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Why reparations could prevent the next Ferguson

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    The Week Magazine
    Sept 2 2014

    Why reparations could prevent the next Ferguson


    Countries can only move forward once they have come to terms with their past
    By Belinda Cooper

    Watching the events unfold in Ferguson, Missouri, I couldn't help
    thinking about the Holocaust and post-war Germany.

    As the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, I've spent years watching
    Germany wrestle with its dark past. It's just one of many places that
    have made efforts to understand and compensate for a difficult
    history: For nearly three decades, countries as varied as South
    Africa, Rwanda, and the nations of Latin America and post-Communist
    Eastern Europe have been engaged in this process, often called
    "transitional justice." That's a broad term for the ways in which
    societies deal with the legacies of past injustice. Many believe that
    countries can only move forward once they have come to terms with
    their past in this way.

    We're accustomed to looking abroad for examples of such processes. But
    maybe -- especially in light of racial tensions once again revealed in
    Ferguson -- it's time for us to begin thinking about what "transitional
    justice" could mean for the U.S.

    Like many nations, Americans are reluctant to see ourselves in the
    same light as human rights abusers elsewhere. And yet our history
    includes a number of glaring atrocities, including the genocide of
    Native Americans and slavery and its aftermath. But the United States
    lags behind other societies in its efforts to confront and make amends
    for that legacy.

    What, exactly would that entail? Justice means more than putting
    perpetrators on trial. The transitional justice process also
    encompasses methods focused on the victims and the wider society, such
    as truthseeking, memorialization, education, institutional change, and
    material compensation -- that is, actions that seek not only to punish,
    but to encourage a shared historical understanding, begin to repair
    the damage done, and ensure that it can't happen again.

    A first step in the process seems simple: official acknowledgment. Yet
    societies are often hesitant to admit historical wrongdoing. Armenians
    have been trying for decades to get Turkish authorities to acknowledge
    that they were the victims of an organized crime. To understand what
    this means, I've tried to imagine what I would feel had Germany not
    accepted responsibility for the Holocaust. Official silence negates
    the experience of the victims, but it's also damaging to perpetrator
    societies; it feeds denial and false narratives of history that allow
    tensions and resentments to persist.

    Apology often accompanies acknowledgment. Both Australia and Canada
    have recently apologized to their aboriginal populations for decades
    of removing children from their families. German Chancellor Willy
    Brandt's famous gesture in Warsaw in 1970, when he fell to his knees
    before a memorial to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, enraged many Germans
    who preferred not to face questions of guilt and responsibility. But
    this spontaneous gesture of atonement was enormously important to
    Holocaust survivors. In recent years, the Polish government has
    reversed decades of denial under its Communist government by
    acknowledging the participation of some Poles in anti- Semitic
    atrocities during World War II. Even the U.S. has managed an apology --
    in 1988, after a long campaign by Japanese-Americans, President Reagan
    apologized for the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War
    II.

    Yet the U.S. has never officially apologized for slavery or Jim Crow
    (and a 2009 "apology" to Native Americans, slipped into a Defense
    Appropriations Act, made little impact). Nor are there memorials to
    slavery or to the Native American genocide on a scale similar to the
    Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. That memorial,
    imperfect as it is, represents a conscious public acknowledgment by a
    perpetrator society of its own wrongdoing -- both a rebuke to deniers
    and a purposeful statement that memory should not only be the job of
    victims.

    One reason societies often resist officially acknowledging wrongdoing
    is the fear of being held financially accountable. Even years after
    the fact, victims or their descendants may ask for the return of
    confiscated property, bank accounts, or uncollected insurance claims,
    as they have in the case of the Holocaust, Eastern European communism,
    and the Armenian genocide. Reagan's apology for our treatment of
    Japanese-Americans was accompanied by monetary compensation.

    Financial reparations are in fact the most direct way to compensate
    victims for past suffering.

    Germany was able to pay millions to survivors of the Holocaust who
    suffered quantifiable harm, and continues to do so (my father received
    a small monthly check that made an enormous difference, especially to
    a penniless new immigrant in the 1950s who had lost his entire family
    in the Holocaust; my mother, not a survivor, still receives a widow's
    pension). Societies with fewer resources have offered other types of
    reparation: scholarships to victims' children, affirmative action
    programs, and preferential housing, health care, and other
    entitlements.

    In the United States, however, we are more likely to insist that
    existing institutions already provide a sufficient foundation for
    improving conditions, as though we could erase the effects of past
    atrocity without undertaking any difficult changes. Except in the
    brief period following the Civil War, direct financial compensation
    for slavery and Jim Crow has never had a serious place on the national
    agenda. The most significant effort to compensate for the
    institutionalized legal, economic, and social discrimination against
    black Americans that persisted into recent decades -- a modern legacy
    of slavery and Jim Crow vividly described in Ta-Nehisi Coates' recent
    Atlantic piece "The Case for Reparations" -- was affirmative action,
    but it has largely been reversed by the Supreme Court. Very little has
    been done to directly address ongoing racial injustices such as the
    disproportionate incarceration of black Americans, which author
    Michelle Alexander has referred to as "The New Jim Crow."

    Transitional justice demands recognition that fulfilling
    responsibilities to the past requires more than merely lip service
    from a perpetrator society. Crimes against minority groups in any
    society bring benefits to the perpetrator group, and compensating for
    them can necessitate material sacrifice. But remorse often ends where
    personal sacrifice begins. Marco Williams' 2006 documentary, Banished,
    tells the story of several black towns in the American South that were
    ethnically cleansed in the early 20th century. A black family from one
    of these towns sought to have a father's remains reburied near their
    new home and was met with sympathy from the white residents of the
    town -- until they asked the town to pay the costs. As in Germany,
    where polls over the years have shown significant minorities that deny
    an ongoing financial responsibility towards the victims of the
    Holocaust, many fail to see why they should be held individually
    accountable for the acts of their parents or grandparents. The
    benefits accrued through the injustices of the past are not always
    apparent.

    One of the most important aspects of successful transitional justice,
    therefore, lies in illuminating not only the victims' suffering, but
    the ways in which an entire society continues to bear the burdens of
    history. This helps elevate an important point: correcting injustice
    may require affirmative steps. The U.S. government and society need to
    recognize -- and educate citizens on -- the direct connections between
    continuing racial disparities in this country and the wrongs that gave
    rise to them, and to talk far more about the responsibilities we all
    share for repairing the damage. Perhaps Ferguson -- which has revealed
    what can happen when we suppress these conversations -- will finally
    motivate us to think about how to address the harms, whether through
    material reparations or otherwise. If we're willing to start talking,
    we'll find no shortage of role models for transitional justice
    throughout the world to help us take the next steps.

    http://theweek.com/article/index/267269/why-reparations-could-prevent-the-next-ferguson


    From: Baghdasarian
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