The fight for reparations must go beyond material demands towards a restructuring of psychic investments in whiteness.

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.