Reparations represent healing by embracing reconciliation

At this moment, standing at the crossroads, American reparations theory charts a murky path. In light of the stakes and in hopes of generating practical theory that links scholars and frontline advocates with policymakers and the American public, we have suggested next steps down an American reparations path that elevates the role of "social healing" and links group and societal healing to "doing justice." To help chart this path we have suggested that reparations-asrepair392 scholars and advocates generate a strategic framework that draws more deeply from multidisciplinary understandings of social healing as well as from multifaceted global reparations attempts at symbolic and practical justice.393 The suggested framework of social healing through justice bears three distinct markers. First, it builds upon the scholarship embracing reconciliation (instead of compensation) as the conceptual foundation for reparations. 394 It diverges, however, by expressly highlighting the role of justice in social healing and by deploying language that is less controversial than "reconciliation." 395 Second, it casts reparations not as an end in itself but instead as an integral aspect of the larger project of social healing-as the culmination of a series of strategic efforts targeting recognition, responsibility, and reconstruction. 396 In doing so, it identifies repairing damage to group members and building new relationships as focal points for fostering an interest-convergence among the subjects of injustice, citizens' groups, and society itself. And third, the path is marked by an emphasis on reparations practice; or more specifically, on the insights drawn from recent ground-level human rights struggles worldwide to redress the harms of injustice as a pivotal element of a country's democratic legitimacy. 397