Reparations are a non-event, to approach the idea of reparations for slavery and colonialism, time must be reframed as a “dimension of power” that problematizes single-axis time as violent power relations of dominance and subordination.

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.