Taken
Lands, Taken Lives: The Crimes and Legacies of Colonialism and the Necessity
for Discussion
In
Response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Case for Reparations
By Balraj Gill
I write these words while sitting on the second level of a
triple-decker house on land that once sustained the Massachusett people, land
that was taken, enclosed, parceled, privatized, and has since been under the
ownership of generation after generation of settlers. I am sustained by a
stipend, given to me by a top private university, a university built on land
that once sustained the Massachusett people and benefitted in part from the
profits generated by the trade and exploitation of slaves. I am a member of the
U.S. polity, a polity that was built on lands that once sustained the
indigenous peoples of the northern part of this continent, land that is now the
territory of the United States of America, a nation-state that derived huge wealth
from the slave trade and exploitation of enslaved peoples.
At the very foundation of our polity, of our political
community, are taken lands and taken lives—the lives of indigenous peoples and
the lives of peoples of African descent sold into slavery. The legacy of such
takings includes the decimation of indigenous communities. It includes the
violation of treaty after treaty with Native bands, tribes, and nations. It
includes the continued brutalization and economic deprivation of black
Americans and institutionalized racism that further affects countless others.
These are the crimes and legacies of colonialism and imperialism. As members of
the U.S. polity how do we take account of and responsibility for such crimes
and their legacies? There are two threads of discussion that must be taken up
seriously and simultaneously: the case for reparations and the relationship
between indigenous peoples and the U.S. state.
Ta-Nehisi Coates’s "The Case for Reparations", published in the
June 2014 issue of The Atlantic, is
an important political intervention in this regard. The cover of the magazine
provocatively states: “250 years of slavery. 90 years of Jim Crow. 60 years of
separate but equal. 35 years of state-sanctioned redlining. Until we reckon
with the compounding moral debts of our ancestors, America will never be
whole.” The two most salient features of the article are Coates’s move away
from the neutral, ahistorical, social-scientific term “race relations” as a way
of understanding racism in the United States to instead naming it a history of
white supremacy; and his call to publicly discuss—simply discuss—this colossal part of our history and what that history
means for the present and future through informed
opinion and analysis rather than resorting to old prejudices and the
superficiality of knee-jerk reactions.
Coates’s case for reparations is an invitation to Americans
to consciously participate in an act of finding out—to investigate—and through
that act to engage in and raise the level of political discourse, a
surprisingly simple yet radical proposition. To say, “I didn’t know,” and leave
it at that is not enough. Go find out. Analyze. Form your opinions. Discuss
with other people. Find the ways and means to broaden the discussion. This is
the basic requirement of democratic participation, not waiting around to cast a
vote every four years as some would have us believe.
Based on his own investigation, mainly through interviews and
his reading of a selection of scholarly works published in recent decades, Coates
proposes that reparations might be a way to repair the wealth gap, of which, he
said, there is no better statistical illustration of the “enduring legacy of
our country’s shameful history of treating black people as sub-citizens,
sub-Americans, and sub-humans.” But he further noted that only a national
discussion could reveal how or even if
the damage done by centuries of subjugation is reparable. In this respect, he
supports Congressman John Conyers’s bill H.R. 40 to establish a commission to
study reparation proposals, a bill Conyers has reintroduced in Congress every
year since 1989.
I have my doubts that liberal democracy could ever fully
deliver in terms of an honest discussion on reparations or on the remedies for
institutional racism, that is, for the history of white supremacy. Yet the case
for reparations nonetheless deserves broad, critical attention as a starting
point for discussion, keeping in mind the urgently needed changes in social
policy that could provide short- and mid-term relief for the most vulnerable
members of U.S. society—that is, relief from the constant state of emergency
that has been the norm in so many people’s lives.
Yet while we discuss reparations, we cannot escape
discussing the land upon which such reparations might be made. In response to
Coates, Daniel Wildcat noted that indigenous peoples have been deprived of
their homeland and for them reparations could never be a remedy. “To American
Indians,” he wrote, “land is not simply a property value or a piece of real
estate. It is a source of traditions and identities, ones that have emerged
from centuries and millennia of relationships with landscapes and seascapes.”
As such, the struggle of Native peoples has been around treaty rights and the
right to self-determination.
In his case for reparations, Coates moves from slavery in
the United States to Germany’s reparations for the Holocaust. His example of
what reparations did for Israeli nation-building unfortunately elides the
longer history of Israel, that it became a fact on the ground as a nation-state
through the expropriation of Palestinian land. Therefore, in the spirit of
contributing to the discussion, I propose that the field of our inquiry be
broadened, that it include the taking of lands in the Americas, the occupation
of Palestine, and go even further. Anything less would be a grave injustice.
How do we do this? We certainly cannot rely on the wisdom of John Locke whose
very ideology underwrote this state of affairs, who presented the
justifications for the taking of land from “savages” and for the enslavement of
Africans. (Coates begins his article with three quotes related to reparations, including
one from Locke’s Two Treatises on
Government.) That is to say, while we have to engage with liberal democracy
because that is what we have, liberalism and its political systems cannot be
left off the hook. With this, perhaps, Coates might agree. And when liberal
democracy doesn’t deliver, we cannot lose hope; we have to take stock of our
experience and delve ever deeper into our imaginations to conjure other
possibilities.
Lives shattered by slavery, Jim Crow, separate but equal,
and redlining cannot be discussed separately from lives shattered by genocide,
removal, and the taking of land. The uniting factors are the histories of
colonialism, imperialism, and white supremacy and the numerous crimes
sanctioned under the auspices of liberal democracy. So where does that leave
us? Coates wants to make America whole through a national reckoning that would
lead to a spiritual renewal. “Reparations
would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our
self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history,” he
commented. Yet making America whole and spiritually renewed is an
ambiguous task. To be a touch more concrete, I would suggest that democratic
renewal is a more achievable goal. In other words, our project has to be one of
people’s empowerment and social justice, a project of taking control over the
decisions that affect our lives, a project of collectively setting social and
political agendas with a view to end exploitation and oppression in their many
manifestations.
To that end, let’s start with some much needed discussion.
