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Even though work is an important good and people generally want to work, there are reasons of principle to question conditional systems of benefit. In 1998 Jonathan Wolff questioned whether they are compatible with equality, as they require the most disadvantaged in society to reveal information about their circumstances, while ‘the rich do not have to explain how they got rich’,11 but also because of what he calls ‘shameful revelation’.12 On this analysis, there are things that people do not want to reveal to anyone, including themselves. If someone is unemployed at a time of low unemployment, the failure to be employed is not perceived to be due to external circumstances, but due to lack of talent or aptitude for the jobs that are available. Welfare-to-work schemes in this case require that those who want welfare support to prove to themselves and to state authorities that they have failed to get a job despite the fact that there are few employment opportunities. They have to reveal facts that may be degrading, embarrassing or humiliating, in a manner that makes it impossible to think of themselves as equals in society. ‘This removes any last shred of dignity from those already in a very unfortunate position.’13 Wolff was concerned that egalitarian theories of distributive justice focus on individual responsibility for people’s condition in order to assess what is the fair distribution of resources, and argued that an egalitarian ethos is not only about fairness in distribution of resources, but also about respect.14 Wolff’s argument is an important normative argument involving the compatibility of these schemes with egalitarian values.15 In the UK welfare-to-work schemes and their underlying principles are not a new phenomenon, but have become especially punitive in recent years.16 They represent a shift away from social security as a way to prevent hardship to a way to get people into work, 17 and have been endorsed both by Labour and Conservative governments. The way that they have evolved helps illustrate how over the last two decades there has been a turn towards a particularly strict conditionality system. In 1995 the Jobseekers Act was enacted, which involved the assessment of jobseekers’ behaviour. Labour Governments (1997-2010) endorsed welfare-to-work as a key element of their policy that insisted that the unemployed should access paid work as quickly as possible, otherwise there would be stepped up sanctions, consisting in reduction of their welfare benefits. During this same period conditionality applied to more groups of welfare support claimants than before, including people with disabilities and single parents. In 2002, an agency called Jobcentre Plus was established, which was for all those who claimed benefits and were out of work. Personal advisers were introduced who would support claimants to find work, and a weekly plan (the ‘jobseeker’s agreement’) was put in place for everyone. The advisers would regularly monitor compliance with the agreement and refer claimants who had not met the conditions to the Department for Work and Pensions. Other tasks of the advisers were to issue a ‘jobseeker’s direction’ which gave specific guidance on how to look for a job, to receive training and improve their employability. Advisers also had the power to impose sanctions if the claimants did not meet the conditions imposed. One of the key aims of the regime was to support not only jobseekers, but also those with childcare responsibilities, the ill and disabled, to find work. The Welfare Reform Act 2007 introduced among other things a stricter test for disabled claimants, who were assigned personal advisers and would be sanctioned if they did not take part in the scheme. The Welfare Reform Act 2009 extended conditionality to other groups, such as single parents.

Against this background, Seikel and Spannagel examined the links between activation policies and in-work poverty. 39 They explained that research on activation often ignores employment conditions, such as whether the new job is full-time or part-time work, and the levels of remuneration. On the basis of empirical evidence from 18 European countries, they stressed that an increase in employment does not necessarily mean less poverty: ‘simply making the jobless work is no guarantee for a reduction of in-work poverty’.40 Activation policies, as they explained, force individuals to take up any job irrespective of how much it is paid, while cuts to benefits reduce the total income of the household. They argued that ‘activation can be seen as a driver of in-work poverty’ and found that ‘strict conditionality of welfare benefits and a high degree of commodification of labour seems to force unemployed persons to accept jobs regardless of the pay levels’.41 They also highlighted that the stricter a welfare conditionality system is, the more likely it is that participants will become part of the working poor. Activation policies that focus on upskilling can have a positive effect on household income, while strict conditionality systems force people to accept jobs irrespective of pay, which means that some schemes often turn the unemployed poor into working poor.42 The UN Special Rapporteur on Extreme Poverty and Human Rights, Philip Alston, produced a Report following a visit to the UK in 2018, which focused on the problems of Universal Credit and in-work poverty. 43 He said that ‘the philosophy underpinning the British welfare system has changed radically since 2010’, 44 extensively discussed welfare conditionality and its punitive effects on the worst off, and also referred to in-work poverty. He emphasised that in the UK there are 14 million people in poverty, that 60% of those who are in poverty are in families where someone works, and 2.8 million people in poverty are in families where all adults work full time.45 He also explained that even if both parents in a family work full time and earn the national minimum wage, they are still 11 per cent short of the income that is needed in order to raise one child.46 A Joseph Rowntree Foundation Report of 2018 found that there were four million workers in poverty, a rise of half a million in comparison to five years before.47 Since 2004-2005, the number of those in in-work poverty has been rising faster than the total number of people in employment.48 Alston emphasised that the denial of benefits has pushed certain categories of claimants into unsuitable work,49 and explained that people want to work, and take work that is badly paid and precarious in order to meet their basic needs.50 Having spoken with Universal Credit claimants, he said that not only did they have to ‘fill out pointless job applications for positions that did not match their qualifications’, but also that they had to ‘take inappropriate temporary work just to avoid debilitating sanctions’.51 To further corroborate the claim of Seikel and Spannagel, empirical research conducted in the UK on the effects of Universal Credit suggests that claimants are routinely forced to apply for and accept jobs that are precarious. It is crucial to underline here that claimants are expected to accept zero hour contracts, because these are viewed as valuable flexible arrangements.52 For those who accessed the Jobcentre, the experience of applying for many unsuitable and inappropriate jobs is reported to be ‘soul destroying’, in the words of a foodbank volunteer. 53 The duty to accept exploitative work accentuates the problem. Someone interviewed said:

20 Black Feminist Hauntology is an anti-colonial analysis of time that captures the expanding and repetitive nature of structural violence, a process whereby we begin to locate a language to speak about the actual, not just symbolic or theorized violence that is racial colonialism. The ghosted nature of this work brings forth or calls upon the silent yet visible and enduring realities of colonialism: …a ‘sociological ghost,’ the form by which something is lost, barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition… the forces in our lives that we usually try to ignore or forget, but never totally leave us alone. If we deliberately investigate these ghosts, though, we can learn to take control over troubling memories; we may turn destructive haunting into something more enabling (Jacobs, 2007, 7). 21Here, the term ‘ghost’ neither confirms nor denies the metaphysical. It simply invokes a framework in which terror and unpredictability, grief and unrest, guilt and injustice, ancestors and demons can be called upon to empower and liberate us, not from the fact that we have been violated or even that violation continues, but from a condition of inability to locate the heart and soul of the problem. 22As we learn to see in Beloved, slavery shapes (present tense) the lives of the people (across its racializing spectrums) it consumes. Through Sethe, Toni Morrison brings forth the undeniable reality of the problem at hand: that the ensuing legacies of centuries engulfed in chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide are real, that at this time, we continue to live through its bloodshed and that no amount of silence, distortion or terror can erase it. In her presentation of Sethe’s rememory Morrison disallows, even at the periphery, a view of the world in which chattel slavery and plantation violence is not forever carved into the social, political, cultural, and economic landscape. At the same time, a fatalistic view of colonial slavery assuming we always have and always will be colonizers or colonized is rejected in her vivid articulation of the brutality with which these institutions are built and maintained. So finally, with both of these realities articulated, we are left with a deep recognition for the casualties and survivors of such violence, their descendant’s continued struggles against it and an immediate reverence against it. From this place of both acceptance (that colonialism and slavery happened, are happening, and are significant indicators of how we live our lives today) and rejection (that this violence is reprehensible) we locate an acutely anti-colonial stance desperately needed in abolitionist movements today. 23Through Black Feminist Hauntology, racial colonialism re-appears an implicitly abusive system of power (capitalism) and control (enslaved, reservation-bound, imprisoned and many more varying forms of conquest). A system built upon White supremacist conceptions of humanity and conquest is a system that must appear and re-appear in varying forms to uphold its own lies. It functions like a ponzi-scheme borrowing from one liberation movement’s language and ideologies to the next, co-opting the images of freedom to conceal its racist, morally corrupt bankruptcy. The scheme can only crumble – and quickly – when new lenders stop providing funds. Thus, White supremacy’s fuel has always resided in an implicit anti-Blackness it knows it can bank on, for its political campaigns, its policies of reform, its anti-Black constructions of abolition, its varying punishing and thinking institutions. That ponzi-scheme flourishes when feminism remains dominantly White, when Marxism remains dominantly White, when postmodernism remain dominantly White, when neocolonial and postcolonial studies became dominantly White, and so on. While the ponzi-scheme analogy helps us understand how White supremacy perpetuates itself despite moral bankruptcy, its actual practices are best understood through our knowledge of abusive relationships. 24Race-relations, through colonial conquest, have developed inter-generational, wide-reaching, institutionalized and structurally abusive relationships that mirror cycles of abuse made familiar to us in feminist scholarship. Abusers start by isolating their victims from family and support networks, proceed by entangling their victims in a web of self-doubt and dangerously involuntary dependence, and entrap their victims by building an illusion of change to come or abuse to end. The institutional beatings of a systemic abuser manifests itself behind a million small and large acts of injustice behind the looming figure of a White man, on a horse, with a gun in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other. Buried deep within that figure are the qualities that form the modern abusive husband who is born out of the colonial soldier’s massacres, the White feminist who constructs her own womanhood in juxtaposition to her colonized stepdaughter, the one who was born because her husband, a slaveholder, a prison guard, a president of the United States raped that child’s enslaved, imprisoned mother. Racial colonialism binds us up in one place and constructs us through a classically capitalist competition of humanity in which Whiteness, backed by militarized power (penal and otherwise) becomes dependent upon racializing violence to construct itself. 25White hetero-patriarchal violence classically legitimizes racial abuse by othering so it can blame the victim. It occurs in cycles starting with isolation, followed by beatings, then apologies accompanied by gifts in what feminists call the ‘honeymoon’ phase rife with formerly broken promises. Typically as the honeymoon ends tensions begin to build and soon after the abused partner bears the brunt of her abusers ways and inevitably, the cycle continues with beatings once again manifesting themselves in overtly abusive measures of control. Through Black Feminist Hauntology we apply this cycle of violence so well discussed in feminist scholarship (e.g. Snider, 1998; Harris, 2011) to a structural understanding of colonizing race-relations in the United States. These are inter-generational, foundationally abusive: the original acts of isolation began with colonial land-theft (isolating Indigenous peoples from their land, identities and ways of life) and slavery (isolating African peoples from their homelands, families, ways of life and worship, their very identities). The first severe and often lethal beatings were performed by Europeans through chattel slavery and Indigenous genocides. Centuries of abuse were followed by a brief honeymoon phase phase (in the structural Black and White Racial relationship) in the United States named ‘reconstruction’ after the 13th amendment was passed in 1895: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction (United States Constitution, emphasis added). Heavily embedded in this amendment is the abuser’s warning, that slavery could re-emerge if his victim does not follow his rules (i.e. if she is convicted of a crime). This moment in race-relations, the passing of the 13th amendment, is mirrored every time an abuser comes home with flowers or blood diamonds, depending on his inherited or achieved status, to atone for his violence. As we know, these gifts are accompanied by ‘never again’ messages underscored by classic, ‘do not provoke me’ tones of victim blaming. Race-relations through colonial conquest continue to exist within these tensions and the beatings eventually resurface. During Reconstruction Whiteness emerged solidly rooted in the formations of the ku klux klan and their support within White neighborhood associations manifesting in White police enforcement and their politically popular endorsement of lynching (Hale, 1999). Those beatings performed through lynching, and accompanied by varieties of Black resistance, commenced for decades and claimed thousands of lives. This abuse was briefly followed by a honeymoon moment in which the Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964. Shortly afterward COINTELPRO waged its war on freedom struggles, the war on drugs became institutionalized, privatized prisons were revived, and prison labor entered into the New York Stock exchange to be bought and sold by corporations investing in these most expensive and ‘low risk’ stocks (Browne, 1996). The criminal justice system emerged empowered to carry on the beatings that chattel slavery and jim crow violence had performed before it accompanied by each generation’s resistance, struggles to survive. Today, the public, recorded and endorsed police murders of Black people in the United States are confronted with ghosted words, “Hands up don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe”, uttered from the graves, sustained by protesters shouting back White supremacy’s ultimate unspeakable sentiment: “Black Lives Matter”. Anti-Black police violence today is ghosted by its historic antecedents, was forward-haunted by lynching and the countless deaths inflicted by armed White men on plantations colonizing the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere, overshadowing but unable to fully erase the fact that chattel slavery extends well beyond the Confederate States of the Southern United States and pollutes the Northern regions of the United States, Canada, Western Europe (Cooper, 2007) and vast lands and islands south of the United States. Chattel slavery was the underpinning institution for White modernity and as generations of White Supremacy’s abusive institutional beatings arises, with each comes its own systemic perpetrator’s versions of why the victims of abusive race-relations are ‘responsible’ for that violence. Much like an abused woman must first recognize that she is trapped in an abusive relationship before she can find the language needed to critique it, it is only through an understanding of colonial cycles of abuse that we can transcend these exploitative explanations – of crime, of segregation, of slavery, of the inevitability of Black and Indigenous death mirrored in the progression of White supremacist life – to fully consider an exit from White supremacist hetero-patriarchy altogether. 26Oftentimes, the first step in exiting an abusive relationship alive requires the abused to see, in her abuser, his potential to kill, coupled by her desire to remain alive. She must recognize his intentions to continue abusing her, his obsessive need to control her. It is not that he cannot or will not change, it is that he does not want to or does not have to change. Margaret Garner knew that, which is why she left Sweet Home Plantation. That was why she killed her daughter, because she had to kill her: If I had not killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her (Morrison, 1987, 200). 27Orlando Patterson’s definition of slavery as parasitic helps us better define the abusive nature of White racializing colonialism: parasitism emphasizes the asymmetry of all such unequal relations: the degree to which the parasite [Whiteness] depends on the host [Blackness] is not necessarily a direct measure of the extent to which the host is exploited in supporting the parasite. A parasite may be only partially dependent on its host, but this partial dependence may entail the destruction of the host (Patterson, 1982, 335). To view slavery through these lenses requires we see racial dependency and race relations as inherently exploitative: for slavery produced a parasitic Whiteness dependent on degraded conceptions of Black personhood through which forced Black labor is imagined legitimate, legal and ethical. Whiteness, as such, relies on and literally feeds off anti-Blackness, without which it could not uphold the White power structures upon which European colonialism then and now is dependent.

20 Black Feminist Hauntology is an anti-colonial analysis of time that captures the expanding and repetitive nature of structural violence, a process whereby we begin to locate a language to speak about the actual, not just symbolic or theorized violence that is racial colonialism. The ghosted nature of this work brings forth or calls upon the silent yet visible and enduring realities of colonialism: …a ‘sociological ghost,’ the form by which something is lost, barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course. The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a transformative recognition… the forces in our lives that we usually try to ignore or forget, but never totally leave us alone. If we deliberately investigate these ghosts, though, we can learn to take control over troubling memories; we may turn destructive haunting into something more enabling (Jacobs, 2007, 7). 21Here, the term ‘ghost’ neither confirms nor denies the metaphysical. It simply invokes a framework in which terror and unpredictability, grief and unrest, guilt and injustice, ancestors and demons can be called upon to empower and liberate us, not from the fact that we have been violated or even that violation continues, but from a condition of inability to locate the heart and soul of the problem. 22As we learn to see in Beloved, slavery shapes (present tense) the lives of the people (across its racializing spectrums) it consumes. Through Sethe, Toni Morrison brings forth the undeniable reality of the problem at hand: that the ensuing legacies of centuries engulfed in chattel slavery and Indigenous genocide are real, that at this time, we continue to live through its bloodshed and that no amount of silence, distortion or terror can erase it. In her presentation of Sethe’s rememory Morrison disallows, even at the periphery, a view of the world in which chattel slavery and plantation violence is not forever carved into the social, political, cultural, and economic landscape. At the same time, a fatalistic view of colonial slavery assuming we always have and always will be colonizers or colonized is rejected in her vivid articulation of the brutality with which these institutions are built and maintained. So finally, with both of these realities articulated, we are left with a deep recognition for the casualties and survivors of such violence, their descendant’s continued struggles against it and an immediate reverence against it. From this place of both acceptance (that colonialism and slavery happened, are happening, and are significant indicators of how we live our lives today) and rejection (that this violence is reprehensible) we locate an acutely anti-colonial stance desperately needed in abolitionist movements today. 23Through Black Feminist Hauntology, racial colonialism re-appears an implicitly abusive system of power (capitalism) and control (enslaved, reservation-bound, imprisoned and many more varying forms of conquest). A system built upon White supremacist conceptions of humanity and conquest is a system that must appear and re-appear in varying forms to uphold its own lies. It functions like a ponzi-scheme borrowing from one liberation movement’s language and ideologies to the next, co-opting the images of freedom to conceal its racist, morally corrupt bankruptcy. The scheme can only crumble – and quickly – when new lenders stop providing funds. Thus, White supremacy’s fuel has always resided in an implicit anti-Blackness it knows it can bank on, for its political campaigns, its policies of reform, its anti-Black constructions of abolition, its varying punishing and thinking institutions. That ponzi-scheme flourishes when feminism remains dominantly White, when Marxism remains dominantly White, when postmodernism remain dominantly White, when neocolonial and postcolonial studies became dominantly White, and so on. While the ponzi-scheme analogy helps us understand how White supremacy perpetuates itself despite moral bankruptcy, its actual practices are best understood through our knowledge of abusive relationships. 24Race-relations, through colonial conquest, have developed inter-generational, wide-reaching, institutionalized and structurally abusive relationships that mirror cycles of abuse made familiar to us in feminist scholarship. Abusers start by isolating their victims from family and support networks, proceed by entangling their victims in a web of self-doubt and dangerously involuntary dependence, and entrap their victims by building an illusion of change to come or abuse to end. The institutional beatings of a systemic abuser manifests itself behind a million small and large acts of injustice behind the looming figure of a White man, on a horse, with a gun in one hand and a bouquet of flowers in the other. Buried deep within that figure are the qualities that form the modern abusive husband who is born out of the colonial soldier’s massacres, the White feminist who constructs her own womanhood in juxtaposition to her colonized stepdaughter, the one who was born because her husband, a slaveholder, a prison guard, a president of the United States raped that child’s enslaved, imprisoned mother. Racial colonialism binds us up in one place and constructs us through a classically capitalist competition of humanity in which Whiteness, backed by militarized power (penal and otherwise) becomes dependent upon racializing violence to construct itself. 25White hetero-patriarchal violence classically legitimizes racial abuse by othering so it can blame the victim. It occurs in cycles starting with isolation, followed by beatings, then apologies accompanied by gifts in what feminists call the ‘honeymoon’ phase rife with formerly broken promises. Typically as the honeymoon ends tensions begin to build and soon after the abused partner bears the brunt of her abusers ways and inevitably, the cycle continues with beatings once again manifesting themselves in overtly abusive measures of control. Through Black Feminist Hauntology we apply this cycle of violence so well discussed in feminist scholarship (e.g. Snider, 1998; Harris, 2011) to a structural understanding of colonizing race-relations in the United States. These are inter-generational, foundationally abusive: the original acts of isolation began with colonial land-theft (isolating Indigenous peoples from their land, identities and ways of life) and slavery (isolating African peoples from their homelands, families, ways of life and worship, their very identities). The first severe and often lethal beatings were performed by Europeans through chattel slavery and Indigenous genocides. Centuries of abuse were followed by a brief honeymoon phase phase (in the structural Black and White Racial relationship) in the United States named ‘reconstruction’ after the 13th amendment was passed in 1895: Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as punishment for a crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction (United States Constitution, emphasis added). Heavily embedded in this amendment is the abuser’s warning, that slavery could re-emerge if his victim does not follow his rules (i.e. if she is convicted of a crime). This moment in race-relations, the passing of the 13th amendment, is mirrored every time an abuser comes home with flowers or blood diamonds, depending on his inherited or achieved status, to atone for his violence. As we know, these gifts are accompanied by ‘never again’ messages underscored by classic, ‘do not provoke me’ tones of victim blaming. Race-relations through colonial conquest continue to exist within these tensions and the beatings eventually resurface. During Reconstruction Whiteness emerged solidly rooted in the formations of the ku klux klan and their support within White neighborhood associations manifesting in White police enforcement and their politically popular endorsement of lynching (Hale, 1999). Those beatings performed through lynching, and accompanied by varieties of Black resistance, commenced for decades and claimed thousands of lives. This abuse was briefly followed by a honeymoon moment in which the Civil Rights Act was signed in 1964. Shortly afterward COINTELPRO waged its war on freedom struggles, the war on drugs became institutionalized, privatized prisons were revived, and prison labor entered into the New York Stock exchange to be bought and sold by corporations investing in these most expensive and ‘low risk’ stocks (Browne, 1996). The criminal justice system emerged empowered to carry on the beatings that chattel slavery and jim crow violence had performed before it accompanied by each generation’s resistance, struggles to survive. Today, the public, recorded and endorsed police murders of Black people in the United States are confronted with ghosted words, “Hands up don’t shoot” and “I can’t breathe”, uttered from the graves, sustained by protesters shouting back White supremacy’s ultimate unspeakable sentiment: “Black Lives Matter”. Anti-Black police violence today is ghosted by its historic antecedents, was forward-haunted by lynching and the countless deaths inflicted by armed White men on plantations colonizing the vast majority of the Western Hemisphere, overshadowing but unable to fully erase the fact that chattel slavery extends well beyond the Confederate States of the Southern United States and pollutes the Northern regions of the United States, Canada, Western Europe (Cooper, 2007) and vast lands and islands south of the United States. Chattel slavery was the underpinning institution for White modernity and as generations of White Supremacy’s abusive institutional beatings arises, with each comes its own systemic perpetrator’s versions of why the victims of abusive race-relations are ‘responsible’ for that violence. Much like an abused woman must first recognize that she is trapped in an abusive relationship before she can find the language needed to critique it, it is only through an understanding of colonial cycles of abuse that we can transcend these exploitative explanations – of crime, of segregation, of slavery, of the inevitability of Black and Indigenous death mirrored in the progression of White supremacist life – to fully consider an exit from White supremacist hetero-patriarchy altogether. 26Oftentimes, the first step in exiting an abusive relationship alive requires the abused to see, in her abuser, his potential to kill, coupled by her desire to remain alive. She must recognize his intentions to continue abusing her, his obsessive need to control her. It is not that he cannot or will not change, it is that he does not want to or does not have to change. Margaret Garner knew that, which is why she left Sweet Home Plantation. That was why she killed her daughter, because she had to kill her: If I had not killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her (Morrison, 1987, 200). 27Orlando Patterson’s definition of slavery as parasitic helps us better define the abusive nature of White racializing colonialism: parasitism emphasizes the asymmetry of all such unequal relations: the degree to which the parasite [Whiteness] depends on the host [Blackness] is not necessarily a direct measure of the extent to which the host is exploited in supporting the parasite. A parasite may be only partially dependent on its host, but this partial dependence may entail the destruction of the host (Patterson, 1982, 335). To view slavery through these lenses requires we see racial dependency and race relations as inherently exploitative: for slavery produced a parasitic Whiteness dependent on degraded conceptions of Black personhood through which forced Black labor is imagined legitimate, legal and ethical. Whiteness, as such, relies on and literally feeds off anti-Blackness, without which it could not uphold the White power structures upon which European colonialism then and now is dependent.

In 2012, Kasandra Perkins of Kansas City, Missouri, was murdered by her partner, Jovan Belcher. This same year, I entered a doctoral program at the University of Illinois, the same institution I graduated two years prior, and was given the assignment to create a final project reflective of my academic interests. As I prepared my assignment, I was confronted with the news of Perkins’s death and experienced a visceral response to the brutal incident. Importantly, I came back to graduate school to organize and write with and about Black girlhood in this doctoral program and the Saving Our Lives Hear Our Truths (SOLHOT) collective, and just as I was preparing to make a claim about what I came back to this place and city to do, I was reminded of the kind of work SOLHOT had already prepared me for through its intentional collective practices. The final project for this proseminar course resulted in a performance entitled “Kasi to her Homegirls,” which was influenced by previous work done in SOLHOT as a result of SOLHOT’s intentional work with Black girls and the praxis of Black feminism. Envisioned by Ruth Nicole Brown and brought to life by a collective of Black women and girls in central Illinois in 2006, SOLHOT is a collective of people who believe Black girlhood is an embodiment and practice of collective worldmaking with Black girls and women as a means of self-articulation within the collective. This worldmaking is only possible through particular practices such as knowing and remembering, listening to Black girls and women, and collective musicmaking. These practices make up a repertoire of collective Black girlhood praxis. A repertoire, as theorized by performance studies scholar Diana Taylor, functions as a set of performances that, unlike an archive of those cultural memories that would privilege the written text or narrative of those actions, acknowledges that those performances operate as ever-changing and alive instead of a captured memory. In this way, those performances are scenarios operating as “meaning-making paradigms that structure social environments, behaviors, and potential outcomes” (2003, 28). To this degree, knowing and remembering is a scenario (whenever the practice of performance happens), which acknowledges Black girls and women, in particular, as well as the people and things that make the collective possible. Additionally, knowing and remembering contributes to our (the collective’s) understanding of Black girlhood as an organizing construct invested in alternative modes of being; that is, subversion to anti-Blackness and heteropatriarchy, as central to building power through our relationship and accountability to one another. These scenarios within SOLHOT’s repertoire, then, “make visible, yet again, what is already there: the ghosts, the images, the stereotypes” with the goal of recalibration of these scenarios to conjure new futures and renewed stories of the past and present (Taylor 2003, 28). This function of SOLHOT can be described by Terrion L. Williamson in her work Scandalize My Name (2016) as a Black feminist practice. Williamson makes the connection between Black social life and Black feminist practice as meaningful ways of living that do not require Blackness to be qualified by ideas of citizenship, value, or representation but instead by the everyday life-making and saving practices Black women and girls participate in. In this way, Williamson, like SOLHOT, is invested in exploring the ways death and life are entangled for Black people, and the ways that, because of this precarious situation, Black women and girls participate in Black feminist practices that require resistance (whether intentional or not) to imperial ideas of being alive. For example, Williamson grapples with discourses around violence, teenage pregnancy campaigns, and practices like wearing weaves or hair straightening to consider ways in which adherence to the degradation of these practices reinforces white supremacist standards. Williamson explores Black social life through interrogating “the terrain of black female experience . . . made legible by black women’s lives and bodies in the making of a sociality that is firmly rooted in the black imaginary” (2016, 10). In this way, these practices inform the life-making and saving practices of Black women and girls in the everyday, “not circumscribed by the conditions of its possibility but instead enriched and enlarged by the embrace of the mundane and everyday” (5). This, then, makes the space possible to remember someone like Kasi Perkins, and guides a practice like SOLHOT where the objective is not to ask, Why are Black women and girls treated inhumanely?—a question we already know the answer to—but rather, How do we/have we create/d the alternative with what we already know about ourselves and other Black women and girls? With focus on the collective’s practice of knowing and remembering, this chapter explores performances of this practice as speculative, which conjures reappearances of people and ideas invoked through the practice. Specifically, by tracing our knowing and remembering through Black feminist texts that influence the work of SOLHOT, as well as performances of knowing and remembering created in SOLHOT such as that of “Kasi to Her Homegirls,” this chapter theorizes Black girlhood hauntings and the speculative reappearances explored through Black feminist texts and SOLHOT performances as a collective self-articulation of Black girlhood. It is not simply a categorization of a time period or visual representation of a girl, but is a nonstatic and imaginative mode that honors the experiences, genius, and contribution of Black girls. This theorization of Black girlhood through imaginative modes offers a tangible, collective practice of BlackGirlMagic through Black women and girls organizing together to create new modes of sensing and seeing each other. BlackGirlMagic, a term associated with the “Black Girls are Magic” movement started in 2013 by CaShawn Thompson, has been used in digital spaces as a way to affirm and acknowledge the accomplishments of Black women. Thompson explains her use of magic to point to the invisibility of Black women’s labor and work. She states, “Our accomplishments might seem to come out of thin air, because a lot of times, the only people supporting us are other black women” (quoted in Thomas 2015). Similarly, SOLHOT depends on Black women and girls being in collective relationship to one another. This interdependence generates an articulation of power recognized as magic that relies on building community where you live, through collective worldmaking with Black women and girls, to imagine political power outside of capitalism. In this way, this paper puts forth Black girlhood hauntings and speculative reappearances as a critique of neoliberal articulations of the future, and as an exploration of articulating the self through collective acts.

The ghosts of whiteness have haunted Indigenous peoples in North America since before the U.S. nation was metaphorically “birth[ed],” considering that “the [Christian] church and [Euro-American] state . . . acted as coconspirators in the theft of Native America” (Grande 2015, p. 15). The racial logics of Euro-American settlers from the 15th through the 20th century were tied to an aggressive “Protestant ideology” (Adams 2008, p. 12). This ideology informed white Christians’ colonization efforts from their inception. It was an ideology founded on possessing Indigenous lands and invalidating Indigenous knowledges for the socioeconomic and political benefit of those deemed “white” enough for their entitlement (Grande 2015, pp. 183–90; Grosfoguel 2013; Mills 1997, pp. 12–14; Wynter 2003). Kelley (2021); Mills (1997); Robinson (2005) have argued that the predecessors of Locke and Kant-oriented Euro-American Christian missionaries perfected their colonization tactics in Europe prior to their North American arrival. They did so, the scholars assert, by waging epistemic, spatial, and spiritual genocide among the Jews, Muslims, and Pagans. In effect, the French Huguenots, Spanish Catholics, and British Protestants arrived at North American shores in the 15th and 16th centuries like ghosts with unfinished business. Grande (2015, pp. 15–16) details how over the subsequent centuries, “full-service educational systems” determined to “de-Indigenize” Native children and youth. Indeed, the mission of some of the U.S.’s earliest educational institutions—including Harvard (1636), the College of William and Mary (1693); Dartmouth (1769)—were committed to dual charges of “civilizing” and “Christianizing” North America’s Native peoples (Grande 2015, pp. 15–16). Ghosts have taken the form of U.S. jurisprudence and legislation, revealing the horrific intent by white, Euro-American settlers to deprive Indigenous peoples and their children of epistemic, spatial, and spiritual sovereignty. The passing of a Virginia Statute on “The Education of Indian Children Held Hostage” in 1656, for instance, demonstrates white Euro- American settlers’ possessive interest in reorienting Indigenous worldviews. It was their intent to center Christian ethics and morals, dispossess Indigenous peoples of their lands, languages, and relationships, and to inculcate the capitalistic labor classes and principles taught by white missionaries and colonial settlers (Fraser 2010; Grande 2015, pp. 50–51, 54–55; Kaestle 2011; Urban et al. 2019, pp. 10–11). The U.S. Congress passed the “Civilization Fund Act” in 1819 for the purpose of “civilizing” North American Indigenous peoples in “agriculture,” and in “reading, writing, and arithmetic” (Fraser 2010). However, Indigenous children’s schooling on the U.S. frontier in private homes and at Christian missions was merely “a place of ‘becoming white’” (Peshkin 1997, p. 117). Furthermore, Grande (2015) illustrates the ghostly nature of U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s opinion in Johnson v. McIntosh (1823), haunting Indigenous peoples of the past as well as in the present. Marshall’s nineteenth century opinion highlighted and elevated the so-called “Doctrine of Discovery”—the Medieval European law that established rules and regulations for the “discovery,” “finding,” and “right of occupancy” to land in the western hemisphere—to rational jurisprudence in the modern world (Grande 2015, pp. 55–56). True to form, the poltergeists of the juridical past, continue to “haunt the political and legal domain” of the U.S. They have effectively established a “landlord-tenant relationship” between the U.S. federal government and Native nations and tribes that continues to this day (Grande 2015, p. 56; Harris 1993). Next to African enslavement, one of the most horrific instances of haunting induced by the ghosts of whiteness in the U.S. were the creation and operation of residential boarding schools. Most famous among these schools, which eventually dotted North America (Urban et al. 2019, p. 146), was the off-reservation school located at Carlisle, Pennsylvania after which other so-called “schools” were modeled (Adams 1995; Reyhner and Eder 2004). The haunting of Carlisle was epistemic and spiritual assimilation of Native children to “white” society by instructing them “in the light of Christian civilization” (Adams 2008, p. 20). “Reclothed, regroomed, and renamed” (Reyhner and Eder 2004, p. 168), Indigenous children’s realities were distorted by the ghosts of whiteness, which also attempted to replace Indigenous spiritual rituals with those based on a white supremacist Christian theology (Adams 1995; Deloria 2003; Standing Bear 2006). Carlisle—and other “schools” modeled after it—also served white supremacy’s pernicious spatial ends by further dispossessing Indigenous families of their lands in order to “gain access to [Native] labor and resources” (Adams 2008, pp. 26–30; Grande 2015, p. 23). Persistent efforts by the phantom “Wasichus”—or white colonizing settlers (Neihardt 1979; Estes 2020, pp. 46, 111)—to eradicate Native American cultural and religious cer- emonies through the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses and subsequent corollaries (Treuer 2019), and otherwise dispossess Native peoples, proved futile (Adams 1995; Estes 2020; Grande 2015; Ostler 2019). Through Indigenous resistance across time and space, Native peoples’ identities, relationship to the land, human, and non-human relatives, as well as their spiritual ceremonies and rituals remain presently intact (Estes 2020; Grande 2015; Villegas et al. 2008). This has been most recognizable through The Ghost Dance, but more recently through the #NoDAPL Movement—e.g., the Indigenous women led movement against the Dakota Access Pipeline (Estes 2020; Keene 2020; Mackey 2018; Mays 2021). Contrary to popular white settler understanding, the Ghost Dance—begun in the 1870s by Paiute prophet Wodziwob—was part of an “anticolonial theory and movement” that resisted the ghost world created by white supremacy and colonialism by presenting “visions” of a pan-Indigenous “anti-colonial future” (Estes 2020, pp. 124–25). In every way, the Ghost Dance religion, informed the Indigenous resistance movement in 2016–2017 at Standing Rock against the Dakota Access Pipeline (Estes 2020, p. 131). The Ghost Dance thus presents further opportunities for exploring Indigenous resistance, flexibility, expertise, and epistemology as decolonial and hauntological pedagogy and theory (Keene 2020, pp. 109–10; Mackey 2018). The ghosts that have for centuries haunted the lands and lives of Indigenous peoples on “Turtle Island”—or North America to numerous but not all Indigenous nations (Paris 2020, p. 23)—are unsurprisingly discontent, and continue to morph in the 21st century. Indigenous peoples contemporarily face issues as they struggle for educational sovereignty, including educating administrators and instructors at P-20 educational institutions about the histories and needs of, as well as institutional responsibilities towards, Indigenous students and their communities (Brayboy et al. 2015, p. 6). The ghosts of whiteness also cast a shadow over Indigenous language revitalization efforts, as demonstrated by the inconsistencies of the federal government’s No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy. NCLB notoriously called for Indigenous language revitalization, but punished schools enrolling Indigenous students by taking away money and essential resources due to poor performance on standardized tests (Reyhner and Sing 2015, pp. 26–27). In response to this, educational leader and Indigenous scholar, Mackey (2018), has suggested that to rely exclusively on U.S. education policy to assist Indigenous nations and peoples in education related efforts is essentially to live in a state of futility and torment. In effect, she argues that overreliance on federal intervention is to be haunted by the ghosts of whiteness. Indigenous leaders encourage increased solidarity with Indigenous peoples and educators who advocate “place-based” pedagogies centered on community resources and needs, kinship, and relationality, relying on intergenerational epistemologies, and reflecting on Indigenous resistance as a guide for “protecting what is sacred” (Garcia et al. 2020, pp. 90–92, 97).

The loss of the future is a fundamentally hauntological concern. Since Jacques Derrida coined the concept in the early 1990s as a response to Francis Fukuyama’s thesis of the post-communist “end of history”, hauntology has been appropriated in the context of cultural, literary and media studies as a critical attempt at “presenting new ways of thinking about the past, present and future, rather than just the ‘end’ of history and of the twentieth century”.Footnote32 Hauntology is a way to utilise spectres and hauntings as figures that represent the paradoxical and destabilised experience of time and space.Footnote33 For Mark Fisher, who popularised hauntology in the twenty-first century, “[t]he future is always experienced as a haunting: a virtuality that already impinges on the present, conditioning expectations and motivating cultural production”.Footnote34 Hauntological artworks and media engage with the haunting of the future in an act of mourning. For instance, hauntological electronic music mourns both the failure of the future to materialise “as actuality” and its disappearance of its “effective virtuality”.Footnote35 Hauntology, through the figure of the spectre, deconstructs the “fixity of the temporal” by confronting and infusing the present with “the possibility of alternative pasts and futures”.Footnote36 This is what hauntology and pessimism share. Pessimism, as a philosophy, is an intervention into dominant notions of temporality.Footnote37 Pessimism negates the notion of unchallenged continuous human progress and “attacks the roots of modern political orders by denying their sense of time”.Footnote38 Its negational stance is often considered unconstructive, counterproductive and obstructive. And yet, pessimism’s reflections on time can be an ethical and even political project—it cannot, as Joshua Foa Dienstag has argued, be fully divorced from the notion of progress. Rather, both have emerged as specifically modern ideas. Pessimism is thus the “hidden twin” of progress.Footnote39 In that, pessimism shares sensibilities with the concept of hauntology which considers the present to be disrupted by hauntings from the political and cultural past and potential futures. In hauntology the figure of the spectre becomes a vehicle to think of this temporal disjuncture. Likewise, pessimism haunts contemporary culture as the spectral “doppelgänger” of progress and fundamentally unsettles linear temporalities. While it questions the dominant sense of time, pessimism’s relationship to temporality goes even further in that it is itself always untimely. “No one has time for pessimism”,Footnote40 its complaining and disruptive voice always raised at an inopportune moment. Like untimely critique voiced in times of crisis, pessimism points to the “rupture of temporal continuity”.Footnote41 In its cosmic variant, it also invites views of futures in which humans will be merely ghosts, a spectral memory. But pessimism goes one step further than hauntology in that it always confronts the present with the worst possible alternative future. It is not just that pessimism suggests that the future may be uncertain. It also asserts that whatever the future might bring, it will definitely be the worst possible one—“[f]or pessimism the world is brimming with negative possibility”.Footnote42 From a pessimist perspective, the future is already effective in the present, at least as a potentiality that is evoked in feelings towards the future as well as in modes of anticipation such as predictions, whether they are scientific, political, economic, religious or personal, and fears and desires for the future that shape the present.Footnote43 This becomes even more problematic when considering the current crisis of the future. For Mark Fisher, hauntology was the expression of the loss of the future described by Franco Berardi and others—the lack of a utopian vision or even an alternative to the current state of affairs that Fisher called “capitalist realism”.Footnote44 The current cultural logic of the worst is a continuation of this tendency. This, as Amy J. Elias has argued, also has a dramatic effect on the present. “We post-moderns”, she observes, “have lost this sense of progress, but we also lose the present as it disappears not into the future, but into an uneasy mixture of pre- and post-Enlightenment thinking about the relation between past and future time”.Footnote45 Elias’ description of the crisis of the tools of prognosis resonates with the anxious pessimism of Gen Z and Millennials in that it likewise renders humanity as being “dragged forward into a future that seems already in place”.Footnote46 Elias’ assessment of the post-modern attitude towards temporality echoes both hauntological and pessimist concerns. The future, then, is not only something that already takes effect in the present—through pre-emptive or anticipatory action. Rather, the future happens to us. A pessimist perspective is deeply suspicious of the ability to predict or anticipate the future in order to master time or humanity’s existence in time. From a eudaemonic perspective, pessimist thought questions the possibility of happiness as the point of human life. However, pessimism can at least name the sources of human unhappiness, among which the “ontological misalignment between human beings and the world they inhabit”Footnote47 is probably the most central one. In other words, pessimism establishes that the world is not there to please the human beings inhabiting it. Pessimism identifies the “ontological misalignment” in the anthropocentric misconception of a “world-for-us”.Footnote48 The notion of “ontological misalignment” is another aspect that pessimism shares with hauntology. Derrida coined the term as a phonetic play on the homophonous French words “ontologie” and “hantologie”.Footnote49 A hauntological perspective focuses on ontological ruptures in the human experience of history and temporality.

As a dissection of all of the layers that combine to constitute a performance, the ‘Verfremdungseffekt’ is a relevant precursor to hauntology. Essentially, hauntology shares with Brechtian theatre the same function of deconstruction. The past is deconstructed and shown as it exists and is perceived from inside the present. Hauntology is about transcending the forcible reconciliation of representations as reality to focus on the social dimensions of these representations. Through deconstruction, these social dimensions are deconstructed and excavated until internal contradictions are discovered, and in turn, a space is carved out for alternatives. Hauntology exists in a temporal dyschronia where traces of lost futures spasmodically emerge from the past and unsettle the present. In an Afrofuturist context, “hauntology is the proper temporal mode for a history made up of gaps, erased names, and sudden abductions.”90 By reassessing the validity of historical texts and discourses that have so often proliferated the subjugation of people of the African diaspora, hauntology opens a space for the archaeological reevaluation, and the identification of new truths and narratives that had hitherto the point of observation remained undetected. Through deconstruction, the phantoms of history that cannot be ‘ontologised’ away91 are reintroduced into relevance and discourse, and the singular narratives associated with official historical record are shown to be incomplete. The aesthetic effect of hauntology can be applied to a wide variety of texts and subjects. As we will see in Krista Franklin’s ‘Money Folder’, the hauntological aesthetic arises from the contextual factors surrounding the image. Franklin’s collage technique abstracts the images in the piece and imbues them with new meanings that case a spotlight on the lurking specters of the past. Sampling and Collage in Afrofuturism Sampling and collage are mediums for cutting, ripping, and tearing apart normative culture, and the oppressive and hegemonic structures of society. They allow an artist to subvert linear narratives and ascribe a text with their own, personal meaning. The sample also empowers the viewer/listener to formulate their own perspectives, their own aesthesis Meanings of a text that have been established on face value are destroyed and hidden ones are revealed. Contrary to universal hegemony collage is “a metaphor for universal continuous change. It is both the result of a blind impulse and directed process. The transformation is driven by the desire of each entity to be itself, blending into a wider landscape where other objects interact.”92 Collage is one of the many techniques that Ohio born artist Krista Franklin uses in her work. In ‘Money Folder’ (Figure 1) she uses collage to construct an alarming scene where it is insinuated that the power of money and purported financial equality provides a sufficient premise with which to atone for, and forget the horrors of historical oppression. The central figure of the piece is a ‘black-faced’ vaudeville era performer whose face is awash with an expression of petrified helplessness. He is subserviently licking the white glove in his hand, an interaction that is notably highlighted by Franklin, as the man’s tongue is the only coloured element of an otherwise monochromatic figure. In black and white we have the circus of top hats, make up, and stage shows, all relics of the past. In the present, live and in colour, we have the pink tongue of subservience. Franklin shows that while it may not be as explicit or elaborate as it used to be, the power structures that reinforce the disparity between black and white are remain as effectual as ever The collage appears as a sequential layering of processes. The foundational layer has ‘Devant’, ‘Frente’, and ‘Fron’ (with a missing ‘t’) listed down, all of which mean ‘in front of’ in the three main colonial languages: English, Spanish, and French. This insinuates a disregard for the past, and a focus on the present. The next layer, a loose coupon for ‘Magic’ shaving powder, confirms the erasure of the past. ‘Magic’s’ logo is of a razor next to the words ‘no more trouble’. The powder is marketed as being “formulated for black men to help stop razor bumps.”93 The metaphor of a ‘smooth and clean shave’ is fitting for ‘Money Folder’. The folded edge of the coupon shows that it is being removed for use, presumably in an act to forget the ‘rough and bumpy’ past in favour of an embrace of the purported ‘smoothness’ of modernity. The packaging is enticing the black man to rid himself of the vicissitudes of his skin’s past. Dollar bills appear all over the collage, fragmented over the canvas and the only entity that interacts with every other piece of the artwork. Opaque hundred dollar bills provide the foundations upon which the character, the stereo player, and the advertisement lie. A translucent fifty-dollar bill disappears further as the coupon is extracted. The scene is a paradox. Without money one has no means to a voice, as portrayed by the stereo, gramophone, and mask, yet money is being spent to ‘remove’ the ‘razor’ sharp constituents of history. Meanwhile, the objects at the front of the collage lay benign. The stereo’s volume gauges indicate silence; the gramophone’s needle is set aside, and the mask lies dormant on its side with its eyes closed, dead. Culture has been rendered utterly helpless, and the voices of yesteryear have been shelved and silenced. Magic, according to parent company L’Oreal, “believe everyone should be able to celebrate his or her beauty with confidence. And for people of colour that means they should be able to express how they want to look, and, ultimately, who they uniquely want to be.”94 Krista Franklin refutes this ‘ultimate’ correlation. ‘Money Folder’ makes a statement that is akin to Mignolo’s ‘AestheTics vs AestheSis’ thesis, as Franklin unequivocally rejects the validity of a societal reconstruction that she regards are purely aesthetic. Aesthetic, surface transformations are in no way capable of exorcising the specters of the past. Sampling is the key theme of John Akomfrah’s 1996 film, ‘The Last Angel of History’, in which the main protagonist is known as the ‘Data Thief’. A metaphor for Afrofuturism, the ‘Data Thief’ travels through time acquiring artifacts of Afro-diasporic expression in an attempt to discover the ‘mothership connection’. The price that he pays for traveling through time is that he forfeits the right to be a part of his society’s modernity. The most effective form of data thievery is sampling, and, by utilising this method, The ‘Data Thief’ uses both the past to create new visions of the future, and the knowledge that he brings from the future to re-contextualise the past. For a population in which many have no base heritage, sampling is the motion capture and adaptation mechanism that is deployed for survival. Sampling is a means for navigating an experience of constant flux. Sonically, sampling allows for a simultaneous cross-referencing of generational creators in which all eras of black music are digitally immortalised. “Sonic futurism doesn’t locate you in tradition, instead it dislocates you from origins.”96 The sonic futurism breaks from genealogies, and rejects all notions of a compulsory black condition. Afrofuturist musicians travel through time, taking inspiration from their predecessors and collecting samples to surgically stitch together an innovative new creation. In the sonic realm, hauntology appears in the form of a sample. The sample disrupts the listener’s auditory experience, and adds a new dimension to the act of listening where the listener is cognizant of the intrusion into the present of a fragment of the past. The consequential fictions created by recursive sampling adopt meaning, and imbue past sounds with a layer of hauntological significance. Writing in 1957, Norman Mailer brilliantly articulated the dilemma of the Afrofuturist musician, “we are obliged to meet the tempo of the present and the future with reflexes and rhythms which come from the past; the inefficient and often antiquated nervous circuits of the past strangle our potentiality for responding to new.”97 Sampling is a means through which the musician can overcome this dilemma, and free themselves from the obligations and ‘choking’ grip of the past. Sonic hauntology allows for a diversion from the constraints on innovation that are caused by a linear continuation of the cultural narratives of the past, into a space of possibility that caters for the creation of new sounds that are unique to contemporaneity. Mark Fisher captured the synergy between Afrofuturism and ‘sonic hauntology’ perfectly, “Afrofuturism unravels any linear model of the future, disrupting the idea that the future will be a simple supersession of the past. Time in Afrofuturism is plastic, stretchable and prophetic – it is, in other words, a technologized time, in which past and future are subject to ceaseless de- and recomposition.”98

With Phillipe Pignarre, Stengers has explored what keeps us spellbound by capitalism; how it comes to appear inevitable and unstoppable; how it attaches to us, binding us to its programs (Pignarre and Stengers 2011). Other possibilities are turned aside, made difficult, curtailed, as we are lured in and entrapped by capitalism’s enchantments. Thinking of being spellbound, we might consider settler colonial justifications of ongoing dispossession as itself a kind of possession, as a way being possessed, of being put under a spell and alienated from other ways of thinking and being.16 It takes new spells to weaken the force of these powerful ontological bindings, and they cannot be cast by individuals operating on their own. Alliances matter. What might be called spellbinding can also be called haunting, depending on one’s standpoint. Invoking the spectral can bend social policy ethnography toward the hauntings that policy also bequeaths as trace effects, residues, and sediments, within any present-time “milieu.” Recall that real ghosts haunted the women’s toilets of the Chan Building, from where the Strategic Indigenous Housing and Infrastructure Program was coordinated (chapter 2). Women were afraid to enter the ablution area, sensing something apparitional in there, gaping yet hidden. Who knows what happened in the corridors of that old building, or on its soil prior, that a ghost might still be wandering there? For women who police their physical movements based on absent-present threats every single day, it is not too hard to think of possible scenarios. Policy hauntings thus might literally refer to spectrally inhabited bureaucratic spaces that are animated by invisible yet felt forces. And there are metaphorical phantoms. Let’s not forget that the minister who banned my presence from that haunted Chan Building issued her edict as a verbal warrant, becoming an apparition in another guise. Unauthored bureaucratic edicts have their own spectral powers. Hauntings can also refer to the ways policies past and present are physically incorporated, having (insidiously or noisily) seeped into lives, affecting probable destinies and shaping overall circumstances, if not immutably then certainly as a powerful stimulus. Individuals are hindered or facilitated by the ghosts of policy pasts manifesting, for instance, as privileged or underfunded schooling, as life-sustaining potable water or water so contaminated that deaths are inevitable. Policies past and current adhere to bodies and things, making privilege feel earned and inequality feel natural, the product of personal destiny and pure choice. Perhaps a more familiar way of understanding policy hauntings, at least since Foucault, is to consider the dominant paradigms that are encoded within black-letter policy documents or, as I have referred to them, within policy artifacts.17 Policy vocabularies reflect (are shackled by) their own deeply invested socioeconomic logics. They require all things (animate and inanimate) to serve the settlers’ currently dominating form of existence, as a necessary condition of citizenship within the nation-state. Policy emphases and abandonments aggregate around an inherited and taken-for-granted cultural core. It is not simply paperwork about or served to Indigenous people that encodes what happens to whom, how, for what kind of money. Policy involves paperwork—the artifactual—but it is also an inheritance (which I have termed hauntological) that shapes conditions of possibility in the present and future. As a cultural formation, settler policy is an ancient mode of draining lifeworlds entirely legally, without visible violence or notable theft, via contracts, grants, regulations, negotiations, standards, accountabilities, and enumeration, and the avoidance, thwarting, attenuation, noncounting, or perennial bastardization of all these mechanisms, which together constitute a settler colonial policy hauntology that Indigenous people continually weather (Lea, Howey, and O’Brien 2018, Neu 2000). Here we might think about files, and what is kept in and what is missing from them (Vismann 2008). Forms, and what they do and don’t count (Hull 2012). Archives, and what they attract and repel (Yale 2015). Regulations, and what they protect or safeguard: a river occasionally (Neale 2017) or, more commonly, “deregulated” banking with financial regulations directed into banking’s profitable favor (Sikka and Lehman 2015). And I would include in this minigathering myriad other forms of policy blindness, where phenomena are not investigated in order that they cannot occupy a named policy existence—the levels of lead, cadmium, and other contaminants in groundwater where mining and people coexist being one such institutionally endorsed sightlessness (Kristensen and Taylor 2016).18 Policy hauntology encompasses these kinds of governance assumptions and adds something more. Tottering infrastructure and hollowed and gutted regulatory supervision are policy inheritances too, reflecting relational histories of human and other agencies. These relational histories include the gestational and corrosive contributions of water, soil, contaminants, human and nonhuman critters and their unstable, shifting sustenance systems—representing an intra-active metabolism with different ingredients reappearing and disappearing over time. Policy hauntings exist even where they don’t seem to. One day you might push against foam-filled wall cladding and have it spill cockroach leavings, for the wall’s insides have been eaten hollow by termites welcomed in by their friend, electrolyte water. Water pushes into weaknesses in buildings shaken by storms then left porous by the baking of hot days and the slaking of more rain; a permeability that can be made more, or less, fragile by the quality of policy-fed interventions and resurrections. By the quality, that is, of mesolevel (in)attention at multiple points in a policy’s mutations as it intra-acts with the environments that summon and authorize policy interventions. And then there are the hauntings of past violations that some Indigenous people might carry inside themselves as secret wounds stemming from microand macropolicy: from the abuses of a disdainful school clerk to the heartwrenching moment when a family is evicted, merging with inherited memories of murders and massacres haunting contaminated swamps, still too close in time for emotional neutering; and always, a sense of a judging sentient environment that might be pleased, or likely disappointed, with a person’s level of attunement and care within the meso of a particular clan member’s kin and country.19 In Karrabing hands, settler policy operates like viral matter, with discarded ideas and jettisoned programs from long ago still able to intercept contemporary lives, mingling with new openings and foreclosings. Karrabing members’ probative work and counterfactuals show that the contemporary is not “now” in the singular but a composite formation of multiple times. The contaminated swamp our fugitives hide in overnight is the real site of a real asbestos dumping ground, shoveled there from leftover military installations, from and through which new connections with ecologically altered and somewhat hostile ancestral forces are also forged. As untrained actors and amateur production crew, the Karrabing have been using techniques members would say are “story but true”: taking things from life that could have happened to challenge configurations of “the truth.” People are shown to be many things at once: hunters; families; married couples; loving parents; lovers in and out of love; cohorts squabbling across the generations; welfare beneficiaries and public housing tenants; jobholders; students; hospital patients; bush people and city people; drinkers; smokers; fighters—and people who, obliged to their country, get things done, when push comes to shove. The improvisational realism of film scripts mirrors the makeshift workarounds of everyday life, where obstacles include jail time, hospital episodes, negotiating lost bank-card details, the spatial tethering of a court order or a suspended driver’s license, and incarceration or eviction from accumulating fines. Members are resilient without this being a romantic way of being, as policy hauntings render both city and bush life equally precarious.

In 2013, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) established National Committees on Reparations and a Reparations Commission in order to “establish the moral, ethical and legal case for the payment of reparations by the former colonial European countries, to the nations and peoples of the Caribbean Community, for native genocide, the transatlantic slave trade and a racialized system of chattel slavery.”1Citing the crimes against humanity that disenfranchised both the victims and the descendants of colonial genocide and slavery, the Commission brought forth a lawsuit against the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and France in order to begin a “reparatory dialogue to address the living legacies of these crimes.”2Demands like these for reparations are part of a long history of marginalized peoples wrestling with the aftermath of imperial violence, slavery, and degradation. At its center, the CARICOM lawsuit underscores what theories of decoloniality have long emphasized: that the ideological structures, orders, and legacies of colonialism subsist even after colonial administrations ceased to exist in full.3Aníbal Quijano (2000) calls these structuring processes the “coloniality-of-power” and this concept is central to the ways in which I analyzethe struggles for reparations in the modern/colonial world. The quotation from Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masksthat prefaces this essay is part of his meditation on anti-colonial struggles and what he calls “a double process” of inferiority (xiv).4For Fanon,the anti-colonial struggle must be waged on two levels: the objective and subjective,or the colonial administration and ideology. Proof of the need for this dual struggle can be seen in the failure of the political decolonization projects that reached their apex in the 1950’s and 1CARICOM member states include: Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada, Guyana, Haiti, Jamaica, Montserrat, Saint Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago. Press release 285/2013 (10 December 2013) CARICOM Reparations Commission Press Statement Delivered by Professor Sir Hilary Beckles (Chairman) on behalf of the CARICOM Reparations Commission Press Conference Regional Headquarters, UWI 10th December 2013 (accessed 11/9/14 http://caricom.org/jsp/pressreleases/press_releases_2013/pres285_13.jsp). 2The CARICOM suit also includes other slave-owning nations of Europe including Spain, Portugal, Norway, Sweden and Denmark.3Here I am referring to the genealogy of decoloniality,for which the modern/colonial world begins in the 15thcentury,and which contendsthat coloniality is “the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations” (Grosfoguel,2002, p. 205). The coloniality-of-power also “brings together race and capital” to form new relations of power (Maldonado-Torres,2006, p. 233). Please also see: Anzaldúa, 1987; Quijano, 1992, 1998, 2000; Mignolo, 2000; Grosfoguel, 2003; Maldonado-Torres, 2008, 2012; Mendez, 2014. This temporal scope is notnotrepresentative of all decolonial thought.4Though Fanon is speaking to anti-colonial realities of the mid-twentieth century, his relevance is further manifest after the failed political decolonization projects in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Advancing Fanonian thought in the context of theories of decoloniality (emphasis mine) crystalizes its significance outside of his temporal moment. Reparation as transformation431960’s, projects that largely focused on transforming colonial administration. Similarly, in the context of decoloniality, reparations must contend with past evils and the current social and political injustices that stem from those evils. Any reparation that does not transform or attempt to dismantle coloniality is a failed reparation. I contend that literary narratives offer discursive spaces through which to imagine and reimagine the possibilities of decolonial reparations as amends that are both material and immaterial.5This piece is a meditation on how an exilic Equatoguinean and an Afro-Dominican text engage with ideas of reparations and futurities as decolonial love.6I first look at theories of decolonial love and reparation as a frameworks for engaging the texts andpropose that at the center of a decolonial reparation is decolonial love. I then analyze how Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Waoand Joaquin Mbomio Bacheng’s Matinga: Sangre en la selva, imagine and reimagine the future through a decolonial love politic that posits a reparation of the self and a reconciliation of community as integral partsof imagining decolonial futurities

In the face of all these strong and substantiated arguments, why is the payment of reparations to Black people and nations not more common? One reason is the denialism of slaver countries. Consider British policy of denial (Beckles, 2013, Chapter 14). It can be characterised as ‘No apology, no reparations’ (Beckles, 2013, p. 194). That position is telling because there were some 2 million enslaved African people uprooted and enchained in West African forts (Beckles, 2013, p. 195). On the contrary, the British state compensated the 45, 000 slavers who requested compensation when slavery was formally abolished (Beckles, 2013, p. 195), not because they endured the horrors of racism and enslavement, but because they lost ‘property’. The amount of compensation to the slavers has about 40% of British GDP (Beckles, 2013, p. 179). Britain did not only refuse to compensate the freed formerly enslaved Black people but also, when the formerly enslaved people demanded land as part of their settlement, they were murdered (Beckles, 2013, p. 196). Such murders of enslaved Black people and formerly enslaved Black people were common, but Britain still refuses to pay reparations as a national policy. Both liberal and labour toe the same lines, both White and Black labour MPs, including David Lammy, Dianne Abbort, Baronness Amos, and Lord Morris (Beckles, 2013, p. 197), all support the British state's policy. Slaver countries also took steps to further impoverish formerly enslaved peoples. Not only did the American state refuse to honour the promise of ‘40 acres and a mule’ demanded by emancipated enslaved people, the land accumulated by Black farmers was confiscated through force and fraud (Darity & Mullen, 2020, pp. 209–210). Apart from the ‘sins of the sons and daughters’ (Chapter 10, From Here to There), Black people continue to suffer indignities and dispossession of their assets. ‘The failure to grant ex-enslaved people an initial stake in American property ownership and the subsequent land taking from Blacks has contributed to the comprehensive denial of Black wealth accumulation…Apart from the barriers to landownership, Black home ownership was restricted throughout the twentieth century by discriminatory redlining, differential access to government finance for home mortgages, and, most recently, by the subprime mortgage crisis induced by the banking system's loan-pushing schemes’ (Darity & Mullen, 2020, p. 212). A third obstacle is African opposition and so-called alternatives provided by African and Black leaders in Africa (Beckles, 2013, p. 194). Some African countries oppose reparations, too. At the World Congress on Racism, Nigeria, Senegal, and South Africa voted against the case for reparations (see, Beckles, 2013, pp. 164, 166). Collin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, Black republicans representing the American state, also questioned the reparations case. Today, it appears that JA Kufour, a former President of Ghana, is also against the case for reparations. But President Kufour's position is more personal rather than partisan. Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo, a member of the same political party as Kufour's and the current President of Ghana, is a strong supporter of the reparations movement3. Other Black power brokers like Bernio Grant (see Beckles, 2013, p. 198) are for reparations, too, but the power players are quite fractured. A fourth hindrance relates to the sheer extent of slavery. So, when slavery was ultimately abolished, through the abolitionist work done first by Black enslaved people themselves, by other Black activists and intellectuals, and a handful of White abolitionists (see, for detailed contribution of Black people, and Black women, especially, Opoku-Agyemang, 2008; Dadzie, 2020), the demand for ‘slave owners’ reparations’ received a groundswell of support. With slave states in power, propped up by a largely pro-enslavement publics, compensation for former slave owners was fait accompli. As MCD Beckles (2013) argues in Chapter 11 of his book, 20 million pounds was paid then, that is, 200 billion pounds in 2010 values went to former slavers, and slave institutions such as British banks. This £200-billion compensation excludes interest payments. The emancipated enslaved people got nothing. Rather, they had to serve for a further 4–6 years before obtaining freedom. This ‘cooling off’ period was to enable the slavers to unlearn their dependence on slavery. Still, the formerly enslaved people received nothing, no reparations, no land, no mules. The non-payment of reparations to formerly enslaved people, Beckles argues, was a deliberate attempt to force them to remain in servitude, this time, by ‘choice’. Myths constitute a fifth hurdle. Darity and Mullen (2020) contend that opposition is softening, but there are still many questions and concerns. In chapter 12 of From Here to Equality (2020), they review and rebut common myths about reparations such as Slavery is long gone, Reparations would only create more animosity between races, a point forcefully argued by Glenn Loury (2007), African countries should be the ones paying for reparations because they did the selling, and has welfare/affirmative action not been enough ‘reparations’ already? African complicity is one common myth. Yet, the books under discussion show that the resistance of enslaved people was widespread and persistent during enslavement. Many enslaved people committed suicide in protest. There were fights of emancipation on slave voyages. African kings abolished kidnapping for enslavement. But Britain kept using force, fraud, and assassination of kings who opposed slavery. The British also used divide and rule to perpetuate enslavement (Beckles, 2013, chapter 2). By this ‘King James's version’ (Beckles, 2013, p. 37) of slavery (the Duke of York later became King James II, see p. 229), slavery had to be expanded by all means possible. After all, as MCD Beckles (2013) argues in Chapter 4 of Britain's Black Debt, Black people were property, not human (for a detailed account of women's contribution to, and leadership of, anti-slavery resistance, see also Opoku-Agyemang, 2008; Dadzie, 2020). The question about redesigning or formulating reparations has three aspects (see, for an implicit discussion, Obeng-Odoom, 2022a, pp. 436–438). The ontological basis for valuation is fundamental. Usually, either a profit-based approach (emphasising what the slaver gained from slavery) or a wage-based approach (emphasising what enslaved people lost using wages for free labour as proxy and adjusting for the harder work of slaves) could be used. Alternatively, a land-based approach (emphasising the present value of land which could have been given to enslaved people upon liberation) could be applied (Craemer et al., 2020). William Darity Jr and A Kirsten Mullen (2020) propose the wealth gap as a bolder and more comprehensive starting point for formulating reparations. The reason is that ‘it captures, better than any other disparity, the cumulative disadvantages visited upon the present generation’ (Craemer et al., 2020, p. 219). This wealth gap approach reflects all cumulative disadvantages. A second aspect of the formulating reparations question relates to how the resulting reparations will be paid, whether in cash, in infrastructure, or in terms of something else, incrementally or as a lumpsum. A third is how the reparations programme can be financed.in addressing all three aspects, it is important to reassert the case for reparations: “the core reason that a comprehensive plan for reparations is needed is that the ‘other programs’ have not been up to the task of eliminating ‘those disparities’. The objective of a reparations project is precisely ‘to redress the socioeconomic inequalities associated with race’” (Darity & Mullen, 2020, p. 240). In the final chapter, 13, of From Here to Equality (2020), Darity and Mullen provide a detailed discussion of various approaches to estimating adequate reparations. They ultimately state their (a) own basis for the calculation –‘the racial gap in per capita wealth’ (Darity & Mullen, 2020, p. 265) – and (b) how the money can be paid. In their words:…since today's differential in wealth captures the cumulative effects of racism on living Black descendants of American slavery, we propose mobilizing national resources to eradicate the racial wealth gap. The magnitude of ongoing shortfalls in wealth for Black people vis-à-vis White people provides the most sensible foundation for the complete monetary portion of the bill for reparations (Darity & Mullen, 2020, p. 264).It seems these could amount to between $15 and $20 trillion (Darity & Mullen, 2020, p. 265). There are many ways to pay these reparations, but Darity and Mullen note that they should not necessarily all be paid out at one go. Reparations could be paid incrementally. Reparations could also be placed in a trust to which qualified Black people could make regular applications. Or, the payments could be used for endowments for Black colleges and universities, which currently face financial challenges. However, they are paid, Darity and Mullen (2020) contend that reparatory payments must include direct cash transfers to the victims of historical and present inequalities. Beckles (2013) addresses the same question of design in chapters 12, 13, 14, and 15 of Britain's Black Debt. ‘The case for reparations should be made against the British state and a select group of its national institutions, such as merchant houses, banks, insurance companies and the Church of England4. These institutions exist today. Their slave-derived wealth is not in question’ (Beckles, 2013, p.163). He contends that the case for reparations should be made against the British state: for its involvement, for being a tax beneficiary, for aiding and abetting other institutions of slavery. Estimates show that, for Caribbean Black people alone, Britain owes 7.5 trillion pounds (Beckles, 2013, pp. 170–171). This amount could be paid in terms of infrastructural support by Britain to meet its obligation to assist Caribbean right to development. This point was recently emphasised by David Commissiong, the Deputy Chair of the Barbadian National Taskforce on Reparations (Allison, 2023, p. 17). Hilary Beckles (2013) summed up the case at the 2001 UN Conference against Racism. ‘The call for reparations is the call for collective healing and closure’. At the heart of this argument is land. As Darity and Mullen, (2020) note, when enslaved people were asked directly what it was that they desired to have upon their liberation, the overwhelming answer was ‘land’ (Darity & Mullen, 2020, p. 9). ‘40 acres and a mule’ was what was then officially promised, but this was never honoured. As Darity and Mullen (2020) argue, not only was this promise not progressed, even the land that the freed enslaved people actually obtained by themselves were taken away from them by force and fraud. The current state of glaring stratification in the US is exactly due to this non-payment, dispossession, and more recent challenges such as Jim Crow and neoliberalism. Reparations, in short, are to be paid not only for the past, but also for the present and the future. ‘We seek a new tomorrow that will enable the nation to realise the long-unfulfilled dreams of the freedmen. Reparations for Black America, finally, will open the door to that new tomorrow. At last, reparations will move America from here to equality’ (Darity & Mullen, 2020, p. 270).‘What's Next?… ‘Why Reparations Require Climate Justice’ (Táíwò, 2022, p. 149)? The answer, according to Olufemi Táíwò (2022), seems to be because various conjunctions in world history have led to the current uneven distribution of climate harms. So, there is definitely the need for climate reparations, an argument Táíwò makes forcefully: People are usually surprised when I make this argument. The confusion makes sense - after all, they point, there's hardly an obvious conceptual connection between climate crisis and reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism. They’re right. The connection is largely contingent: it just so happens, given the particular distributions created by this era of global politics and their ecological consequences, that our response to climate crisis will deeply determine the possibilities for justice (and injustice) in what remains of this century – and if we survive to the next. Had some things gone differently even decades ago – had the countries and corporations of the Global North polluted less, had the fossil fuel interests not worked along with coal and freight rail companies to orchestrate misinformation campaigns, protecting their short-term financial gains at the cost of their and our collective future – the relationship between reparations and climate crisis could well have been quite different (Táíwò, 2022, p. 158). There are historical reasons, stretching from the invasions of the Global South and how such colonialism and imperialism were central to the industrial revolution. It is the Global North transformation that, to this day, is responsible for most of the accumulated emissions over time. The model continues to this day, but while the benefits are in the North, the harms are disproportionately in the South. For Olúfẹmi Táíwò, ‘what matters from the standpoint of justice is how these ecological phenomena affect people's capabilities – what lives they are or are not empowered to live. This is determined not only by what happens to the ecological systems, but also by the interaction of those impacts with a host of other factors that are determined by our social and political systems’ (Táíwò, 2022, p. 163). Thus, inequalities in capabilities constitute a critical reason to demand reparations. Reconsidering Reparations (Táíwò, 2022), therefore, offers ‘targets’ (aspirations) and ‘tactics’ (specific steps) for climate reparations. Táíwò's reparations would (a) provide unconditional cash transfers at a national level like the Darity and Mullen model but, in addition, Táíwò's would be on a global scale like the demand for a ‘global universal basic income’ (b) Global climate funding involving debt reliefs, using public funding for climate purposes, asking the rich to pay more towards a global climate fund because they have inherited more from the racial empire of fossil fuel and similar strategies aimed at redistributing ‘burdens and benefits’ (Táíwò, 2022, pp. 174–178). A third target is (c) opening up tax havens in the world where money often unjustly taken from the poor are hidden so that the money could be put to climate change purposes. ‘One of the targets of a just world must be to access these caches of illicitly hoarded wealth, so they can be used to reshape the world through unconditional cash transfers and global funding’ (Táíwò, 2022, p. 180). Finally, Táíwò's model includes a target of (d) community control with protections against external aggression and imperialism. Olufemi Táíwò's tactics are similarly broad-ranging. Not only should the world divest from fossil fuel investments, green investments must be planted in these communities which the fossil companies underdeveloped (Táíwò, 2022, pp. 182–183). The point is that activists should not only be content with opposing more investment in fossil. Activists should also promote that the divested resources be invested in green institutions in Black and Indigenous communities. Finally, Olúfẹmi Táíwò advocates citizen science, a collaboration of lay and learned to hold the powerful to account, to make a sustained environmentalist investigation for a renewal (Táíwò, 2022, pp.185–187), a new grassroots struggle based on politicised science of climate. Regarding, Climate Reparations, Táíwò puts the case for building clear standards that must be met for a reparations programme to be truly reconstructive (see Táíwò, 2022, pp. 140–143). These are as follows: 1.Reparations for global racial empire should make tangible differences in the material conditions of people's lives; 2.Reparations for global racial empire should address the core moral wrongs of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism, to the extent possible; and 3.Reparations for global racial empire should discriminate: should distribute benefits and burdens based on the different relationships of persons and institutions to the core moral wrongs (Táíwò, 2022,p. 140).Olúfẹmi Táíwò asks ‘how do we decide on any of this?’ (Táíwò, 2022, p. 187). He answers that not just by representative democracy, but also by community control, public funding of deliberation and learning from how activists make decisions. Other approaches could be taking inspiration from unions, sometimes called ‘bargaining for the common good’ (Táíwò, 2022, p. 189). So, not only should negotiations be with employers but also negotiations must be between unions and communities. Whether these arguments by reparationists – Beckles, Darity and Mullen, and Táíwò - can keep the gap closed is hotly contested. The critical questions appear to be what happens after reparations are paid? Why is climate justice necessary, but not sufficient for ecological justice? How could we move from ‘here’ to ‘there’? In short, Can we get and remain there from here? Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr have provided a fundamental critique. According to them (Michaels & Reed, 2020), the dominant basis for the reparations claim – racial wealth gap - is fundamentally inadequate. Not only does this measure confuse symptoms for causes, it also provides the basis for the wrong policy. Even more fundamentally, the racial wage gap approach is a pro-capitalist path to addressing inequality. By asserting the resolution of racial discrimination, class differences receive no attention. Instead of social democracy, racial democracy is promoted. The former aspires for a generalised social inclusion, whereas the latter advances a proportional representation of racial minorities among both the rich and the poor. Without class, therefore, the case of racial wealth gap arguments can advance racial democracy without questioning working class inequalities. For Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr (2020), these concerns must lead to a singular focus on class as a measure of inequalities (see also, Reed, 2018). As they ask rhetorically, ‘why not just use class’? These arguments have a long-standing place in progressive circles. There, concerns are recurrently raised about ‘class politics’ versus ‘identity politics’. Advocates of class politics claim that a focus on class should address ‘mere’ identity issues that are symptomatic of ‘deeper’ structural and class problems. From this perspective, focusing on race is the wrong way. Aime Cesaire (1972) disputed these claims and, instead, advanced the case that a strong focus must also be placed on race. In the end, he had to leave the Communist Party because of its insistence on class politics over identity politics. Similar debates arose in the days of W.E.B. Du Bois. Indeed, in Socialism and the Negro Problem, W.E.B. Du Bois (1913, points 1–3) made a classic distinction between socialists interested in ending capitalism and socialists focused on addressing the social structures that oppress Black people. The former were dominant and their approach to the Black problem docile: ‘let the question wait; when the objects of Socialism are achieved, this problem will be settled along with other problems’ (p.3). According to Du Bois, ‘ there is a logical flaw here… Can the problem of any group … be properly considered as “aside” from any program of Socialism? Can the objects of Socialism be achieved so long as the Negro is neglected? Can any great human problem “wait"? (Du Bois, 1913, p.4). Du Bois even suggested that class-only socialists lack consistency: ‘If Socialism is going to settle the American problem of race prejudice without direct attack along these lines by Socialists, why is it necessary for Socialists to fight along other lines? (Du Bois, 1913, p.4). Can a race-blind socialist system redistribute the fruits of labour from White to Black? ‘Does the history of the world justify us in expecting any such outcome? ‘ (Du Bois, 1913, p. 6). Du Bois (1913, p6) provided a categorical answer: ‘Frankly, I do not believe it does.’ He went on to state a positive preference for race and class analysis:I have come to believe that the test of any great movement toward social reform is the Excluded Class. Who is it that Reform does not propose to benefit? If you are saving dying babies, whose babies are you going to let die? If you are feeding the hungry, what folk are you (regretfully, perhaps, but nonetheless truly) going to let starve? If you are making a just division of wealth, what people are you going to permit at present to remain in poverty? If you are giving all men votes (not only in the “political” but also in the economic world), what class of people are you going to allow to remain disfranchised? (Du Bois, 1913, p. 6) Unfortunately, there has been a tendency to bifurcate these analyses. For instance, Gunnar Myrdal's (1944) approach to racial inequalities in the US, drew a sharp response from Oliver Cox (1945) who pointed out Myrdal's inattention to class analysis. Today, the lines can be similarly fraught. While Walter Benn Michaels and Adolph Reed Jr (2020) demand a singular focus on class (see also Reed, 2018), many Black economists advocate a primary, even singular, focus on race (see, for example, Darity et al., 2020; Hamilton, 2021; Paul et al., 2022a). But, the latter group of economists need to be understood in context. Historically, the focus on class has invisibilised or marginalised the race problem. The claim that social democracy addresses racial dictatorship is not borne out of the evidence: whether in Australia, in Finland, in Sweden …or in any other social democratic countries (Piketty, 2014; Stilwell, 2019; Fina et al., 2021). In Australia, for example, even after years of social democracy, of every 4 people, 3 show ‘racial bias’ against the Black Aboriginal people of the country (The Economist, 2020b, p.44). Stratification economists (see, for example, Darity, 2022; Paul et al., 2022b) are increasingly recognising intersectionality of identities (Crenshaw, 1989). But they correctly point out that multiple, intersectional identities are not simply additive. Such identities like race, class, and gender could compound inequalities, as in the case of Black women, but such intersectionality could take many forms: some might even be subtractive. This holistic approach seems more compelling, but it also raises the broader issue of a just ecological political economy (Obeng-Odoom, 2021a, pp. 203–208). Táíwò's (2022) contribution to resolving ‘climate injustice’ is a helpful start. But, its contingent, tentative, and indirect nature weakens his arguments. They, in turn, appear rhetorical rather than empirical, neglecting the actual demonstration of actions that triggered biodiversity loss, for example, but also (in) actions related to economic resource losses that trigger ecological problems. Economic analysis by Tyler Hansen and Pollin (2022, p. 449) shows that concerted and systematic anti-fossil fuel campaigns for divestment for more than a decade has led to limited partial divestment. Full divestment commitments amount to only 0.2% of the entire market value for all oil transnational corporations. Both partial and full divestment commitments amount to a mere 0.7% or less than 1% of total market value of all fossil fuel assets. As fundamentally, we need to go beyond ‘climate’ and anthropocentric analysis to consider ecological imperialism more widely (Crosby, 1986/2009). Whether concepts such as ‘wealth’, ‘income’, and ‘catch-up’ are used consistently and carefully in Reconsidering Reparations is debatable (Obeng-Odoom, 2022b), as is whether the book strikes a helpful balance between emphasising specific moral wrongs and the structures that shaped them (Lambrecht, 2022). Certainly, though, a broadening out of the structures of philosophy into wider social scientific concerns of underdevelopment is needed (Mueller, 2022). One concrete step in this direction is to open up Táíwò's (2022) critique from social and climate relations to ecological and property relations more broadly. The ecological crisis is not reducible to emissions and pollution. Climate change is not only a product of climate warming. Biodiversity loss, dispossession, displacement, extinction, ecocide and ecosystem crisis are as critical (United Nations, 2022). Beyond wage theft, modern slavery can be more comprehensively analysed using the concept of rent theft. This arises when more and more income is paid out as rent. This way, the labour share of total output keeps declining, while the share of profit continues to rise. Rent, as used here, refers to the price of land monopoly and speculation, privilege and power. Cast within the surplus approach to rent, this payment is not simply income – earned or unearned – in competitive markets, as typically conceived in mainstream economics. Rather, this specific rent is privately extracted from what is socially and publicly created (see, for a discussion of the surplus approach to rent, Obeng-Odoom, 2021c). A ‘rent theft’, it is also prevalent in the fossil industry. While the International Slave Trade had officially ended before the fossil industry started, the rent theft model became quite useful in the fossil industry which developed subsequently. Consider, the Niger Delta area. It was a major place of enslavement (Afigbo, 2006). When slavery officially ended, the people were further exploited. Not only were they coerced by the British coloniser to abandon their subsistence farming, they were also obligated to develop palm oil plantation to support British industrial development with its well-known ecological problems (Heblich et al., 2022). The subsequent ‘legitimate’ trade was fossil fuel extractivism. Its development was led by transnational corporations (TNCs) like Shell whose activities created serious ecocide in the Niger Delta (Whyte, 2020, Obeng-Odoom, 2021a, 2021b). To this day, the people of the area remain marginalised. So, ‘The institution of slavery ended, but the underlying prejudices remained’ (Nwaubani, 2019, online). The subsequent years of weakening public environmental authorities and the resulting ecocide entailed not only socio-economic devastation but also destruction of flora, fauna, and water bodies in the Niger Delta. The degradation of the land complements the picture, while oil transnational corporations siphoned off the net benefits to Britain. This ecological imperialism (Crosby, 1986/2009) continues to this day. Ecological reparations must be paid for all these and the loss of African land around the world. There is the straightforward case of African migrants. They tend to be located in Naomi Klein's (2014, p. 310) ‘sacrifice zones’ with crumbling infrastructure and corrosive ecological and economic conditions for the dominantly Black populations. They own little land and control much less value. The idea that their remittances prevent them from building economic wealth to enable them control land and live in safer areas is diversionary, masking the systemic barriers they face all over the world as migrants, Black migrants, a point more systematically developed in Global Migration Beyond Limits by Franklin Obeng-Odoom (2022a). Barriers to the rental markets, rooted both in history and contemporary society, deprive them of the keys to decent homes. For most of them, death in a decent home is a pipe dream. Forced African migrants, often the descendants of enslaved people, have continued to experience these problems in the world. Several books have been written on the subject. Afrodescendant Resistance to Deracination in Colombia: Massacre at Bellavisat-Bojaya-Choco (Vergara-Figueroa, 2018) is one example. Another is The African Presence in Santo Domingo (Andújar, 2012). A third is Black Women Against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (Perry, 2013). Elsewhere, Black lives have not mattered either. The US is a case in point. Black people have been dispossessed of their land by force and fraud (see Hinson, 2018). There is the well-documented institutionalised devaluation of Black people's real estate in the Jim Crow years (Connolly, 2014). But, even today, the value of White land is much higher still. The limited land for Black people is systematically undervalued. For the same land, Black people can receive only 58% of the value given to White families (Kamin, 2022).Similar comments apply to the experiences of Black people in Australia, South America, and South Africa. In Australia, Indigenous peoples’ land is grossly undervalued. Sometimes, their land is even regarded as terra nullius. That does not only mean that the land is ‘no man's land’, it also means that it is of little or no economic value. The Economist (2019, pp. 37–38) claims that African land tenure systems drive the persistent deprivation in Colombia's Afro communities, but systematic analysis of the evidence by experienced Colombian economists (Peña et al., 2017; Vélez, 2019; Vélez et al., 2020) fundamentally challenges such claims. Instead, the evidence shows a transfer of wealth from Black to White societies. In South Africa, too, apartheid shifted the incomes and wealth of Black South Africans to White South Africans (Price, 2003). Tembeka Ngcukaitobi (2021) shows how White minority economic rule is based on land. White people make up only 8% of the total South African population, but they own 72% of the agricultural land in South Africa. Coloured peoples and Indians own 24% of South African land, while Black people, the majority of the population, constituting 81% of the nation, own only 4% of land (Ngcukaitobi, 2021, p. 110). Physical inequalities in landownership aside, there are also inequalities in terms of land value. White South Africans privately appropriate value which has been socially created by the state and Black South Africans who constitute the majority of the South African population. In turn, the economic advancement of Black South Africans has been stifled and that of White South Africans supported through a persistent and systematic process of land devaluation and valuation. These inequalities and social stratification have had dire consequences on Black lives in South Africa, whether socially, economically, or ecologically. Rigorous econometric analyses (Price, 2003) demonstrate that reparations are urgently needed by Black South Africans to bridge the current racial wealth gap (Price, 2019; Darity & Mullen, 2020). Ecologically, greater economic inclusion could better enable Black people to mitigate and adapt more effectively. Economically, a more inclusive society could reduce the mimicry, consumerism, and the pressure for ecologically destructive growth linked to maintaining status.The critical issue, then, is how to address this land question? The most common approach is the willing seller/willing buyer model. Advanced mostly by White South Africans, the argument is for the government to buy back land from White landowners (Ngcukaitobi, 2021). They cannot be compelled to sell, however, because, under this model, the free market decides. This approach has failed, partly because the South African state cannot afford it, partly because White landowners do not easily sell land to Black women, and particularly because this only increases, not diminishes, the racial wealth gap. A well-known Marxist alternative is to physically redistribute land. Yet, this approach does not solve the problem of value: obtaining the same plots of land does not mean sharing the same value of land. A second approach is Proudhonist. This entails the nationalisation of all land banks such that people help themselves whenever they need land. Again, this national land grab does not address the question of value.An approach that is centred on land value could entail assessing the present value of land promised, but never given, to formerly enslaved Black people. The resulting value could be multiplied by 4, an adjustment to make up for what the freed enslaved people should have been paid at the time. Another adjustment could be adding four times the present value of the ‘mule’ that the freed enslaved people were promised but were never given (for a review of such studies, see Darity et al., 2020; Darity & Mullen, 2020). Stratification economists (see, for example, Darity & Mullen, 2020, pp. 264–270) argue that the compensable amount could be paid incrementally from new money printed by the central bank. Some reparations might also be used to create endowments. A critical question is what happens to the racial wealth gap when it is closed this way? Chances are that it will reopen. The private appropriation of socially created value cannot be addressed by the payment of reparations. Neither can rent theft be addressed by reparations alone. Indeed, even though the support for paying reparations has substantially risen in the US for example, the idea of printing new and more money for only reparations can face stiff resistance. The political economy of inequalities tends to overlook the case for reparations. Grounded in the need to address the persistent legacies of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, neoliberalism, capitalism and its many variants, the books examined in this paper have made a more compelling case for reparations than any other. These insights do not exist in any one discipline. Rather, the books reviewed reflect economic history, economics, and philosophy, the disciplines in which the key writers of the books have been educated. Could any one school of economic history, economics, or philosophy embrace the holistic political economy that these insights produce? A full answer is beyond the scope of this article because it would require a careful analysis of these various disciplines. What is quite clear is that analytically, at least, these insights can more easily percolate the new science of stratification economics, ‘The specific focus of [which] is on group-based inequality, particularly inequalities between ethnic and racial groups’ (Mason et al., 2022, p. 464). Defined (see Darity et al., 2015, p.2) ‘as a subfield of the wider discipline of economics … designed to improve our understanding intergroup disparity (e.g., racial, ethnic, caste and religious disparity)’, designing and demanding reparations are central to the study of stratification economics. Yet, the expansive scope of this subfield could be broadened even more. As the authoritative survey of the field by its most eminent pioneer and exponent, William Darity Jr. shows, the current ‘implications and extensions of stratification economics’ (Darity, 2022, p.15) are in six key areas, immigration, public goods, explaining the origins of intergroup wealth differences, various approaches to addressing disparities, political responses to stratification, and explanations of individual productivity (Darity et al., 2020, pp. 42–50; Darity, 2022, pp. 15–21). These areas overlap and intersect, of course (Darity et al., 2020; Darity 2022). Studying discrimination and privilege is a crosscutting theme. Many other permutations could be derived from these areas, including explaining the support many White women give to Whiteness. Or how increasing number of White women support dictators, showing less attachment to gender, class, or gender and class, the standard emphases of western feminism (Darity, 2022, pp. 5–6). However, as this article suggests, this framework must be widened. William Darity Jr himself called for more analytical holism in his Theodore W. Schultz Memorial Award Lecture, for the Agricultural and Applied Economics Association on 3 January 2021 (see Darity, 2021). For this purpose, urban and regional economics requires a place. Most ‘global cities’ are built on slavery. It continues to shape urban form and structure. So must just ecological political economy be wired into this school of thought, extending its present focus on differential environmental harms and ‘public goods’ (Darity et al., 2020, pp. 42–44), to the commons and just ecological political economy more widely (Obeng-Odoom, 2021a, pp.203–208). Black feminism already flourishes within stratification economics (Darity et al., 2020; Lewis et al., 2021; Obeng-Odoom, 2022a), although more can clearly be done to centre stratification economics as intersectional and intersectionality as stratification economics. Georgist political economy accepts 40 acres and a mule as a start, but stratification economics shows that even that premise is biased. White people obtained four times more (Craemer et al., 2020). Yet, stratification economics has not developed the full science of ‘progress and poverty’ in Georgist political economy intended to keep the gap closed. So, a fusion to fix the fission might be desirable, but a fuller consideration is beyond the scope of this paper. Additional symbiotic relationships between stratification economics and other schools of political economy could be fostered or deepened, if such interlinkages are fledgling. The goal is to build a wider and deeper approach to Black political economy.

In addition, there are daunting legal problems with monetary transfers as a form of reparations for past injustices to African-Americans. Certainly, there are cases where courts have agreed that monetary transfers were an appropriate remedy for past injustice. 136 However, these cases are easily distinguished from the case of African-Americans and therefore have little (if any) value as precedents. For example, in 1992 Japanese Americans interned during World War II received $1.2 billion in reparations-about $20,000 each.'3 7 Furthermore, the US government authorized funds to build a memorial to the injustice done to Japanese Americans. Perhaps the most widely recognized case of successful reparations claim is the Jewish community's campaign for restitution from Germany for atrocities committed during World War II. One author writes: The best known example the world over are the payments Germany continues to make to the victims of the Jewish holocaust since 1945. On the argument that responsibility survives even the defeat and eradication of the offending government (the Nazi regime in this instance), Israel and individual white Jews (and their heirs) have been buoyed financially for nigh onto half a century. 1 38 Remarkably, Jewish claimants were able to secure compensation on both the individual level and as a group. Individuals were able obtain reparations based on their ability to prove, in the typical American fashion, who took what from whom while group-based legal claims succeeded by using Israel as a surrogate. All told, the Jewish community has received tens of billions of dollars in cash reparations. 39 These cases seem to be of little help to supporters of cash reparations for African-Americans. In the case of the Japanese Americans, the victims were members of small, discrete groups; the sum was quantifiable; and the verdict was final. They were successful because the victims were able to state a cognizable claim: the injury was unequivocal and documented; the victims still alive in some cases and able to recover in person. 140 In the case of Jews, on the individual level, they were able to obtain reparations from Germany for the same reasons as the Japanese Americans. As for the argument for group level reparations, based on the Jewish precedent, that success was only possible because of the creation of Israel. In the end, there are inherent problems in both non-monetary transfers and monetary transfers as a remedy for past injustices against African-Americans. Notably, these problems mirror the problems seen throughout the history of reparations for African-Americans.

Equally, monetary transfers might create problems in public opinion if implemented. As mentioned, to fund cash payments taxes would certainly have to be raised for all Americans. The cost to taxpayers of funding reparations payments to African-Americans may engender some resentment. Moreover, monetary transfers may exacerbate the race problem in America, as other groups perceive these re-distributions as little more than undeserved handouts. Payments may lead to African Americans being characterized as victims, or being perceived as helpless by other groups. Lastly, cash payments as a form of reparations can even be counterproductive insofar as it creates the illusion that substantive progress is being made in race relations. 12 Whether it is a check to AfricanAmerican community groups or a check to each African-American in the country, such a large social spending effort will inevitably create the sense that the race problem has been resolved.

Similarly, a program of cash reparations to African Americans would be difficult to implement and would probably not resolve the disparity between white Americans and African Americans. The groupbased variant of cash distribution presents special problems. For one thing, there is the problem of "picking the group." Who legitimately represents African Americans? If the goal of these cash distributions is to establish some sort of autonomy for black groups, it will probably fail. Cash payments would leave African-American groups beholden to those in the United States who distribute the money. Second, the real costs of any type of cash remedy, payments to representative groups or to individuals, would be extremely expensive.10 Taxes would have to be raised or, alternatively, public spending would have to be cut. Arguably, this may reduce national growth, and it will certainly raise tension between average taxpaying Americans and African-Americans. Finally, monetary transfers do nothing to stymie racist social attitudes. 102 It can scarcely be said, according to one author for example, that a reparations "check" given to Japanese Americans who were sent to internment camps during World War II changed institutional racism or the social attitudes that Japanese Americans face.

Given that, why do bosses—at least the ones in Silicon Valley—seem to like UBI so much? Some of their enthusiasm may simply be well-meaning naiveté: as Sam Altman of Y Combinator says, “50 years from now, I think it will seem ridiculous that we used fear of not being able to eat as a way to motivate people”—as if this hasn’t been one of the defining features of capitalism all along. Presumably freedom from the need to earn a living will unleash people’s entrepreneurial spirit, their inner innovator—rather than simply give us the chance to fish, hunt, and criticize just as we please. The view of UBI as the foundation of the gig economy, meanwhile, is a tacit acknowledgement that capitalism can’t pay its full costs—a transfer of responsibility for a living wage from private employers to the public. Then there’s an even worse case for UBI as pressure outlet: Stern argues that basic income supporters would do well to convince the anxious rich that it’s their best bet to avoid “the guillotine” amidst growing inequality and desperation. But you don’t need to be Robespierre to be suspicious of a proposal that explicitly announces its intent to protect the rich from working-class rage—particularly when one of the major questions of UBI is where the free money will come from. Stern cautions UBI supporters against advocating a “soak the rich” tax on political grounds: the broad coalition that UBI requires will be impossible if the rich are against it from the start. (Alas, this is already the metric for most policies.) Instead, he proposes to fund UBI by cashing out major welfare programs (food stamps, housing assistance, the earned income tax credit) and charging a value-added tax on consumer goods; more tentatively, he considers a wealth tax, a financial transaction tax, and cuts to military spending. But funding a basic income by cannibalizing existing welfare programs and imposing regressive consumption taxes perversely places the burden of subsidizing low wages on the poor and working-class people making them in the first place. That this is a proposal put forth by a former labor leader is a measure of the left’s weakness. And indeed, Stern’s view of labor’s political prospects is remarkably dim. In fact, UBI is explicitly posed as a solution to the problem of declining union power: “It was time for me to look beyond unions for answers,” Stern declares in the first thirty pages. Instead, he proposes a Basic Income Party that could run candidates in every Congressional district and threaten a tax strike—the weapon of the wealthy—until Congress agrees to vote on a basic income package. It’s obviously a non-starter. But it reveals the limits of Stern-style unionism: start out collaborating with Walmart on healthcare, and soon you’ll hope only for the dwindling state to throw a few bucks at the reserve army of Uber drivers tasked with ferrying the rich from one gentrified enclave to the next. Instead of fighting off the dystopian future, settle into the interregnum of the present, with all its morbid symptoms. But as the writer Ben Tarnoff has pointed out, the places where technological development hasn’t produced a dystopian, jobless future (like Sweden) don’t just have technology, they also have strong unions and a robust welfare state. The kind of starkly unequal society that Stern and other UBI futurists fear wouldn’t just come about because the robots arrived—it would come about because only a few people owned them. Recognizing this, Bregman explicitly advocates “massive redistribution” of money, time, and robots—that is, of income, work, and the means of production. All wealth is socially produced, he argues, and so it should be shared accordingly. It’s not so much that this time is different—it’s that we have the chance to make it so. Though he stops short of inciting us to seize the robots outright, he advocates taxes on the wealthy and on financial transactions as a means to both fund basic income and disincentivize certain activities—like banking—that make money “without creating anything of value.” Though Bregman’s version of UBI is far more appealing on the merits, his political program is disappointing. Ideas change the world, Bregman declares, and UBI is such an obviously good idea that we just need to spread the word. The last line of the book belongs to Keynes, the book’s implicit hero, who famously said of ideas, “indeed, the world is ruled by little else.” But of course, it’s ruled by many other things—money and power chief among them. The fifteen-hour work week Keynes predicted didn’t come to pass because the idea alone wasn’t enough. More importantly, Keynes was talking about ideology rather than ideas per se, about the systems of thought that underpin our assumptions whether or not we know it, not just clever notions. And the problem with basic income is that it tends to be read as an idea without an ideology. Bregman describes the pro-UBI movement in Europe as grassroots and “cross-ideological” in character. At the local level where most programs are proposed, the debate is largely pragmatic. The program in Utrecht, for example, is known as “Weten Wat Werkt” or “Knowing What Works,” in acknowledgment that many see the current welfare system— which even in Europe has ceded more and more ground to workfare—as unaffordable and dysfunctional. But of course, what counts as pragmatic depends on the existing balance of political power. Even Bregman’s own position, though solidly on the left, shifts between advocating for UBI as what the Belgian philosopher Philippe Van Parijs described as the “capitalist road to communism” and the capitalist road to . . . saving capitalism from itself. Stern’s post-ideological stance is even more blatant: at one point he imagines an exchange between the libertarian political thinker Charles Murray, whose 1997 book The Bell Curve famously argued for racial differences in intelligence based on genetics, and Martin Luther King, Jr. He argues that their disagreements about the relationship of basic income to the role of the state in society are simply diversions from their shared idea of giving people money. But these disagreements get to the heart of the matter. The debate about basic income is about the obligations we have to one another, the origins of property, the ends of human life, the shape of our society. And when these broader visions are translated into policy, they don’t simply suggest a shared plan to give people money—they offer drastically different accounts of how much money people should get, where it should come from, and who should get it. The leftist-futurist version of basic income is often described as a nonreformist reform, per Van Parijs’s quip: a goal that’s achievable within capitalism but that has the potential to change the conditions of capitalism enough to lead beyond it. Basic income is the fully automated monorail to luxury communism, where we all own the robots and everyone gets what they need. This UBI isn’t a backstop for bad jobs, but the material condition for human fulfillment. But not just any income will do: for it to be a genuine step toward a post-work society, it has to be genuinely universal and unconditional, provide enough income to actually live on, and supplement rather than replace the welfare state. This UBI is the one that draws from the Marxist feminists who pointed out the unwaged labor of social reproduction in the 1970s, the working-class women of color who fought for the rights of welfare recipients in the 1960s, and the architects of the Freedom Budget who attempted to translate the gains of the civil rights movement into a program for economic justice. They wanted not just a basic income but a sufficient one—one adequate not merely to survive, but to live a decent life, and maybe even a good one. The right-wing version of basic income, by contrast, wherein paltry lumps of cash replace public services and goods, is a UBI not worth having. This version of basic income is a mechanism to streamline—a more accurate word might be “gut”—the welfare state in the name of libertarian ideas of freedom. People know what they need better than the state does, the argument goes; how people will be able to afford healthcare on $12,000 a year is less often addressed. Who exactly should get a basic income is another question. It’s sometimes called a “citizen’s dividend,” explicitly limiting recipients by nationality. More generally the “universal” is aspirational: basic income programs have only seriously been proposed at the national or local levels. So, as with other welfare programs, debates over basic income will undoubtedly be bound up with questions about nationality and migration. In the European context, we should be wary of the deployment of basic income to solidify Fortress Europe as the refugee crisis intensifies. In the debates over the Swiss program, for example, Luzi Stamm, a member of parliament for the right-wing Swiss People’s Party, said he could imagine supporting UBI—but only for the Swiss. “Theoretically, if Switzerland were an island, the answer is yes,” he said at the time. “But with open borders, it’s a total impossibility, especially for Switzerland, with a high living standard.” In the United States, meanwhile, the combination of nativism and libertarianism that makes up the Trump coalition is particularly dangerous: it’s hard to imagine any way a basic income program implemented in the Trump era would be anything but a vehicle for dismantling the remains of the welfare state while simultaneously reinforcing nationalism by excluding non-citizens from shared prosperity. That said, basic income doesn’t seem likely to be on the agenda of the Trump administration anytime soon. Instead of inventing the future, Trump’s move is to borrow from the past via boondoggles like the Carrier deal, which give public money to private companies in an attempt to revive a mid-century imaginary where men had real factory jobs. Welfare programs, meanwhile, are likely to come under renewed attack from a Republican administration ready to slash government spending. The apparent success of Trump’s appeal to mid-century nostalgia, though, has thrown cold water on utopian visions. After a few years of UBI flirtation, the American left seems to be returning to full employment— rather than full unemployment—as a demand, particularly via the idea of a federal job guarantee. There’s plenty of useful work to be done, of course, and like income, jobs should be distributed as evenly as possible. Remaking the ideology of work may be too heavy a lift for the next few years. Still, we shouldn’t stop pushing back against reifying work as the source of both income and social worth. Ongoing expropriation and proletarianization have left billions worldwide in a condition of what historian Michael Denning calls “wageless life,” rendered surplus to capital’s needs and struggling to scrape by in a system that starts “not with the offer of work, but with the imperative to earn a living.” And so while basic income sounds like a program for rich countries—a luxury made possible by a certain level of prosperity—it may be even more promising in places where it seems most unaffordable. In recent years UBI pilot programs have rolled out in Namibia, Kenya, and Uganda, mostly funded by NGOs; more generally, cash transfer programs, which aim to diminish poverty by giving poor people money—though often with specific criteria or restrictions—are the latest fad in development. Elsewhere, public support provides more in the way of livelihoods than do private wages: the anthropologist James Ferguson notes that more South Africans receive income from government welfare programs, whether child allowances or disability aid, than from waged labor. Basic income, Ferguson argues, may be the way to achieve social welfare in countries where the prospect of job creation on a scale adequate to the population is little more than a fantasy.

The Fiscal Nature Municipal and national fiscal policies undoubtedly have an impact on disaster and vice versa. Governments seek to grow their economies through taxation and spending. However, a natural disaster has the potential to undermine that expansion. In crass financial terms, disaster is a liability. As such, when catastrophe hits, governments must cope with the resulting costs without increasing public debt. In our era of global neoliberalism, financial markets are a popular means of dealing with risk. For instance, the “how-to guide” of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) on managing the cost of natural disaster notes the use of insurance, reinsurance, debt instruments (securitization), catastrophe bonds, and other capital market options to transfer risk. The goal, according to the IMF, is to create fiscal buffers against disaster-related financial threats.22 Beyond insurance covering potential and actual losses, we see that financialization is central to understanding contemporary disaster capitalism. Finance, simply put, influences everything. Importantly, Sarah Quinn reminds us that this means, “Finance is always social.”23 Financial systems, according to Quinn, not only distribute profit and risk throughout society but are also based on social understandings and relationships that have deepened throughout the last fifty years. Lin and Neely have also argued that “finance has become an essential fabric of contemporary American life.”24 We now see a reliance on market-based solutions for everything. Disaster risk is no different. Importantly, financialization is not just an American phenomenon. Globalization facilitates this process. As John Bellamy Foster argues, financialization, or more specifically, the financialization of accumulation, is at the center of the global economic system. Like other forms of capitalism, this system is predicated on the unequal relationships within countries, such as those between newly industrialized countries in the Global South and wealthy countries that control capital markets.25 Similarly, this imbalance can be extended to relationships between cities. What does financialization mean for the fiscal nature of cities and disaster risk? According to Manuel Aalbers, “Urban policy has become a financial instrument.”26 Amid debates over climate change, the mayors of New York, Paris, and Rio de Janeiro penned a 2016 editorial arguing that environmental action begins with cities. Noting that cities “account for 85% of global GDP, and they are engines of technological process and policy innovation,” they claim that cities are better positioned to solve environmental problems than national governments. However, in their editorial, the mayors wrote that they have faith in the benefits of expansion and urbanization. In fact, they argue that urban innovation can “increase economic activity.”27 The mayors, in other words, accept an expansion-oriented understanding of cities even as they support initiatives such as renewable energy. Similarly, following the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris (COP15), hundreds of investors from around the world mobilized around the call for new green technology and energy.28 This was spurred by Article 2 of the Climate Agreement, which calls for “making finance flows consistent with a pathway towards low greenhouse gas emissions and climate resilient development.”29 An immediate outcome of COP15 was the convening of the 2018 Ceres Investor Summit on Climate Risk at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Over 450 financial companies and capital market leaders met to discuss disaster-resilience projects and ways to fund green and sustainable projects that reduce carbon emissions.30 Meetings such as these reflect a trend toward so-called corporate environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investment practices, which are increasingly influencing environmental policy and action. While such developments suggest a growing concern for environmental problems, they are deeply rooted in the expansion of profit-making activities that would likely encourage capitalistic urban expansion. ESG investors, while slowly moving money toward renewable energy sources, have not pushed to radically decarbonize our economy. For instance, investment in smart cities still fuels the urban growth machine, which consists of a coalition of policymakers, corporations, and citizens who are true believers in endless expansion. This is not just about getting bigger; it is also about having a wider reach. Expansion-oriented growth means increased local and global consumption. Allan Schnaiberg calls this insatiable hunger the treadmill of production. The treadmill is an everaccelerating machine that thrives on the consumption of resources.31 This theoretical approach is addressed in more detail in chapter 3. However, it is essential to note here that our cities run faster than they ever have—by extracting and consuming resources, producing waste, and, as a corollary, creating more risk. As such, we need to question whether our system of risky cities should or can continue to run faster and faster.

From the outset it should be acknowledged that a history of reparations for slavery would be a history of a nonevent, a history of events too recent to deserve the name of history, or events that reverse the mode of contemporary expectations about reparations.5 The twentieth-century elaboration of the reparations concept to include compensation to victims of injustice (for example, German Wiedergutmachung) or even remorse in the form of public acknowledgment of wrongdoing and This content downloaded from 35.0.62.139 on Wed, 19 Jul 2023 14:48:40 +00:00 All use subject to http 84 R apology to victims (for example, the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission) arrived on the scene of slavery’s imbrication in a distant past, wherein all the victims and wrongdoers are dead, and all the ill-gotten gains dissipated. Contemporary claims for slave reparations face the legal corollary of historical distancing in the form of the doctrines of standing and time bar.6 Such difficulties relate to differences of moral temper and temporality, not to moral constants. In attempting to construct a history not of reparations for slavery but of the idea of reparations for slavery, it will be necessary to treat time, no less than race, in the words of Johannes Fabian, as a culturally constructed ‘‘dimension of power.’’7 Concretely, this involves a skeptical attitude with respect to single-axis time and viewing such frameworks as rooted in the violent power relations of dominance and subordination. As Walter Johnson points out, ‘‘Western concepts like primitiveness, backwardness, and underdevelopment rank areas and people of the world on a seemingly naturalized timeline—their ‘present’ is our ‘past’—and reframe the grubby real-time politics of colonial domination and exploitation as part of an orderly natural process of evolution toward modernity.’’8 The notion of progress, as David Brion Davis has shown, is as compatible with slavery as it is with abolition.9 Although this is not a work of political economy, as a work that attempts to contextualize in socio-economic terms the legal and moral vicissitudes of the idea of reparations for slavery, it cannot overlook the problem of value as it relates to the exploitation of slave labor, and how, in the wake of abolition, this problem became a crisis. The problem of value undertaken is not the same as that articulated by Karl Marx, which can be resolved by appeal to a notion of abstract labor; rather, the problem of value explored here relates to the social value placed on subjects whom slave trade and chattel slavery made into objects of commerce (commodities). As commodities, the value of slaves was determined by market principles to which a Marxist analysis of abstract labor, however awkwardly, could be applied. Moreover, the historiography of the slave trade and slavery is replete with expressions of the value of commerce in slaves. However, the social value of former slaves as subjects remains paradoxical. The divine sanction of African enslavement gave justification not only to the extraction of value from slave labor but also to the devaluation of Black subjects for whom an accursed share was ordained.10 Abolition did little to undo such devaluation, in part because low esteem was a function of color prejudice and ideologies of white racial superiority. Compensation to the enslaved, therefore, entails not mere abolition but a fundamental social revaluation of objects of commerce as subjects, a social transformation in which those same subjects are viewed as persons entitled to restitution and recognition of human rights and, not least of all, an appreciation of the exploitative dimension of slavery across time. This content downloaded from 35.0.62.139 on Wed, 19 Jul 2023 14:48:40 +00:00 All use subject to http The Accursed Share 85 Temporality Plaintiffs’ alleged injury is derivative of the injury inflicted upon enslaved AfricanAmericans over a century ago. This is insufficient to establish standing, and contrary to centuries of well-settled legal principles requiring that a litigant demonstrate a personal stake in an alleged dispute . . . Plaintiffs cannot establish a personal injury sufficient to confer standing by merely alleging some genealogical relationship to African-Americans held in slavery over one-hundred, two-hundred, or three-hundred years ago. —In re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation 304 F. Supp. 2d 1027, 1047,1051 (N. D. Ill. 2004) What is the justification for depriving a man of his rights, a pure evil as far as it goes, in consequence of the lapse of time? —Oliver Wendell Holmes, ‘‘The Path of the Law,’’ Harvard Law Review 10 (1897): 457, 476 Time and standing in American law are interrelated concepts. Temporal relations can determine the existence or nonexistence of standing.11 Neither, however, is merely a value-neutral objective datum of life or legal institutions. Like race, time and standing are socially constructed. They are dimensions of power. How human beings use time, how it gets constructed, in Fabian’s analysis, is expressive of a worldview, even a cosmology.12 In reparations discourse, the construction of time and standing lends itself to two opposing cosmologies: one in which the passage of time decreases or eliminates standing to claim redress for race-based injuries, and the other in which its passage increases and compounds race-based injuries, and thus augments standing for redress. Through the law of limitations that places temporal restrictions on personal injury claims, the former cosmology is enforced as the general rule. Some opponents of reparations have even attempted to defend the morality of the former view.13 The latter cosmology, which we may call the accumulation or maturation thesis, also finds its doctrinal home in the law of limitations as exceptions to the general rule based on continuing violations, fraudulent concealment, or equitable tolling.14 It has also been defended morally by proponents of reparations for race-based injuries whose origins are relatively remote in time.15 These are not value-neutral positions. Their opposition speaks to the difference between viewing current race relations as radically distinct from the past and viewing those relations as co-extensive with past practices. In other words, it is the difference between the past as bygone and the past as prologue. The conflict between these cosmologies of time and standing lies at the heart of whether any legal claim for slavery reparations will ever receive merit-based adjudication in the courts.

Few dare to speak of a ‘‘slaveholders’ Constitution’’ (as abolitionists had a century and a half ago), to charge the government with ultimate responsibility for slavery. The injuries suffered were not at the hand of the U.S. government, but at the hands of Aetna Life & Casualty, R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, FleetBoston Financial, Lloyds of London, and other corporations. In cases recently filed in U.S. civil courts, the ‘‘crime’’ of slavery involves ‘‘unjust enrichment,’’ the loan of monies to ‘‘planters, merchants, and cotton brokers throughout the South,’’ the collection of ‘‘custom duties and fees on ships engaged in the slave trade,’’ the garnishing of premiums through the ‘‘sale of life insurance to slave owners’’ and ‘‘the insuring of ships utilized for the Trans-Atlantic slave trade,’’ and the construction of railroad lines and harvesting of tobacco ‘‘in part by slave labor.’’18These most recent reparations cases are unable to name the state as an agent in the perpetuation of injury; they foreclose the possibility of a discussion of the racial state, and as such they reinscribe the neutrality of the state. What is more, in all these cases, which ‘‘demand . . . a just and fair accounting of profits earned from slave labor,’’ the injury of slavery amounts in essence to the withholding (certainly violent, certainly coerced) of the slave’s wages. The plan for redress, in turn, amounts to a demand for back wages. What better illustrates Cugoano’s pragmatic resignation and the This content downloaded from 35.0.62.139 on Wed, 19 Jul 2023 14:43:36 +00:00 All use subject to http 8 R insufficiency of redress—‘‘a just commutation for what cannot be fully restored’’— than a demand for back wages? Recent cases for reparations have focused on figuring out formulas for ‘‘just commutation,’’ on how to create a case for a ‘‘cause of action,’’ on how to advance and pursue claims for redress before the bar.19 Judicial models of redress often require that claims fit a legal paradigm of individual rights, that a group seeking a court’s remedy for harms done to it translate its claims into forms synonymous with the rights and privileges, duties and liabilities that the Constitution ascribes to the agents of contractual liberty (for example, the Constitution’s ‘‘due process’’ protections of citizens against deprivation of life, liberty, or property by the state, and its guarantee of ‘‘equal protection of the laws’’). In line with this emphasis on the individual, appeals for judicial redress must satisfy the demand for identifiable victims and perpetrators, unambiguous causation, limited and certain damage, and the acceptance that the agreed remuneration shall be final. This reduction of collective appeal to the forms of grievance common to the paradigm of individual rights is often claimed as the principal reason why the case for Japanese-American reparations succeeded. It is also claimed as the principal reason why the claims for African-American reparations have failed. The paradigm of individual rights presents African Americans with particular obstacles. First, this paradigm’s standard of accountability renders all claims for black reparations null and void, as the victims and perpetrators of slavery have been long dead. Second, the focus on the individual in liberal legal formulas for remedy makes difficult an account of group oppression and structural inequalities. Third, and finally, the focus on identifiable victims and perpetrators foregrounds the law’s indifference to tangled and complicated webs of causation. African Americans’ attempts to establish the authority of the past have been made difficult if not impossible by the temporal limits placed upon the duration and finality of a wrong. Or, in other words, one means of dismissing a claim for redress is to charge the plaintiff with unreasonable delay or negligence in pursuing a right or claim. African Americans are guilty of their own wrong—of sleeping on their own rights, failing to act in a timely fashion, or what the law would describe as laches (F. lachesse, negligence, slackness). If African Americans fail in their attempt to achieve redress, it will be due not to the nation’s failure to recognize historical wrongs, but, curiously, to their own negligence. Dismissals of African American claims for reparations oscillate between competing senses that one either has no ground for a legitimate claim or that the claim has come too late. Temporal relations, as Westley points out, ‘‘determine the existence or nonexistence of standing.’’ He identifies two opposing views. In the eyes of the court, the passage of time eviscerates standing for those who claim redress for race-based injuries; but from the perspective of the petitioners, it is this very passage of time that augments and intensifies these injuries. Westley proposes a legal path beyond this impasse, which arises in large part from the doctrinal constraints of tort law and contract law. The most This content downloaded from 35.0.62.139 on Wed, 19 Jul 2023 14:43:36 +00:00 All use subject to http Fugitive Justice 9 viable path for future reparations claims, he suggests, is to be found in the law of restitution, which gives courts ‘‘the equitable powers . . . to undo the unjust enrichment brought about by a defendant’s misappropriation of labor through violence, coercion, fraud, and duress.’’

The petition read: To the Senators and Representatives of the Congress of the United States of America: Whereas, Generation after generation of Colored people served this country as slaves for two hundred and forty-four years or more, and Whereas, This government owes the unknown and deceased Colored Soldiers a large sum of money which is unclaimed, and Whereas, Many of those soldiers have brothers, fathers, mothers and sisters among us, who are destitute and starving, and Whereas, It is a precedent established by the patriots of this country to relieve its distressed citizens, both on land and sea, and millions of our deceased people, besides those who still survive, worked as slaves for the development of the great resources and wealth of this country, and Whereas, We believe it is just and right to grant the ex-slave a petition: Therefore, We, the undersigned, citizens of the United States of America, appeal to your Honorable Body to pass Senate Bill, No. 4718, introduced June 6, 1898, by Senator Mason, of Illinois, providing pension for Freedmen, etc.14 Six ex-slave pension bills in total went before Congress between 1890 and 1903. All of the bills were identical, according to Walter Hill, ‘‘each providing a pension to ex-slave[s] based on a scale. Ex-slaves 70 years and older were to receive an initial payment of $500 and $15 a month; ex-slaves 60–70 years would receive $300 and $12 a month; ex-slaves 50–60 years would receive $100 and $8 a month; and those ex-slaves less than 50 years old would not receive an initial payment, but a $4 a month pension.’’15 All were finally defeated. Frustrated by these legislative defeats (and encouraged by House to pursue a new path), Cornelius J. Jones in 1915 filed a lawsuit against the United States Department of Treasury on behalf of H. N. Johnson, C. B. Williams, Rebecca Bowers, Minnie Thompson, and ‘‘others similarly interested.’’16 They alleged that between the years 1859 and 1868 they and their ancestors ‘‘were subject to a system of involuntary servitude’’ in the states of the South, and that as a result of such servitude ‘‘many million bales of cotton were produced.’’ In their attempt to recover the monetary value of their unpaid labor and that of their ancestors, they argued that the federal government had benefited financially from slave labor in the form of the ‘‘Internal Revenue Tax on Raw Cotton.’’ In Jones’s estimate, the unpaid labor of the slaves amounted to $68,072,388.99. The U.S. government was a state in debt and the plaintiffs injured creditors. Assessing debt and calculating injury was itself a formula for justice. The federal appeals court did not agree and dismissed the appellants’ case on the grounds that there was no proper defendant. The government, unlike an individual defendant, could not be sued without its consent. The government possessed ‘‘sovereign immunity,’’ which was a defense against legal action. The rationale that undergirded the government’s ‘‘sovereign immunity’’ was protecting the ‘‘public fisc.’’ In this case, the protection of the public fisc had as its cost the perpetuity of This content downloaded from 35.0.62.139 on Wed, 19 Jul 2023 14:43:36 +00:00 All use subject to http Fugitive Justice 7 unremunerated slave labor and the continued failure by the government to return funds it had obtained through unjust means. The decision by the court of appeals nullified not only the specifics of the litigants’ plea but also, and more important, the very conception of the government as culpable or obligated. Redress could only obtain when the state recognized itself as negligent, when it acknowledged its unjust enrichment. The redress Jones sought was possible only if the state assumed a sense of continuity between itself and its predecessor—a continuity made visible by the accusation of ‘‘involuntary servitude’’ in ‘‘the years 1859 to 1868,’’ a charge that denied the barricade between the slave past and the emancipated present. The state, in addition, had its own designs for House, Jones, and their compatriots. The Justice Department and the U.S. Postal Service, acting at the behest of the Pension Bureau, charged the backers of the various ex-slave pension bills with using the mails to defraud ‘‘poor negroes’’ of their ‘‘hard-earned money’’ and making promises the postmaster considered impossible to perform—the outlandish promise that the state would redress slavery. As the Office of the Attorney General explained, the ex-slave petitioners knew that ‘‘there had ‘never been the remotest prospect’ that Congress would appropriate pensions for African Americans.’’17 For sure, the state too was concerned with the stolen wages of poor negroes; but the culpable agent brought before the bar was not the U.S. government; rather, it was the very petitioners who appealed on the ex-slaves’ behalf. House served eight months in a Missouri penitentiary for this fraud. Sovereign immunity protected the government from all charges of culpability as regards the institution of slavery. This seems to be the lesson learned by those who currently argue for reparations. Today, it is too late to invoke the crimes of the U.S. nation state.

I believe that these complications can be addressed, and I have tri address them in some of my other work (McGary 1999). However, in this discussion I don't wish to take up those issues. I want to focus on why debt of justice, if owed to African Americans, ought to have priority. As I have claimed elsewhere, a duty of reparations has dimensions: a material and a psychological dimension. Both are important, but I wish to comment on why the psychological dimension reparation is very important and necessary. Perhaps too much attention has been given to the material aspects of the demand for reparations; psychological aspect of reparations may be equally important. For reparations can be seen in part as recognition of the wrongs of slaver as a mechanism for overcoming victimization. However, they can serve as a way for transgressors to address the wrongs they have done. If putting the victimization behind one is an indispensable first step achieving reconciliation, a failure to do this may cause many African Americans to sit on the fence and not fully embrace their U.S. ide because the U.S. government has not acknowledged in an official w role in the victimization of African American people. This is not t that African Americans have not served their country in times of Clearly they have supported the country in numerous ways, and they fought and died in defense of U.S. ideals, but nonetheless many remained ambivalent about fully identifying themselves as U.S. cit Many African Americans believe that they still suffer because of legacies of slavery and Jim Crow, but they realize that we live in a political climate that stigmatizes black victimization. In fact, a prevalent v that a person who sees himself as a victim of past discrimination someone who is unwilling to take advantage of existing opportunities. Acknowledging black victimization is often described in pejorative as "playing the race card" (Mendleberg 2001) or as a "victim's mentality (Steele 1990, chaps. 3 and 4). And playing the race card is a practice the taken to be at odds with the U.S. ideal of judging persons by their rather than their racial identities. This practice is taken to be incompatible with genuinely working to achieve a racially assimilated society. There is, however, no logical or practical incompatibility between acknowledging a history of racial discrimination, demanding rectification © 2010 The Author Journal compilation © 2010 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd This content downloaded from 35.0.62.139 on Thu, 20 Jul 2023 16:05:44 +00:00 All use subject to http RECONCILIATION AND REPARATIONS 551 for the wrongs one has endured, and working hard to be successful Some people are able to succeed in spite of wrongs, while others broken by them. But success and failure are usually not individual achievements; they often depend on networks and support system a society which is divided along racial lines and in which poverty strongly correlated with a person's race, African American children live in poverty need to know that they bear no responsibility f born into a poor family that lives in a community with inadequate and other services. Acknowledging the historical conditions that tributed to the formulation of such communities is a way to empower these children. It is not simply a way to coddle them, nor does them to real opportunities. Reparations and Reconciliation Many of the supporters of reparations believe that the only achieve genuine reconciliation between the races is for the U.S ment to acknowledge its debt of justice to African Americans and m sincere effort to rectify wrongdoing. An acknowledgment of wrong has been an important ingredient of reconciliation programs in Au and South Africa (George and Smith 2000). Furthermore, these c believe that there cannot be any hope for forgiveness or recon unless the debt of justice is acknowledged. Therefore, where this d not been acknowledged it makes it difficult for the victims to reco and fully embrace the ideal of one nation and one people. They that there must be some truth and reparation before this idea made real. But why do they believe that settling a debt of reparation necessary for this to be so? In Australia and South Africa there are active movements t about reconciliation between the victims of state-sanctioned racial dis crimination and the beneficiaries of this institutional racism. Individuals and institutions in these countries have acknowledged the wrongness and detrimental consequences of prolonged state-sanctioned racism, and their guilt either by association or through participation. We find letters of apology from white Australians and white South Africans that reveal in quite moving terms the regret they feel for perpetrating or not actively opposing their country's unjust policies and practices. These letters are nice, but clearly they do not, by themselves, serve as adequate evidence of genuine remorse or sincere acknowledgment of past wrongdoing. And a relevant question that is often asked is, What more is needed? The call for more than an apology is connected to the idea that there must be truth in the expression of regret and remorse, but it must also be true that there is an accurate accounting of what actually took place. In other words, the apology must be genuine, and there should be no doubt about why the apology was necessary. Since we cannot see into © 2010 The Author Journal compilation © 2010 Metaphilosophy LLC and Blackwell Publishing Ltd This content downloaded from 35.0.20.121 on Thu, 20 Jul 2023 21:07:51 +00:00 All use subject to http 552 HOWARD MCGARY the hearts and minds of others, we have to rely on less direct evidience establish whether an apology is genuine or a person is truly reg remorseful for past wrongdoing. So, a pertinent question is, W these other forms of evidence? For minor wrongs or infraction words may be enough, but when serious wrongdoing has occurred, acts are not sufficient. Why not? It is common belief that it is easy to utter words of regret or r but that some nonverbal demonstration of one's sincerity gives us assurance that our words are genuine. Sometimes facial expressions shedding of a tear can provide further evidence of a person's s These things are useful, but in the case of serious wrongs, they are not enough to convince the victim that the apology is genuine especially true when there has been some unjust enrichment as a r the wrongdoing. In such cases, relinquishing the unjust gains is a f sign of one's sincerity. To apologize but not to offer to return one benefits casts doubt on one's sincerity. Of course, I am not ma that an offer to return one's ill-gotten gains entails that a p apology is genuine, but it can count as good evidence. However the victim is entitled to reparation, this may be the best available that the wrongdoer's apology is genuine. So far I have discussed what can count as reliable evidence for the sincerity of a wrongdoer's expression of remorse. Now I would like to turn to a related, but different, concern: the requirement that the wrongdoer give a truthful account of what she did and why she did it. It is important for the victims of wrongdoing to know that the perpetrators realize what they have done and how the victims have been affected by their actions. This is why convicted criminals are given the opportunity to speak after the verdict in a criminal trial. They are given the opportunity to speak in order to show that they appreciate the gravity of what they have done. Their statements can even influence the judge in the sentencing process. Reparations, when they are properly conceived, involve reassessment. The reassessment requires the alleged victims to examine their victimization, the alleged wrongdoers to come to grips with what they have done, and the victims and the wrongdoers to explore their relationship with each other. In a like manner, when a wrongdoer, be it the state or some other perpetrator, shows that there is an appreciation for the consequences of the wrongdoing, this helps to make reconciliation more likely, since reconciliation requires that the wronged and the wrongdoers be able to interact as moral equals.