Useful search terms and related terms to use in the linked databases below:
These landing pages aggregate or gather a bunch of different resources about reparations. This is another useful starting point if you want to collect a bunch of different resources on a topic in one place.
From Here to Equality
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Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the U.S. government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household holds in wealth the average black household possesses a mere ten cents. In From Here to Equality, William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen confront these injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. After opening the book with a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being, Darity and Mullen look to both the past and the present to measure the inequalities borne of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, they next assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. Finally, Darity and Mullen offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery. Taken individually, any one of the three eras of injustice outlined by Darity and Mullen--slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day discrimination--makes a powerful case for black reparations. Taken collectively, they are impossible to ignore.
Reparations for Black Americans
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In recent years, discussions about reparations for Black Americans have gone from the abstract to the possible. While critics claim that reparations are unnecessary because those who deserve compensation are long dead, others argue that in the years since the end of the Civil War the United States enacted many harmful laws and policies that prevented its Black citizens from leading enriched lives. The viewpoints in this volume examine whether reparations are the best way to right a wrong, how other countries have handled similar matters, and how reparations could be executed on a practical level.
Stolen Wealth, Hidden Power
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A meticulous and exhaustive accounting of the total economic devastation wreaked on Black communities by mass incarceration with an action guide for vital reparations. Stolen Wealth, Hidden Power is a staggering account of the destruction wrought by mass incarceration. Finding that the economic value of the damages to Black individuals, families, and communities totals $7.16 trillion--roughly 86 percent of the current Black-White wealth gap--this compelling and exhaustive analysis puts unprecedented empirical heft behind an urgent call for reparations. Much of the damage of mass incarceration, Tasseli McKay finds, has been silently absorbed by families and communities of the incarcerated--where it is often compensated for by women's invisible labor. Four decades of state-sponsored violence have destroyed the health, economic potential, and political power of Black Americans across generations. Grounded in principles of transitional justice that have guided other nations in moving past eras of state violence, Stolen Wealth, Hidden Power presents a comprehensive framework for how to begin intensive individual and institutional reparations. The extent of mass incarceration's racialized harms, estimated here with new rigor and scope, points to the urgency of this work and the possibilities that lie beyond it.
Reparative Universities
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A timely investigation of why diversity alone is insufficient in higher education and how universities can use reparative actions to become anti-racist institutions. As institutions increasingly reckon with histories entangled with slavery and Indigenous dispossession, diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) efforts occupy a central role in the strategy and resources of higher education. Yet reparation is rarely offered as a viable strategy for institutional transformation. In Reparative Universities, Ariana González Stokas undertakes a critical and decolonial analysis of DEI work, linking contemporary practices of diversity to longer colonial histories. González Stokas argues that diversity is an insufficient concept for efforts concerned with anti-oppression, anti-racism, equity, and decolonization. Given its historical ties to colonialism, can higher education foster reconciliation and healing? Reparation is offered as a pathway toward untangling higher education from its colonial roots. González Stokas develops the term "epistemic reparation" to describe a mode of social-historical accountability that can already be seen at work in historical examples, as well as current events in the United States, South Africa, and Canada. Recent legal decisions by Georgetown University and the Princeton Theological seminary to enact economic recompense for buying and selling human beings are evidence of attempts to redress higher education's violent histories and the colonial structures they reproduce every day on college campuses. Engaging with a broad range of theories from decolonial philosophy to organizational psychology, González Stokas offers a pathway--guided by reparative activities--for institutional workers frustrated by what often feels, as Sara Ahmed describes, like "banging one's head against a brick wall." Reparative Universities offers insight into why DEI efforts have been disconnected from past injustices and why unsettling diversity and engaging meaningful repair are critical for the future of higher education.
Historical Justice and Memory
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Historical Justice and Memory highlights the global movement for historical justice-acknowledging and redressing historic wrongs-as one of the most significant moral and social developments of our times. Such historic wrongs include acts of genocide, slavery, systems of apartheid, the systematic persecution of presumed enemies of the state, colonialism, and the oppression of or discrimination against ethnic or religious minorities. The historical justice movement has inspired the spread of truth and reconciliation processes around the world and has pushed governments to make reparations and apologies for past wrongs. It has changed the public understanding of justice and the role of memory. In this book, leading scholars in philosophy, history, political science, and semiotics offer new essays that discuss and assess these momentous global developments. They evaluate the strength and weaknesses of the movement, its accomplishments and failings, its philosophical assumptions and social preconditions, and its prospects for the future.
Japanese Americans
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This revised and expanded edition of Japanese Americans: From Relocation to Redress presents the most complete and current published account of the Japanese American experience from the evacuation order of World War II to the public policy debate over redress and reparations. A chronology and comprehensive overview of the Japanese American experience by Roger Daniels are underscored by first person accounts of relocations by Bill Hosokawa, Toyo Suyemoto Kawakami, Barry Saiki, Take Uchida, and others, and previously undescribed events of the interment camps for ?enemy aliens? by John Culley and Tetsuden Kashima. The essays bring us up to the U.S. government's first redress payments, made forty eight years after the incarceration of Japanese Americans began. The combined vision of editors Roger Daniels, Sandra C. Taylor, and Harry H. L. Kitano in pulling together disparate aspects of the Japanese American experience results in a landmark volume in the wrenching experiment of American democracy.
Long Overdue
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An investigation of America's failure to atone for the wrongs of slavery Ever since the unfulfilled promise of "forty acres and a mule" after the Civil War, America has consistently failed to compensate Black Americans for the wrongs of slavery. Exploring why America has struggled to confront the issue of racial injustice, Long Overdue provides a history of the racial reparations movement and shows why it is more relevant now than ever. Through an examination of Americans' unwillingness to address economic injustice, Charles P. Henry crafts a skillful moral, political, economic, and historical argument for African American reparations, focusing on successful political cases. In the wake of successes in South Africa and New Zealand, new models for reparations have found traction in a number of American cities and states, from Dallas to Baltimore and Virginia to California. By looking at other dispossessed groups--Native Americans, Holocaust survivors, and Japanese internment victims in the 1940s--Henry shows how some groups have won the fight for reparations, and explores new ways forward for Black Americans. From Hurricane Katrina to Hurricane Harvey, the events of the 21st century continue to show that the legacy of racial segregation and economic disadvantage is never far below the surface in America. As the issue of reparations is brought to the national stage by figures such as Ta-Nehisi Coates and Kamala Harris, Long Overdue provides a must-read survey of the political and legislative efforts made toward reparations over the course of American history, and offers a new path toward establishing equality for all Black Americans.
