violent attacks on the lives and property of the African American population. By

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the late 1870s what came to be known as Radical Reconstruction was over, and by the 1890s the Southern states had enacted “Jim Crow laws” in the form of poll taxes, literacy and character tests; property ownership requirements were supplemented by extra-legal forms of intimidation to subjugate black Americans—the violence of lynching prime among them. Arguably, what was most damaging from a longterm perspective was the transformation of freedmen into debtors, usually as tenant farmers or share-croppers and as customers forced to buy on credit in local stores. (In some of these stores, Aaron Carico shows, freedmen were coerced into setting up accounts at gun-point!)14 In this way, freed men and women were trapped anew—this time in financial relationships that they could not escape and which provided a measure of economic compensation to their former owners. Carico has brilliantly theorized this indebtedness, which he calls “a metamorphosis in the value-form of the slave.”15 Though technically exchange value was no longer engraved in black flesh as a commodity form, this value re-attached to a number of those bodies in the red ink of the merchants’ ledgers—like a kind of ghost conjured by law and capital, constantly haunting the freed and compelling their labor.16

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The American dream of accumulated wealth and generational prosperity could not be shared by these black sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Their and their families’ lives were to be plotted not as a line, like an arrow, but as a circle, like a cell. The horizons of their expectations were the breadth of a field of cotton and the length of its growing season, hemmed in by the annual cycles of having credit furnished and having debt tallied, and of never having that arithmetic add up to another future. Here, the quagmire of debt becomes the inertia of history . . . and that stuckness gets limned as blackness. To be or to become swamped in poverty and debt is to be or to become black . . . . Debt, poverty, stasis—in America, these have been the features of a political economy that formulates race.17

Carico’s conclusion points out that there has never been closure on the evil of slavery. “As a matter of historiography,” he writes, “. . . 1865 marks an ideological cover-up that erroneously calls slavery’s time of death.”18 From the perspective of those demanding reparations, that time of slavery’s death has not yet arrived; these are the ghosts (the zombies?) haunting all subsequent American history.

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Indebtedness was not relieved by progressive legislation in subsequent eras. Even as some measure of reform was achieved, “debt, poverty, stasis” continued to mark most African American lives. I do not want to deny the importance of reforms that have made legal structures more susceptible to claims against racism and so have achieved a measure of institutional change, some of it permanent. But the story of black lives in America is one of progress followed by backlash (one step forward, two steps backward). In that story the precarious economic existence of most African Americans, which is an enduring effect of racism, persists. Reconstruction ended in 1877, and the process of Southern “redemption” restored as much black oppression as possible without the legal restoration of slavery. In the twentieth century, New Deal measures which addressed the impoverished “one-third of the nation” effectively excluded black people. In order to secure Southern senators’ support of Roosevelt’s Social Security insurance (for the old and the unemployed), agricultural workers and domestics—jobs in which African Americans predominated—were not covered.19 The list goes on and on. The GI Bill (1944), which supported veterans returning from the Second World War in areas such as education and housing, was seemingly color blind, but it did not

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address or seek to correct long-standing discriminatory policies of educational institutions, banks, and realtors.20 Similarly, government-supported housing initiatives, which enabled home ownership and so a rise into the middle class for many Americans, engaged in discriminatory practices.21 In Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Supreme Court declared that segregation in public schools was a violation of the equal protection clauses of the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby overturning an earlier ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) which had permitted “separate but equal” accommodations under that same amendment.22 Supreme Court Associate Justice Robert Jackson (chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg tribunal) had worried in a private memo about the impact of the decision on “social custom” and on the “fears, prides and prejudices which this Court cannot eradicate, and which even in the North are latent, and occasionally ignite where the ratio of colored population to white passes a point where the latter vaguely, and perhaps unreasonably, feel themselves insecure.”23 Jackson insisted that it was up to the Congress, not the Court, to enforce the ruling and to carry out the detailed restructuring of schools it called for. His comment that “constitutions are easier amended than social customs, and even the North never fully conformed its racial practices to its professions” proved prescient.24 What

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his words imply is a tension between law and justice; law’s concern with regulation can be at odds with the quest for justice, understood as the realization of a moral principle. Brown unleashed not only a host of important actions to implement the ruling, including the tremendous gains of the Civil Rights movement in the years that followed, but it also did not—could not—address the geographic segregation, in cities especially, that even after Brown, held school segregation in place. As Coates points out: “For a century after emancipation, quasi-slavery haunted the South. And more than half a century after Brown v. Board of Education, schools throughout much of the country remain segregated.”25 The results of this segregation served to compound the poverty and indebtedness in which much of the black population finds itself still today. The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 are important landmarks in the history of anti-discrimination law in the United States. They brought the problem of discrimination to the center of American politics, provided the means for enforcement in individual and collective cases, and the grounds for legal redress in the areas of public accommodation, employment, education, and voting rights. But their impact has been less thoroughgoing than anticipated—the latest example was the Supreme Court decision in 2013 that ended federal

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oversight of voter-suppressing states. The decision was followed by explicit attempts at voter suppression in 2016 and 2018.26 Affirmative action was a complement to the antidiscrimination legislation, aimed particularly at integrating the workforce and higher education. Arguably it has had a measure of success in higher education, increasing the numbers of so-called diverse students and faculty, and drawing attention to the importance of heterogeneity for any educational mission—although the determined backlash to it continues to this day. A recent report on admissions in colleges and universities documents the persistence of inequality despite years of attempts to rectify it.27 In the labor force, the results were more mixed. Indeed, there was a cynical calculation by President Richard Nixon when he endorsed the Philadelphia Plan in 1969 (the Plan concerned allocating jobs based on race in the construction industry). Sociologist John David Skrentny shows that Nixon, among other things, sought to undermine the Democratic Party’s constituencies, aiming to split black and white workers and to pit civil rights groups against the organized labor movement, race against class. In this—only one example in a long history of the workings of racial capitalism—he was successful in the long run.28

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If the long run is what we look at, systematic inequality continues to characterize the white/black wealth divide in the United States. A recent report from the Center for American Progress, which called for policies to address the deepening divide between white and black households, noted that the divide has only increased since the Great Recession of 2008/2009 (when sub-prime mortgages disproportionately targeted black homeowners). The introduction nicely summarizes the reasons: Black households . . . have far less access to tax-advantaged forms of saving, due in part to a long history of employment discrimination and other discriminatory practices. A well-documented history of mortgage market discrimination means that blacks are significantly less likely to be homeowners than whites, which means they have less access to the savings and tax benefits that come with owning a home. Persistent labor market discrimination and segregation also force blacks into fewer and less advantageous employment opportunities than their white counterparts. Thus, African Americans have less access to stable jobs, good wages, and retirement benefits at work. . . .29

It is not surprising then that “African Americans are burdened with more costly debt.”30

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The authors don’t take up the question of mass incarceration—but the fact that black men are five times more likely to be imprisoned than white men means less access to decent jobs for them and greater poverty for their families.31 The Center for American Progress report also found that although black families owe slightly less money than their white counterparts, their “debt payments . . . were more than twice as costly.” The study concludes with a group of recommendations for “intentional systematic policy choices” that echoes proposals we have heard for over a century. “Maintaining the status quo,” the authors conclude, “translates into another 200 years before African Americans have the same level of wealth as their white counterparts.”32 Restitution I cite these data because the theme of debt runs through the long history of demands for reparations. But it is not a debt contracted by African Americans; it is one they are owed. It is a debt the nation has incurred for ever having allowed them to be enslaved. If “debt, poverty, [and] stasis” (to use Carico’s terms) have come to characterize the condition of slavery’s descendants, it is not a failure of their will or agency, but a consequence

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of slavery and its aftermath, say those calling for reparations. African Americans are “slavery’s contemporary victims,” writes Randall Robinson whose book demanding reparations is titled The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks.33 Debt, as Carico pointed out, is reenslavement in another form. It is not any longer the theft of wage labor that is operative, but a tax on socalled free labor that effectively renders freedom null. In the view of its advocates, reparations would cancel the indebtedness that traps African Americans in cycles of poverty; it would acknowledge the debt owed by a nation that has yet to recognize its culpability. The double play on the notion of debt (our indebtedness is a result of a debt you owe us) moves the diagnosis away from “the culture of poverty” (blaming African Americans for their poverty and purported family dysfunction) to the structures that have kept racial inequality in place. As Martha Bondi puts it, “reparations changes the discursive image of African Americans from victims to creditors and revises the dominant narrative of American social, political, and economic history. . .  .”34 The demand for restitution of lost earnings turns African Americans into creditors who are calling their loans due. Their recognition as creditors establishes their enduring humanity. Well before Emancipation, some formerly enslaved people petitioned their masters for reimbursement for

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unpaid wages; they knew well the value of the labor that had been stolen from them, as is sometimes indicated in very precise numerical tabulations of what they were owed. Robinson cites an exchange of letters from Jourdon Anderson, an ex-slave, to his former owner in 1865, who invited him to return to work after emancipation. Writing on behalf of himself and his wife, Jourdon Anderson itemized the debt that needed to be settled first: I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor’s visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. . . . If you fail to pay us for our faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. . . . Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.35

Such demands are a variation on Marx’s notion of work for wages under capitalism as alienated labor. In this case, the claim for wages is a claim for recognition as hu-

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man, it assumes that work is the essence of the human, recognized as such by a wage. In 1829, the black abolitionist David Walker insisted that “the greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears”; some years later (in 1854) another black abolitionist, Martin Delany, called for a “national indemnity . . . for the unparalleled wrongs, undisguised impositions, and unmitigated oppression, which we have suffered at the hands of this American people.” 36 After slavery ended, white and black groups organized to demand pensions for former slaves. Attempting to discredit the very idea that anything was owed to them, the Federal government pressed fraud charges against some of the organizers of these pension societies, and even jailed a few of them. There was an unsuccessful lawsuit in 1915 that claimed taxes the United States had levied on cotton in recompense to the formerly enslaved. The court refused the claims on the grounds of the sovereign immunity of the nation; the judges referred the plaintiffs to their former masters for compensation (suggesting that it was individual “contractual” relationships and not a legal system of enslavement that was at issue).37 In all of these efforts the theme of stolen labor predominated. Here was Sojourner Truth in 1868: We have been a source of wealth to this republic. Our labor supplied the country with cotton, until

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villages and cities dotted the enterprising North for its manufacture. . . . Beneath a burning Southern sun have we toiled, in the canebrake and the rice swamp, urged on by the merciless driver’s lash, earning millions of money.38

A century later, Martin Luther King appealed for “a massive program by the government of special compensatory measures” for repayment to the “Negro [who] was, during those years, robbed of the wages of his toil.”39 Audley Moore made the generational connection in 1963, demanding “fair and just compensation for the loss of property rights in the labor of our foreparents, for which no payment of any kind has ever been made.” 40 Robinson called for a “virtual Marshall Plan of federal resources” to repay “white society’s debt to slavery’s contemporary victims.” 41 “The value of slaves’ labor went into others’ pockets. . . . Where was the money? Where is the money? There is a debt here. I know of no statute of limitations either legally or morally that would extinguish it.”42 The debt stands as the unfinished business of slavery, a history of evil that continues despite gestures made to relegate it to the past. It is, moreover, a collective debt, not one owed to individuals, and though expressed in financial terms, it exceeds any sum that can be named. From this perspective, the

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idea that DNA will establish the rightful heirs to wages owned to those previously enslaved is a distortion of the aims of the reparations movements.43 It is victims of racism, not the descendants of enslaved individuals, who are demanding reparations. In the 1960s, the moment of decolonization, and long afterwards, another theme was added to these reparations claims—that of the debt the nation owed to Africa as well as to African Americans. This was a way of establishing a certain national (or trans-national) identity, a black majority counter to the white supremacy upon which the American nation was based. James Forman Jr.’s dramatic “Black Manifesto,” formulated at the Black National Economic Conference in 1969, referred to American blacks as a “colonized people inside the United States, victimized by the most vicious, racist system in the world.”44 His long list of demands to white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues for what could only be symbolic monetary compensation ($15 a head for every black person in the United States—he calculated there were 30 million of them and so asked for $500 million) to establish cooperative businesses in the United States as well as in Africa, which he referred to as “our motherland.” He also called for support of African Liberation movements.

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We are so proud of our African heritage and realize concretely that our struggle is not only to make revolution in the United States, but to protect our brothers and sisters in Africa and to help them rid themselves of racism, capitalism and imperialism by whatever means necessary, including armed struggle.45

Randall Robinson also emphasized Africa in his book on reparations. For Robinson, reclaiming Africa was a way of restoring African American pride. “To be made whole again, blacks need to know the land of their forebears when its civilizations were verifiably equal to any in the world.”46 Reclaiming the culture of Africa needed to be coordinated with those nations. Robinson cited a declaration on reparations from a 1993 meeting of the Organization of African Unity which pointed to “the damage done to Africa and to the Diaspora by enslavement, colonialism and neo-colonialism.” This was not a matter of claiming retribution for past actions, but an insistence on unfinished history: “Fully persuaded that the damage sustained by the African peoples is not a theory of the past but is painfully manifested from Harare to Harlem and in the damaged economies of Africa and the black world from Guinea to Guyana, from Somalia to Surinam.”47 Admission of guilt, the declaration

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went on, was a necessary but not sufficient action; the “unprecedented moral debt owed to the African peoples” must come in the form of economic compensation for the plunder of slavery.48 In this declaration, as in Farmer’s and Robinson’s texts, the demand for reparations becomes a full-fledged analysis of the place of slavery in the organization of a world system of haves and have nots, with racism at its very core. Racism is “not a theory of the past,” but a continuing disaster, a fact of present history. “This black holocaust,” Robinson insisted, “. . . produces its victims ad infinitum, long after the active stage of the crime has ended.”49 Loss A current of loss runs through this literature on reparations, and it is not just loss of the value of labor and of the material requirements for a good life. It is expressed sometimes as the loss of dignity and humanity, the loss of connection to the rich culture and history of Africa, and the (existential) loss of trust in the possibility for a better future. “I was coming to understand,” writes Ta-Nehisi Coates, “that losing things, too, was part of the journey.”50 Coates refers with these words to his personal journey, but like his collection of essays, We Were Eight Years in Power: An Amer-

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ican Tragedy, it is meant to stand as a comment on the long history of black people in America. I think the book can be read as an allegory: Coates’s awakening to the history of his people and to his place in that history, as the story not only of African Americans, but of America itself—a form of reparative history. He tells us that large story as he recounts his own coming to full consciousness of the power, the extent, and the endurance of white supremacy in democratic America. “The Case for Reparations” is a central chapter of the book, the culmination of his journey in the course of the eight years of the Obama presidency. That essay, and the others in the book (one for each of the years of the Obama presidency), give us rich material for thinking about how the call for reparations addresses the experience of loss, above all loss of faith in the moral promise associated with the necessary progress of history. It is reparative in two senses: first, it corrects the myth of American democracy with an account that represents an “other’” history; and second, it repairs the psychic damage incurred by those others as they repeatedly lost out on the promise held out by the myth. The title of the book refers both to the years of the Obama presidency and to the post–Civil War period of Reconstruction. It is taken from the words of South Carolina congressman Thomas Miller who,

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in 1895, appealed to the state constitutional convention for the recognition of the accomplishments of freedmen (“we were eight years in power”) that had helped reconstruct the state and “placed it upon the road to prosperity.”51 The subtitle of Coates’s book refers to the unhappy outcomes of both eras; the story is of unending tragedy, recurring disappointment, the mourning of an unending loss. Loss is Coates’s unrelenting theme; promise followed by loss. The promise of Reconstruction, its violent denial by the end of the century. The promise of the New Deal and the GI Bill, the exclusion of most black people from those opportunities. The promise of Brown v. Board of Education followed by the murder of Emmett Till. The failures of school busing and housing desegregation in city after city. The gains of the civil rights movement and the promise of affirmative action, weakened by one court decision after another; the refusal of the Congress year after year even to entertain Conyers’s bill to study the effects of slavery on “living African Americans.” The unpunished murders of so many black men. And then the Obama election and Coates’s initial naïve belief: . . . it now seemed possible that white supremacy, the scourge of American history, might well be banished in my life-time. In those days I imagined rac-

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ism as a tumor that could be isolated and removed from the body of America, not as a pervasive system both native and essential to that body.52

It takes the election of Donald Trump (“The First White President”) to finally and fully disillusion him. Coates’s own emergence as a writer is an effect of the Obama presidency: “the doors swung open” for black people like him.53 It seemed possible—his portrait of Michelle Obama illustrates this wish— that black people, black culture, black history would henceforth be seen as just another branch of the American tree. “It seemed possible that our country had indeed, at long last, come to love us.”54 If the president were black, this must mean that racial difference had ended as the organizing principle of national identity. But the backlash against Obama (recounted in “The Fear of a Black President”—chapter 5), the outraged reactions to any sign of his identification with other African Americans (as when he says that the murdered Trayvon Martin could have been his son), the need for him to contain his better instincts, awakens Coates to the illusion of linear progress: “I had been wrong about the possibility of Barack Obama . . . I might be wrong about a good deal more.”55 And it sends him on a quest for understanding, from history books—where he discovers the deep roots of Ameri-

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can racism—to Civil War battlefields, where he learns that he lives in a country “that will never apologize for slavery, but will not stop apologizing for the Civil War.”56 Coates’s insights are not new for historians of the United States (indeed they are old news), but his discovery—his personal journey, presented in terms of a naïve sense of discovery—is a powerful call to a larger public to learn this history with him and to share its emotional impact. For Coates the revelations are stunning, as he recounts his own disillusionment—his willingness over and over again to believe what he calls the American story of progress—as a haunting by history. “And now the lies of the Civil War and the lies of these post-racial years began to resonate with each other, and I could now see history, awful and undead, reaching out from the grave.” 57 There is no possibility of mourning the horrors of slavery, of mourning the enslaved dead, because they live on as zombies or vampires in the very souls of their descendants (of all black Americans); their time has not passed. This is not a wholly pessimistic state of things, as Laura Juliet Lauro points out in her work on “Zombie Dialectics.” Tracing the origin of the myth of the zombie to Haitian slave plantations, she notes that there the zombie was “a slave raised from the dead to labor, who revolts against his masters.”58 The zombie at once signifies the social death of the enslaved

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(“biologically alive, but ‘socially dead’”) and its living potential for rebellion (which can bring the ultimate freedom associated with a martyr’s death). The zombie is the “frozen image of [these] irresolvable opposites”—death in life, life in death.59 We might say that for Coates, too, there is something enabling about the history of the undead—it leads to his own conviction that he needs to act. But, in order to act, he needs to mourn the death of his belief in the promise of democracy. “Mourning,” Freud wrote, “is regularly the reaction to the loss of a loved person, or to the loss of some abstraction which has taken the place of one, such as one’s country, liberty, an ideal, and so on.” 60 For Coates, grieving the loss of his belief in the inevitable triumph of the good, there comes a new realization: “it was slavery that allowed American democracy to exist in the first place.” 61 There was nothing “accidental” about the “hypocrisy of a nation founded by slaveholders extolling a gospel of freedom.” 62 For Coates there is no closure to this loss of the ideal of American democracy. In either form—slave zombies or democracy’s lie uncovered—the past lives on. At best, Coates experiences that insurmountable form of grief that Freud calls melancholia, an inability to let go of the lost object(s), an identification with them that deeply (and for Freud, negatively) affects one’s sense of self.

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But Coates’s melancholia, if that is what it is, has a resolution which comes in the form of a demand for reparations. All the threads I had been working on . . . came together in “The Case for Reparations”: the critique of respectability politics, the realization that history could be denied but not escaped, the understanding of the Civil War’s long shadow, the attempt to discover my own voice and language, and, finally, the deeply held belief that white supremacy was so foundational to this country that it would not be defeated in my lifetime, my child’s lifetime, or perhaps ever. There would be no happy endings, and if there were, they would spring from chance, not from any preordained logic of human morality.63

Reparations, then, is less of a realistic demand for repayment of debt (though for some it may also be that) than it is an acknowledgment of the reality of race in the history of the United States. “For Americans, the hardest part of paying reparations would not be the outlay of money. It would be acknowledging that their most cherished myth was not real.”64 In this way, Coates insists not only on the psychic dimension of reparations—the economic demand becomes an instrument for achieving psychological repair—but on

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the (costs of) rewriting history itself. (Here is a realization of David Scott’s call for a reparative history.) Restitution consists in reclaiming the lost promise of justice, the messianic hope of a better, more just future. (In the actions of some African American leaders, reclaiming the lost promise of justice extends to all Americans, as in the case of Martin Luther King’s “Freedom Budget” or the Reverend William Barber’s “Moral Mondays” movement. With them the problem of race is inseparable from predatory capitalism; putting that past to rest would bring justice to all Americans.) Although Coates is clearly pessimistic about the uprooting of white supremacy “in my lifetime, [in] my child’s lifetime,” he does not restrict his appeal to black Americans. His is a call for defiance, the kind he associates with the “repeated acts of self-creation” of Malcolm X. 65 “If freedom has ever meant anything to me personally,” he writes of Malcolm and other resisters, “it is this defiance.” 66 (Perhaps, too, there is an echo of the defiance of the zombie.) The call for reparations implies the need for defiance, for collective action on the part of African Americans and their allies to demand the long-overdue recognition of the sin of slavery so as to bury once and for all the racism of which slavery was both effect and cause. Conyers’s filing of HR 40 year after year, can also be

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seen as an act of defiance in the very body of the nation that refuses to recognize that it is infected by the racist legacy of slavery. Here, the rereading by David Eng, David Kazanjian, and their collaborators of Freud’s understanding of melancholia is useful to think with. They argue that rather than a pathological state (incomplete mourning resulting in distortions of the ego and libido), melancholia’s “continuous engagement with loss and its remains . . . generates sites for memory and history, for the rewriting of the past as well as the reimagining of the future.” 67 Dana Luciano, reading a novel by Pauline Hopkins, an African American writer at the turn of the last century, notes that in Hopkins’s work, “melancholia . . . comes to seem less a pathology, than a realistic response to racial conditions in the United States.”68 From this perspective, we can see a larger purpose to the moral outrage in the calls for reparations. In this literature, moral outrage is a means of political mobilization and psychological repair. It offers a renewed sense of possibility and self-confidence to those beaten down by centuries of exploitation. The self-hatred clinically associated with melancholia and that Coates addresses at several points in his book, is turned outward to the structural conditions that created it. Reparations are depicted as functioning to re-

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fuse the abjection of the enslaved and their descendants, and not only by enabling them to rise out of material poverty. Eng and Kazanjian characterize the process as retroactively creating the figure of the human.69 Moreover, acting to demand reparations turns victims into creditors, as Biondi pointed out; reversing the debt relationship and the standard explanations for it. It is in this sense that we can hear the Organization of African Unity 1993 declaration (mentioned above): its authors were “convinced that the pursuit of reparations by the African peoples on the continent and in the Diaspora will be a learning experience in self-discovery and in uniting political and psychological experiences.”70 Robinson waxed eloquent on the restorative effects of reparations: Even the making of a well-reasoned case for restitution will do wonders for the spirit of African Americans. It will cause them at long last to understand the genesis of their dilemma by gathering, as have all other groups, all of their history—before, during, and after slavery—into one story of themselves. To hold the story fast to their breast. To make of it, over time, a sacred text. And from it, to explain themselves to themselves and to their heirs. Tall again, as they had been long, long ago.71

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The impact of reparations—the acknowledgment of crimes present and past—would raise up not only black Americans, but all Americans. “We could disinter a buried history,” Robinson wrote, “connect it to another, more recent and mistold, and give it as a healing to the whole of our people, to the whole of America.”72 These new reparative histories, reclaiming what has been stolen, buried, and long-denied, would not only announce, but also enable an outlet for melancholia by understanding it not as individual pathology, but as a historical condition, as Luciano puts it, “the very condition, indeed, of being historical.”73 For Coates the stakes are high: “What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. . . . Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”74 The “facts of our history,” revealed in the case for reparations, will—it is hoped—bring into being a lesson of history. It is in this sense that Coates uses Yale President and Congregational minister Timothy Dwight to make the case for reparations. Writing in 1810, Dwight condemned the institution of slavery and insisted that his generation hold themselves responsible for it. It is in vain to alledge, that our ancestors brought them hither, and not we. . . . We inherit our am-

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ple patrimony with all its encumbrances; and are bound to pay the debts of our ancestors. This debt, particularly, we are bound to discharge: and, when the righteous Judge of the Universe comes to reckon with his servants, he will rigidly exact the payment at our hands.75

Coates, writing some two hundred years later, is still awaiting the final judgment (the righteous Judge of the Universe is, in our secular age, History itself) that will exorcise the hold of the evil of racism on the American nation, sending the undead to their eternal rest. But his writing is also a call to arms. He refuses to renounce the messianic promise of emancipation and in this way he can be seen as proposing the “repoliticization” that Jacques Derrida looks for: Not only must we not renounce the emancipatory desire, it is necessary to insist on it more than ever, it seems, and insist on it moreover, as the very indestructibility of the “it is necessary.” This is the condition of a re-politicization, perhaps of another concept of the political.76

David Scott puts it this way, “. . . catastrophic loss can be animated by a remembrance that keeps the past alive in a fragile tension to the present in ways that

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allow possible modes of non-recriminatory political action.”77 This he calls a “reparatory politics.” It is a demand now for what is owed for what was taken, morally and materially, symbolically and spiritually, a demand that includes the recognition that the unforgivable wrong of generations of enslavement has given rise to a permanent racial debt that, while it can never be finally discharged, has necessarily to be honored before any common future of freedom can begin.78

All the debates about the impracticality of demands for reparations (Who are the rightful heirs of slaves? How can the costs be calculated?) are here beside the point. “Reparatory politics” involves refusing the closures performed by an earlier “operation of history” in order to unmask its evasions and reveal its complicity in the perpetuation of racial injustice. The recognition of the extent and irreparable harm of centuries of this injustice will not compensate for or fix it. But it will begin to make it possible to envision what a more just future might be.

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Epilogue T he “L e s son s of H i stor y ”

I began these chapters with a discussion of Michel

de Certeau’s critical theorizing of the “operations of history,” the means by which past and present are distinguished from one another in order to create an opening to a different (and better) future. “The old slogan about the ‘lessons of history’ acquires new meaning in this perspective, if . . . we can identify the ‘moral of history’ with this interstice created within the events of the day through the representation of differences.”1 The lessons of history and the moral of history are synonymous in this comment; they constitute the legitimation for new and different actions and policies that are defined in opposition to an evil that is past. Another way to put this is that the writing or invocation of history is always driven by some implicit or explicit political aim in which “history” is at once a transcendent force (moving inexorably towards a better future) and the

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record of human action, accomplishment, imperfection, or the capacity for evil. That was certainly the case at Nuremberg and for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Africa. At Nuremberg, Nazi criminality was on trial; those who had corrupted the nation-state were convicted and punished for “crimes against humanity” committed in the conduct of illegal “aggressive warfare.” The distinction was phrased in terms of contrasts between civilized and barbaric, rational and psychotic, modern and archaic, democratic and totalitarian. By prosecuting individuals, the question of nationalism—in reality, of ethno-nationalism—at the very core of the identity of modern nations, could be left unaddressed and so transmitted to the future. The “lesson of history” was the unacceptability of Nazi excess (attributed to corrupt individuals), but not the dangers of ethno-nationalism for political democracy. South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission set out to expose the evils of apartheid and it did so effectively in the form of victim and (sometimes) perpetrator testimony. The testimony was offered to correct a historical record of denial, lies, cover-up, and official immunity that had been offered to those who had committed what the international community recognized as crimes against humanity. Although there was some attention to the structural edifice of the apart-

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heid state, most attention focused on individuals. As at Nuremberg, criminal action was a matter of individual accountability; but for the TRC, instead of punishment, forgiveness was expected to heal the wounds of victims and their survivors. In a context of negotiated settlement instead of victory in war, redemption rather than retribution was taken to be the only practical means of enacting the lesson or moral of history and thus of moving ahead to a new South Africa. While the brutal excesses of the apartheid regime were repeatedly documented in the effort to consign them to the past, the structure of racial capitalism went largely unremarked in the official deliberations of the TRC. The need to assure continuity and the rule of law left in place the property rights of those who had benefited from the regime, even if they did not actively enforce it; these were largely whites, who, to this day, continue to enjoy economic advantage in the new South Africa. I introduced another insight from Certeau in the chapter about the TRC: the metaphor of the bridge. Unlike many South African activists who conceived of the bridge as a one-way street leading from past to future, Certeau’s metaphor is about traffic back and forth and thus about the inevitable and persisting influences of the past. I think it is worth citing again here because it makes a larger point I want to emphasize about our conception of history:

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The bridge is ambiguous everywhere: it alternatively welds together and opposes insularities. It distinguishes between them and threatens them. It liberates from enclosure and destroys autonomy. . . . As a transgression of the limit, a disobedience of the law of the place, it represents a departure, an attack on a state, the ambition of a conquering power or the flight of an exile; in any case, the betrayal of an order. But at the same time as it offers the possibility of a bewildering exteriority, it allows or causes the re-emergence beyond the frontiers of the alien element that was controlled in the interior, and gives objectivity (that is, expression and re-presentation) to the alterity that was hidden inside the limits, so that in recrossing the bridge and coming back within the enclosure the traveler henceforth finds there the exteriority that he had first sought by going outside and then fled by returning. Within the frontiers, the alien is already there, an exoticism or sabbath of the memory, a disquieting familiarity. It is as though delimitation itself were the bridge that opens the inside to its other.2

In contrast to Certeau’s critique of the “operation of history,” his metaphor of the bridge asks us to think about how the past influences the present and future, as well as about how the present shapes our under-

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standing of what counts as the past. In a sense, it dissociates history from temporality or, perhaps it is better to say, it introduces an alternative to the linear temporality of the “operation of history”: “the bridge is ambiguous everywhere,” transgressing frontiers, defying limits. It calls for a new consideration of the relationships of exterior and interior, insiders and others, past and present. In a sense, the bridge is the present. That is the work I think the reparations movements (in the United States and elsewhere) are attempting to do for the legacy of slavery. They are calling as much for a “reparatory history” as they are for literal financial restitution, although addressing the contemporary economic impoverishment of the large majority of black Americans is certainly part of the aim. They are arguing that the legal abolition of slavery did not end—has not ended—discrimination against African Americans. They are insisting on the acknowledgment of the unforgivable crime of slavery and its legacies and on the nation’s indebtedness to those who have suffered: the prosperity of the nation was built on the unpaid, forced labor of enslaved human beings and continues to be built on racist institutions and practices (segregated housing, lending, education, labor markets) that no laws have managed to fully contain. This is not an “operation of history” which locates slavery in the difference of a homogeneous American past,

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nor is it a question of assigning responsibility to or demanding accountability from individual slaveholders or segregationists. Instead, the reparations movements call for the writing of an entirely different history, one more in conformity with Certeau’s image of the bridge, one which takes account of different temporalities (of the white majority, of African Americans, of poor and rich) in which the past is not passed, the dead neither dead nor buried. Slavery haunts American history—indeed the entire history of the West— the racism which justified it lives on. What is at stake here is the dissociation of temporality from an “operation of history,” in which injustice can be assigned definitively to the past. Robert Meister, referring to “the illusion of historical closure,”3 puts it this way: Evil is no longer widely understood to be a system of social injustice that has ongoing structural effects, even after the structure is dismantled. Rather, evil is described as a time of cyclical violence that is past— or can be put in the past by defining the present as another time in which the evil is remembered rather than repeated.4

The reparations movements call into question this illusion of closure and instead demand moral account-

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ability in the present. In this way, it is what David Scott calls “a moral and reparatory history.” A moral history . . . is a history-of-the-present that centers on the perpetration of historical evils and injustices and the moral and material harms that these have spawned. A reparatory history, specifically, is one dimension of such a moral history and is concerned with those historical evils and injustices that remain unrepaired in the present, whose wrongs continue to disfigure generations of human lives; and it is concerned, moreover, to reconstruct these evil and unjust pasts in ways that potentially enable us to rethink the moral responsibility that the present owes in the respect of them.5

There is surely an emancipatory aspiration involved here, the desire for a different future, but its arrival is neither considered the inevitable product of History, nor is it achieved by assuming that the violence originally associated with slavery is over. The rewriting of American history, demanded by advocates of reparations, would instead acknowledge the imbrication of present and past, the varying and persistent forms of institutional racism, and the impossibility of repairing the harm by simply assigning it to the past.

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The advocates of reparations—of a reparatory history—have had a wide impact, perhaps, in part, in reaction to the explicit endorsement of white supremacy and the unleashing of racial violence under the presidency of Donald Trump. In August 2019, the New York Times Magazine unveiled its “1619 Project.” The cover of the magazine, with a photograph of dark water and a gray horizon, introduced the project this way: In August of 1619, a ship appeared on this horizon, near Point Comfort, a coastal port in the British colony of Virginia. It carried more than 20 enslaved Africans, who were sold to the colonists. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment it is finally time to tell our story truthfully.

The pages that follow document a “shameful history.” “By trying hard to understand its powerful influence on the present,” the editors continue, “perhaps we can prepare ourselves for a more just future.” 6 The opening to the future that the Times echoes from the reparations movements comes not with a sharp differentiation of present and past, but with

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a critical reading of what has until now counted as official history, a continued questioning of what is included and left out, of how and in whose name justice (or equality or liberty) is being conceived and implemented. History becomes, in this version of it, a relentlessly critical operation, not the careful and fixed distinction between some absolute past and future, but an interrogation of how those temporal terms (past, present, future) are used to generate their “lessons.” That is the critical reading I have tried to perform in these pages. I wanted to explore what it has meant to act “in the name of history,” to think about how seemingly banal references to history have worked to explain or legitimize political action. It’s not a new insight to suggest that there is no autonomous force at work—no transcendent History—that guarantees a better future, but it has been interesting (and I hope useful) to see how the appeal to that History has had a powerful influence on our thinking, organizing our understanding of time and the meaning of events. This, I argue, is what critical history does. The political work of critical history, of course, aims at a better future, but its primary focus is on the present, on exposing the institutional, structural, and cultural arrangements which perpetuate inequality and injustice, despite the “lessons” about progress we have so long been taught. It’s those lessons we need

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to interrogate, asking what work they are doing to secure specific political ends. Asking, too, what alternative visions have been left out of the story, thus giving a sense of inevitability to the arrangements that prevailed rather than considering the nature of the conflicts that produced them. Certeau’s bridge calls for unsettling those pat narratives, replacing the telos of History with the struggles of politics. Struggles in which action is contingent, moral purpose sometimes an inspiration to action, and alternatives to existing power arrangements the aim. In this view of it, action is consequential, even with no positive outcome guaranteed. Critique—in this case, critical history—is a form of knowledge production that supplies not lessons or closure, but a needed strategic perspective for our thinking about change—how it happens, how it is resisted, how, even with resistance, it is nonetheless sometimes made to happen, how it has been/can be directed to ends other than those promised or imagined—in order to figure out how to achieve greater justice, equality, and freedom in our lives and for those who come after us. In this way, we are acting “in the name of history” not to realize some foreseen promise of History, but to realize, in ways not always fully imagined, the ethical beliefs and moral principles upon which our actions—as citizens and critical historians—are based.

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Endnotes

Introduction 1

Castro, “History Will Absolve Me” (defense speech, October 16, 1953). Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam, 184. 3 Certeau, The Writing of History, 57. 4 Ibid., 85. 5 Ibid., 86. 6 Scott, “Evil Beyond Repair,” viii. See also Scott, “A Reparatory History of the Present,” x. 2

Chapter 1 1

Jackson, The Case Against the Nazi War Criminals, 4. Felman, The Juridical Unconscious, 11. 3 Ibid., 15. 4 Jackson, The Case Against the Nazi War Criminals, vi. 5 Ibid., 88–89. 6 Ibid., 7. 7 Ibid., 41. 8 Cited in Stiller, “The Mass Murder of the European Jews,” 159. 9 Jackson, The Case Against the Nazi War Criminals, 76. 2

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10

Ibid., 78. Cited in Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, 213. 12 Butler, Frames, 93. 13 Cited in Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, 229. 14 Walter Ulbricht, cited in Judt, Postwar, 58–59. 15 Jackson, The Case Against the Nazi War Criminals, 16–17. 16 Ibid., 81. 17 After the war, there was a whole industry of psychological explanation developed around the psychosis of the Nazis. On this, see Pick, “In Pursuit of the Nazi Mind?”; see also Gilbert, Nuremberg Diary, written by the prison psychologist at the Nuremberg Tribunal. 18 Cited in Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, 207. 19 Jackson, The Case Against the Nazi War Criminals, 29, 5. 20 Menthon, “‘Opening Address’”, 93. 21 Ibid., 91–93. 22 Harris, Tyranny on Trial, xx. 23 Jackson, The Trial of the Nazi War Criminals, 17, 6. 24 Ibid., 59. 25 Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, 1080. 26 Cited in Blackbourn and Eley, The Peculiarities of German History, 73. Blackbourn and Eley offer a compelling critique of the Sonderweg in this book. 27 Jackson, The Trial of the Nazi War Criminals, 13. 28 Ibid., 47. 29 Jackson, “Report of Robert H. Jackson,” 45. 30 Jackson, The Trial of the Nazi War Criminals, 33. 31 Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, 229–30. 32 Whitman, Hitler’s American Model, 77. 33 Ibid., 9. 34 Ibid., 145. 35 Harris, Tyranny on Trial, 511. 36 Ibid., 91–92. 37 Taylor, The Origins of the Second World War, 13. 38 Menthon, “Opening Address,” 92. 11

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39

Jackson, The Trial of the Nazi War Criminals, 119. Ibid., 48. 41 Cited in Borgwardt, A New Deal for the World, 229. 42 Jackson, The Trial of the Nazi War Criminals, 47. 43 Meister, After Evil, 40. 44 Ibid., 131–33. 45 Ibid., 14. 46 Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 290. For an extended discussion of this issue, see also Butler, Parting Ways. 47 Perugini and Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate, 20. 48 Ibid., 36. See Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, on the question of Israel’s jurisdiction for crimes committed before it became a nation. 49 Perugini and Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate, 37. 50 Meister, After Evil, 131–33. See also Butler, Parting Ways, on critics of this form of nationhood. 51 Brown, Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, 71. 40

Chapter 2 1

Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 20. Ibid., 21. Tutu makes similar comments in his chairman’s foreword to the TRC report. TRC, Report, vol. 1, 1. 3 Some 14,000 people died in political violence in this period, more than in the entire period of the TRC’s mandate (from 1960 on). Ashforth, Witchcraft, Violence, and Democracy, 276. 4 See the moving account in Nadine Gordimer’s novel, None to Accompany Me, 241: “With his assassination the meaning of the position of the young leader in negotiations becomes clearer than it has ever been; his presence carried the peculiar authority of the guerrilla past in working for peace. If men like him wanted it, who could doubt that it was attainable? If a man like him was there to convince his young followers, could they fail to listen to him?” 5 Sitze, The Impossible Machine, 25–27. These acts were overturned in 2

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1995, but the protection from prosecution of former agents of the apartheid state remained in effect. 6 Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 212. Much to the distress of the commission, the ANC also demanded that the culpability of its members for crimes against humanity be deleted from the report. 7 Cited in Asmal et al., Reconcilation Through Truth, 213–14 . 8 TRC, Report, vol. 5, 436. 9 Rose, “One Long Scream,” 10. 10 See Sitze, The Impossible Machine, 193–200. 11 Thomas, “Catharsis,” 263. 12 Asmal, et al., Reconciliation Through Truth, 208. 13 Ibid., 49 14 Ibid., 11. 15 The Commission had four definitions of truth: factual or forensic, personal or narrative (based on the experience of the speaker as they understood it), social or “dialogue” truth, and healing and restorative truth. “Truth as factual, objective information cannot be divorced from the way in which this information is acquired; nor can such information be separated from the purposes it is required to serve.” TRC, Report, vol. 1, 110. The philosophical implications of these differences were not lost on them. 16 Asmal et al., Reconciliation Through Truth, 48. 17 Tutu, “Foreword,” 7–8. 18 Mamdani, “Reconciliation Without Justice.” 19 Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 279. 20 Castillejo-Cuéllar, “Knowledge, Experience, and South Africa’s Scenarios of Forgiveness.” 21 Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 279. 22 Desmond Tutu, “Speech: No Future Without Forgiveness (Version 2)” (2003). Archbishop Desmond Tutu Collection Textual 15. https:// digitalcommons.unf.edu/archbishoptutupapers/15 23 TRC, Report, vol. 1, 133. 24 Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 273. 25 For example, see TRC, Report, Vol. 1, 48.

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26

TRC, Report, vol. 1, 134. TRC, Report, vol. 1, 48 (emphasis added). 28 Davis, “The South African Truth Commission and the AZAPO case,” 129. 29 Meister, After Evil, 11. 30 Ibid. 31 Personal email correspondence. 32 Asmal et al., Reconciliation Through Truth, 9. 33 TRC, Report, vol. 1, 102. But here, unlike Nuremberg, it is not action against other nations, but internal “crimes against humanity” that constitute a more abstract notion of international law. 34 Volume 2 of the Report is a stunning mapping of the organization and operations of the security forces, the carrying out and covering up of illegal actions, etc. 35 TRC, Report, vol. 5, 11. 36 TRC, Report, vol. 1, 134. 37 Grandin, “The Instruction of Great Catastrophe,” 48. 38 Sitze, The Impossible Machine, 202. 39 Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep, 217. 40 Meister, After Evil, 24. 41 Ibid., 28. 42 “. . . the TRC, by looking to the wisdom of international precepts as a guide to its conclusions, will bolster its own domestic authority along with the authority of those global precepts that were a feature of the country’s deliverance from what went before.” Asmal et al., Reconciliation Through Truth, 205. 43 Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 106. 44 Ibid., 107. On the ANC’s failure to use just means see TRC, Report, vol. 2, 325. 45 Asmal et al., Reconciliation Through Truth, 114. 46 Ibid., 121. 47 TRC, Report, vol. 5, 347. 48 Asmal et al., Reconciliation Through Truth, 141. 49 TRC, Report, vol. 5, 319. 27

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50

Johnson, “Theorizing the Loss of Land,” 290. Mamdani, “Beyond Nuremberg,” 339. 52 Asmal et al., Reconciliation Through Truth, 214. 53 Ibid., 9. 54 Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 265. 55 TRC, Report, vol. 5, 308. 56 TRC, Report, vol. 5, 349. Here there is a similarity to Nuremberg, individual responsibility is the only thing that can be prosecuted—legally at Nuremberg, morally in South Africa. 57 Wilson, The Politics of Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, 97. 58 Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 128. 51

Chapter 3 1

Araujo, Reparations for Slavery and the Slave Trade, 160. This proposal must have been influenced by the establishment of such commissions in Latin America and also by the decision, in 1988, to offer compensation to Japanese-Americans interned during the Second World War. As I write this (June 2019), a similar bill is being proposed by Democrats in the House of Representatives. For the first time in its history, it may gain some traction. 3 HR 40, Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act, https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/ house-bill/40. 4 In 2019, a new version of Conyers’s bill was introduced in the House of Representatives—as of this writing (September 2019), it has won the support of the Democratic leadership and many legislators, but the Republican-controlled Senate is not likely to let it pass into law. See Brufke, “Reparations Bill Gains Traction”; and Stolberg, “House Democrats Consider a Commission on Reparations.” 5 Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 347. 6 Best and Hartman, “Fugitive Justice,” 1–2. 7 Ibid., 5. 2

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8

The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1973), 1108. 9 Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 158. 10 Missouri, Maryland, Delaware, and Kentucky, the last two until the very end of the war. 11 US Senate, “Landmark Legislation: Thirteenth, Fourteenth, & Fifteenth Amendments,” US Senate website, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/common/generic/CivilWarAmendments.htm, last accessed Sep. 12, 2019. 12 Foner, A Short History of Reconstruction. 13 Oubre, Forty Acres and a Mule. 14 Carico, “Freedom as Accumulation,” 1. 15 Ibid., 4. 16 Ibid., 6. 17 Ibid., 23–24. 18 Ibid., 11. 19 Indeed, after passage of the act in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and 70 to 80 percent of them in the South were ineligible for support, leading an NAACP spokesman to describe this new American safety net as “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 186. 20 On the GI Bill, or the Servicemen’s Readjustment Act of 1944, see “Research Starters: The GI Bill” on the National WWII Museum, New Orleans website at https://www.nationalww2museum.org/studentsteachers/student-resources/research-starters/research-starters-gi-bill, last accessed September 23, 2019. 21 In Chicago, for example, the Federal Housing Authority (FHA) openly endorsed segregated housing, leading one commentator to note that “the FHA adopted a racial policy that could well have been called for in the Nuremberg laws.” Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 169. The area of housing was a particularly stark example of racial exclusion; from government-backed loan agencies (which adhered to restrictive covenants for sales and rentals) to local enforcement that protected

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white privilege, housing markets maintained not only geographic segregation, but all that went with it, including segregated schools. 22 In the wake of Brown, schools in the South were integrated, even as many white parents enrolled their children in private (typically Christian) academies. Black teachers and principals were often demoted or lost their jobs entirely since white teachers were given priority in newly integrated schools. See “Brown v. Board of Education,” History.com, October 27, 2009, updated September 9, 2019, https://www.history. com/topics/black-history/brown-v-board-of-education-of-topeka. 23 “Memorandum by Mr. Justice Jackson,” cited in Collins, “Justice Robert Jackson’s Revealing Thoughts.” I am grateful to Robert Post for this reference. 24 Ibid., 1. 25 Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 334. 26 Despite dogged resistance from those (especially in the South) who sought to undermine the laws if they could, both acts opened a period of heightened expectation and significant change. More African Americans voted and won office, even in the South, where federal oversight of states with long records of voter suppression led to important reform. At the same time, racial gerrymandering of electoral districts intensified and party realignments (the Democrats became the face of liberal policies, the Republicans of white conservatism) sharpened political divides based on race. 27 Tough, “The Impossible Math of College Admissions,” 42–49, 72, 74. 28 Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action. 29 Hanks, Solomon, and Weller, “Systematic Inequality,” 3. 30 Ibid., 19. 31 Blacks are 12 percent of the US population and 33 percent of the prison population. A study of the effects of felony convictions on job applicants in 2003 “showed that blacks who said they had a criminal record had a callback rate of 5 percent, and blacks who said they did not had a rate of 14 percent. For whites, the rates were 17 percent . . . and 34 percent.” Pager, Marked. The citation appears in Devah Pager’s obituary in the New York Times, November 9, 2018, B12.

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32

Hanks, Solomon, and Weller, “Systematic Inequality,” 34. Robinson, The Debt, 107. 34 Bondi, “The Rise of the Reparations Movement,” 9. 35 Robinson, The Debt, 240–41. 36 Araujo, Reparations for Slavery, 42, 52. 37 Ibid., 104. 38 Ibid., 94. 39 Ibid., 142. 40 Ibid., 140. 41 Robinson, The Debt, 107. 42 Ibid., 207. 43 See Nelson, The Social Life of DNA, especially, chapter four. 44 Forman, “Black Manifesto.” 45 Forman did not rule out armed struggle in the United States either; in his Manifesto peaceful demands for a Southern land bank, black publishing houses, TV networks, and skill training centers, as well as a Black Anti-Defamation League sat alongside declarations of war, in the form of calls for disruptions of church services, sit-ins, and other unspecified means of self-defense and national liberation. 46 Robinson, The Debt, 17. 47 It was also a call for a treatment equal to that received by other groups: we are “aware of historical precedents in reparations varying from German payments of restitution to the Jews, to the question of compensating Japanese-Americans for the injustice of internment by the Roosevelt Administration in the United States during World War II. . . .” Robinson made the comparison explicit when he repeatedly referred to slavery as “an American holocaust.” Robinson, The Debt, 219. 48 Ibid., 219–21. (My emphasis) 49 Ibid., 216. 50 Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 288. 51 Ibid., xiii. 52 Ibid., 37. 53 Ibid., 43. 54 Ibid., 138. 33

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55

Ibid., 68. Ibid., 80. 57 Ibid., 69 (my emphasis). 58 Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie. See, especially, “Introduction: Zombie Dialectics—“‘Ki sa sa ye?’, (What is that?)”, 4. 59 Ibid., 5. 60 Freud, “Mourning and Melancholia,” 243. 61 Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 109, 66. 62 Ibid., 64. 63 Ibid., 159. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid., 104. 66 Ibid., 112. 67 Eng and Kazanjian, Loss: The Politics of Mourning, 4. 68 Luciano, “Passing Shadows,” 149. 69 There is a great deal of debate on the question of enslavement and the status of human for the enslaved. Certainly, the representation of them as slaves dehumanized them. The effect on their subjectivity is another issue. See Sexton, “Ante-Anti Blackness and Afterthoughts.” For another perspective, see also the forum on Walter Johnson, “To Remake the World: Slavery, Racial Capitalism, and Justice,” Boston Review, February 20, 2018, http://bostonreview.net/forum/walter-johnson-to-remake-the-world. 70 Robinson, The Debt, 220. 71 Ibid., 232. 72 Ibid., 243. 73 Luciano, “Passing Shadows,” 149. 74 Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 202. 75 Dwight, “‘The Charitable Blessed’”: A Sermon, Preached in the First Church in New-Haven, August 8, 1810.” Quoted in Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power, 180. 76 Derrida, Specters of Marx, 75. 77 Scott, Omens of Adversity, 124. 78 Scott, “Preface: Evil Beyond Repair,” x. 56

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Epilogue 1

Certeau, The Writing of History, 86. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 128. 3 Meister, After Evil, x. 4 Ibid., 25. 5 Scott, “A Reparatory History of the Present,” x. 6 “The 1619 Project,” New York Times Magazine, Special Edition, August 18, 2019, 5. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/08/14/ magazine/1619-america-slavery.html. 2

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Inde x

A Adorno, Theodor, 14 affirmative action, 73, 84 Africa, as recipient of reparations, 80–81, 91 African Americans: civil rights legislation and, 72–73; culture of poverty ascribed to, 75–76; incarceration of, 75, 112n31; losses suffered by, 82–94; persistence of racism and discrimination against, 62– 65, 70–76, 79–82, 85–87; post–Civil War racism and discrimination against, 66–68; post-slavery economic situation of, 68–70, 72, 74–75; psychological burdens borne by, 64, 90–92, 114n69; and segregation, 71–72, 84, 111n21. See also slavery reparations African National Congress (ANC), 32–35, 47, 50–51, 108n6 amnesty, 41, 44–45, 47 ANC. See African National Congress apartheid: as alternate value system, 33–34, 47; TRC report on, 43; victims of, as defined by TRC, 37–38; violence under, 32 Arendt, Hannah, 27–28, 55 Asmal, Kader, 36–37, 39, 40, 42, 51–54 B Bankruptcy Act (United States), 67 Barber, William, 89 Best, Stephen, 63 Biko, Steven, 41 Black National Economic Conference, 80 Bondi, Martha, 75–76 Borgwardt, Elizabeth, 21

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Brown, Wendy, 29–30 Brown v. Board of Education, 71–72, 84, 112n22 Butler, Judith, 14 C capitalism. See racial capitalism Carico, Aaron, 68–69, 75–76 Castro, Fidel, 1 catharsis: Gramsci’s notion of, 36; Tutu’s notion of, 38 Center for American Progress, 74–75 Certeau, Michel de, 3–4, 11, 45, 56–59, 95, 97–100, 104 Césaire, Aimé, 7, 30 Christianity: Nazi values contrasted with, 16; and TRC, 35, 37–39, 41–42 civilization, as evaluative standard, 11–14, 17, 30 Civil Rights Act (United States), 72, 112n26 civil rights movement, 72, 84 Coates, Ta-Nehisi, 63, 65, 72, 82–90, 92–93 colonialism. See imperialism/colonialism Commission Report, of TRC, 33, 37, 40, 45 Conservative Party (South Africa), 45 Conyers, John, 61–62, 84, 89–90, 110n4 crimes against humanity: in Nuremberg context, 5, 14, 15, 25, 26; in TRC context, 33, 43, 44, 49, 50, 109n33 critical history, 64–65, 103–4. See also historical operation: alternative to (bridge metaphor) Croce, Benedetto, 22 D Dahrendorf, Ralph, 18–19 debt: forced on African Americans by post–Civil War socioeconomic conditions, 68–70, 72, 74–75; owed to Africa, 80, 91; owed to African Americans, restitution for, 75–82, 92–94

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De Klerk, D.W., 33, 47 Delany, Martin, 78 Derrida, Jacques, 31, 93 despotism, 16–17 DuBois, W.E.B., 61, 67 Dwight, Timothy, 92–93 E Eichmann, Adolf, 29 Emancipation Proclamation, 65 Eng, David, 90–91 ethno-nationalism. See nationalism evil: historical operations for addressing, 95, 100; in Nuremberg context, 8–10, 16, 17, 19, 26–27; reparations claims as response to, 61, 62, 65, 66, 69, 79, 93; in TRC context, 34–35, 38–40, 43, 46, 48 F Federal Housing Authority, 111n21 Felman, Shoshana, 8–9 Fifteenth Amendment, 62, 66 forgiveness, 35, 37–39, 43–44, 46, 58 Forman, James, Jr., 80–81, 113n45 Fourteenth Amendment, 62, 66, 71 France, race in, 23–24 Freud, Sigmund, 87, 90 G Geneva Conventions, 50 genocide, 25–26, 30 GI Bill, 70, 84 Gordon, Neve, 28

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Gramsci, Antonio, 36 Grandin, Greg, 44 H Hani, Chris, 32, 45 Harris, Whitney, 11–14 Hartman, Saidiya, 63 historical operation: alternative to (bridge metaphor), 56–59, 97–100, 104; defining, 2–4; as moral judgment on past, present, and future, 3–6, 11, 19, 24, 26–27, 30, 33, 59, 95, 103–4; in Nuremberg trials, 8, 11, 24, 26–27, 30, 96; reparations movement and, 64–65, 88– 89, 94, 99–100; in TRC, 33, 35, 56–59, 96–97 history: critical, 64–65, 103–4; critique of official U.S., 64–65, 68, 83, 85–89, 92, 100–103; judicial evaluation of, 8–9; lessons of, 2–4, 10, 92, 95–96, 103–4; as moral arbiter, 1, 4, 93, 103; Nazi Germany seen in relation to, 16–19; triple aspect of, 2–3; western notion of universal, 1–2 Hitler, Adolf, 7, 23 housing segregation, 71, 84, 111n21 HR 40 (reparations bill), 61–62, 89–90, 110n2, 110n4 I imperialism/colonialism: African Americans as victims of, 80–81; in context of Nuremberg trials, 12–14, 23, 26; Israel and, 28–29; legitimacy of, 26, 29 incarceration, of African Americans, 75, 112n31 Inkatha Freedom Party, 32 International Labor Organization, 49 international law: in Nuremberg context, 12–13, 15–16, 20; in TRC context, 49, 109n33 International Military Tribunal, 8 Israel, 27–29

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J Jackson, Robert H., 9, 11–16, 19–20, 24–26, 71–72 Jews: international intervention on behalf of, 15, 21, 25; and Israel nationhood, 27–29 Jim Crow laws, 68 Johnson, Andrew, 67 K Kazanjian, David, 90–91 Kellogg–Briand pact, 11, 13 King, Martin Luther, 79, 89 Ku Klux Klan, 67 L Land Commission (South Africa), 53–54 Lauro, Laura Juliet, 86 lebensraum, 12, 22 lessons of history, 2–4, 10, 92, 95–96, 103–4 Lincoln, Abraham, 65, 66 London Charter, 13 Luciano, Dana, 90, 92 Luther, Martin, 18 lynching, 68 M Malan, Wynand, 34, 47 Mamdani, Mahmood, 38, 54 Mandela, Nelson, 32, 50 Mann, Michael, 26, 29 Martin, Trayvon, 85 Marx, Karl, 77 Meinecke, Friedrich, 22

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Meister, Robert, 25–26, 41, 47–49, 100 melancholia, 87, 90, 92 Menthon, François de, 16, 23 Miller, Thomas, 83–84 minorities, nations’ treatment of, 20–21, 24–26 modernity, 18–19 Moore, Audley, 79 Morgenthau, Hans, 16 N nationalism: in context of Nuremberg trials, 19–20, 23, 26–27, 30; dark side of, 26, 29–30 National Party (NP; South Africa), 32, 47 national sovereignty: in globalization, 29–30; homogeneity vs. otherness in conception of, 25–26, 29–30; mistreatment of minorities protected by, 20–21, 24–26; in Nuremberg context, 14, 19–20, 24–27; and reparations claims, 78; war as violation of, 14, 24–25 Native Americans, 22 Nazi Germany: aggressive (illegal) warfare conducted by, 12–16, 20, 25–26; anomalous/idiosyncratic character of, 11, 15–19, 22–24, 26; and nationalism, 19–26; primitive/retrograde character of, 16– 18, 24; U.S. race law as model for, 21–22 New Deal, 70, 84 New York Times Magazine, 102 Nixon, Richard M., 73 NP. See National Party Nuremberg trials, 5, 7–30; on anomalous/idiosyncratic character of Nazi state, 11, 15–19, 22–24, 26; arguments for and against, 10; “civilization” as standard in, 11–14, 17, 30; death sentences in, 9, 26; evidence in, 9, 10, 24; as historical operation, 8, 11, 24, 26–27, 30, 96; on illegal warfare, 12–16, 20, 25–26; and national sovereignty, 19– 27, 30; reparations considered in, 61; TRC rejection of model of, 31

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O Obama, Barack, 83–85 Obama, Michelle, 85 Omar, Dullah, 40 Organization of African Unity, 81, 91 P Perugini, Nicola, 28 Philadelphia Plan, 73 Plessy v. Ferguson, 71–72 primitivism, 16–17, 24 Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act (South Africa), 40 property rights, in South Africa, 52–54 R race: in context of Nuremberg trials, 21–24, 27; in France, 23–24; and nationalism, 27–28; in Nazi Germany, 21–24; in United States, 21–22 racial capitalism, 64, 73 Radical Reconstruction, 68 Reconstruction (United States), 66–68, 70, 83–84 reparations. See slavery reparations Robinson, Randall, 76–77, 79, 81–82, 91–92, 113n47 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 70 Rose, Jacqueline, 35 S school segregation, 71–72, 84, 112n22 Scott, David, 6, 63, 89, 93–94, 101 segregation, 71–72, 84, 111n21, 112n22 “separate but equal” principle, 71 Sherman, William Tecumseh, 67 Shirer, William, 18

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Sitze, Adam, 45 Skrentny, John David, 73 slavery reparations, 5, 61–94; compared to actually instituted reparations, 110n2, 113n47; and debt, 64; and debts incurred after slavery, 68–70, 72, 74–75; defiance expressed through demand for, 89– 91; and historical operation, 64–65, 88–89, 94, 100–103; historical reckoning sought in, 62, 64–65, 88–89, 92–94, 100–103; history of, 61–62; loss as theme in, 82–94; moral/political impetus for, 93– 94, 100–101; persistence of racial injustice as motivation and focus of, 62–65, 70–76, 79–82, 88–90, 92–94, 100–101; post–Civil War conditions as background for, 65–75; psychological component of, 64, 88, 90–92; restitution as goal of, 63–64, 75–82 Social Security, 70, 111n19 Sonderweg (special path), 18 South Africa. See Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC, South Africa) sovereignty. See national sovereignty T Taylor, A.J.P., 24 Taylor, Telford, 1 Thirteenth Amendment, 62, 66 Thomas, Peter, 36 Till, Emmett, 84 Truman, Henry S., 13 Trump, Donald, 85, 102 Truth, Sojourner, 78–79 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC; South Africa), 5, 30–59; background on, 36–37, 40; and beneficiaries of apartheid system, 47–49; bridge metaphor applied to, 39–42, 44, 56–58; collective response as desired outcome of, 35–37, 39, 42, 48; collective vs. individual perspectives on, 35–39, 47–49, 55; criticisms of, 51; for-

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giveness as desired outcome of, 35, 37–39, 43–44, 46, 58; goals and mandate of, 31–32, 34–35, 49–50, 54–55; historical accountability in, 42–47, 50–54; as historical operation, 33, 35, 56–59, 96– 97; individual responsibility as issue for, 43–45, 47, 47–48, 55; legal equivalence as principle in, 49–52; perpetrators’ role in, 35, 36, 39, 44–46; and property rights, 52–54; reparations considered in, 61; subjective transformation as key to, 35–36; truth as defined by, 108n15; victims’ role in, 35, 36–39, 44, 48; violence preceding institution of, 32–33. See also Commission Report, of TRC Tutu, Desmond, 31–32, 37–38, 41, 50, 54–55 U United Nations, 49 United States: critique of official history of, 64–65, 69, 83, 85–89, 92, 100–103; race law as model for Nazis, 21–22; slavery reparations movement in, 61–94, 99–102; treatment of minorities in, 20–22 U.S. Supreme Court, 71–73 V Voting Rights Act (United States), 72, 112n26 W Walker, David, 78 warfare, aggressive (illegal) vs. defensive (legal), 12–16, 20, 25–26 Weber, Max, 18 Whitman, James Q., 21–22 X X, Malcolm, 89 Z zombies, 86–87

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