On February 27, HDS hosted the fourth installment in the the six-part series Religion and the Legacies of Slavery: A Series of Public Online Conversations. The featured speaker was Terrence L. Johnson, Professor of African American Religious Studies at HDS.
The 1619 Project spawned an unprecedented national conversation in and outside the classroom on slavery’s ongoing afterlives in American society. The enthusiastic response to the project was not universal. A few historians noted in a letter to the Times that the project reflected “a displacement of historical understanding of ideology.” The challenge raised here underscores central ethical concerns at the center of American national identity: who is responsible for slavery? What role does religion play in addressing the lingering “afterlives” of African enslavement in the United States? Do African and African American scholars play a unique role in public debates and scholarship on slavery? Terrence Johnson will examine how the writings of W.E.B. Du Bois and Toni Morrison establish a framework for exploring the role of religion and ethics in grappling with the memory and history of African enslavement.
Hosted by Dr. Diane L. Moore, Faculty Director, Religion and Public Life, and Dr. Melissa Wood Bartholomew, Associate Dean of the Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging.
Full transcript:
SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.
SPEAKER 2: Memory, History, and the Ethics of Reparations. February 27, 2023.
DIANE MOORE: Good evening. On behalf of our Dean David Hempton, welcome to our fourth in a series of six webinars on religion and the legacies of slavery, co-sponsored by Harvard Divinity School, the Harvard Legacy of Slavery Initiative, and Harvard X. My name is Diane Moore, and I'm the faculty director of Religion and Public Life here at the Divinity School. And it is my pleasure to co-host this series with my friend and colleague Melissa Wood Bartholomew, Associate Dean for our Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging. On behalf of us both and our many staff and faculty colleagues who have helped bring the series into being, I want to welcome the hundreds of participants who are joining us for this presentation, representing over 80 countries worldwide. We are so grateful for your presence.
Tonight is the fourth in a series of six critical conversations building upon and beyond the work of the 2022 Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Report. In this series we explore through the head and the heart what the academic study of religion teaches us about the tangled histories and legacies of slavery and racism here in the United States and beyond. These tragic legacies are alive and present in many forms as the news on any given day, in any given hour devastatingly reveals.
We hope that by gaining a deeper understanding of the complex power of religion relevant to the historical and contemporary manifestations of racism and white supremacy that this knowledge will enhance our commitment to reparative action, and racial justice, and healing in our own times and in our own contexts. Ultimately, these conversations are in service of advancing our vision of just world at peace healed of racism and oppression.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: And before we proceed, we pause. We pause out of reverence. We pause to acknowledge and honor those who came before us, who were indigenous to this land, and the African and Indigenous people who were enslaved in this country, including the more than 70 people of African and Indigenous descent who were enslaved here at Harvard University, as detailed in the Harvard and the Legacy of Slavery Report.
As a descendant of Africans who were enslaved in this country, I am aware of the potential impact of hearing this tragic history. We remind everyone that as we proceed through these difficult conversations and listen to the exchanges, it is so important to be attuned to what might be stirring up in us and happening in our bodies, particularly as we navigate our emotions regarding ongoing manifestations of the legacies of slavery in this country. Please remember to breathe and take care of yourself during and after this session. We invite you now to pause and breathe with intention and to focus on your breath as we lift up the Harvard University Native American Program's acknowledgment of the land and people.
We acknowledge that Harvard University is located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people. But for the stolen land and the stolen labor, this country and this University would not be. Our acknowledgment of the people in the land extends beyond words. It is expressed through our actions and it's connected to what we are doing through these conversations.
This series is a part of the broader work stemming from our school's commitment to reading the Harvard and Legacy of Slavery Report as our Common Read text this year. As we engage with this report we are discerning our institutional actions for redress and ways to support the University in implementing its recommendations and even expanding upon them. And we aim to further our vision in the restorative antiracist and anti-oppressive Harvard Divinity School. This is sacred work.
DIANE MOORE: As I mentioned earlier, this is the fourth in a series of six webinars on religion and the legacies of slavery. Our first presentation was based on what it means to-- our first presentation was by Professor Karen King, who focused on what it means to recognize that Christian scriptures were formed in a social and historical context where slavery was commonplace. Our second webinar featured professors David Holland and Kathryn Gin Lum, who engaged in a conversation on religion, race, and the double helix of white supremacy, with a focus on Professor Lum's new book entitled Heathen: Religion and Race in American History. Our third presentation featured Professor Dan KcKanan, who explored the complex lives of several of Harvard's Divinity School's original benefactors in a presentation entitled "Harvard Divinity School and Slavery-- Family Stories."
And tonight we're honored to have Professor Terence Johnson with us to speak about memory, history, and the ethics of reparations. Terrence L. Johnson is Professor of African American religious studies. And he joined our faculty just this last fall, but he has already earned a well-deserved reputation as a beloved teacher, colleague, and friend.
In his research interests-- his research interests include African American political thought, ethics, American religions, and the role of religion in public life. Johnson's interdisciplinary research agenda is historical, critical, and constructive. He weaves together African American religions, political theory, and American history to paint broad conceptual schemes for imagining religion, democracy, ethics, liberalism, justice, and freedom.
Professor Johnson, it is just such an honor to have you with us in this series. And I'll turn it over to you for your presentation on memory, history, and the ethics of reparations.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Thank you, Diane. I'm really appreciative of your support. I'd also like to thank Melissa Wood Bartholomew for the invitation as well to join this incredible, and very painful, and powerful set of conversations.
I'm going to try a bit of a thought experiment as I paint through memory, and ethics, and reparations. And I want to begin with the slide of the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah by Henry Ossawa Tanner.
So Henry Ossawa Tanner was one of the most celebrated painters of the late 19th century. His art mirrored his transnational experiences, depicting human experiences from the American South to Palestine and Europe. With the stroke of his brush, Tanner cuts the Du Boisian veil and creates the unimaginable at the dawn of the 20th century, imagining and inserting oneself in a world stained by the transatlantic slave trade and punctuated by what I call elsewhere the moral problem of Blackness.
Tanner, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal bishop, conjures light in dark places, where, for instance, in Palestine he discovers fragments of Zion. Near the Jordan banks he reremembers and looks upon the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. And from a Mount of Olives is visited by Judas, with whom he weighs the consequences of betrayal and whether his own flight to France signaled a betrayal to his people.
Though his impressionist art, Tanner recreates worlds where identity, religion, and race are intertwined, twisted, and sometimes unforgivenly absent from his paintings. Without a home, Tanner portrays on canvas sites of memory we're imagined communities narrate through biblical scenes and pastoral terrain a life unrealized for the native Philadelphian in the US.
In 1914, Tanner reflected on his meandering journey, which fueled racial violence in the nation called by Puritans the new Jerusalem. He wrote, quote, "The conditions have driven me out of the country. And while I cannot sing our national hymn 'Land of Liberty,' still, deep in my heart, I love it and am sometimes sad that I cannot live where my heart sits."
Sitting and gazing here on Zoom at the Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, Tanner, through his use of color and delicate streams of light the conceals the apparent destruction of Gomorrah, we're left pondering questions of memory, accountability, and repair. His artwork allows us to understand the ethical, historical, and spiritual underpinnings of our past and current struggle for reparations in a new and critical ways.
Instead, Tanner's paintings, as characterized by our historian Kymberly Pinder, are sermons on canvas, where race and spirituality are as inseparable as the head and limbs are from the body. And through his paintings, we, in the contemporary moment, are challenged to sit with his nuances.
In the destruction, Blackness finds its way into light through bodies that may or may not be phenotypically Black or white. He masterfully shifts our attention to biblical narratives and plants our feet firmly in the place many call the Holy Land. A like a good preacher in Black Protestant traditions, the text of the sermon captures the imagination. Judgments of the artist, preacher, race, society, and Blackness are temporarily suspended as we gaze upon the flesh of the familiar biblical narrative.
The text speaks back to us. The color turquoise looms over the barren land, where light sits on the margins. The looming horizon signifies a possibility of life or possibly a new narration of dread and destruction on the other side. Tanner's religious engagement on canvas emerges from the competing and overlapping aims of Black church traditions, what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham characterizes as counter-public spheres, where the spiritual, political, economic, and educational aspirations find a home.
Along these lines, Tanner masked three important moves in his art. First, religion is private, public, and a heuristic tool for interrogating human existence. Second, Tanner obscures through renarration, and color, enlightenment's White-Black binary, where Blackness is the negation of whiteness, the absence of soul and humanity.
Third, Tanner's art seems to be preoccupied with abandonment and desolation. Paintings of the Resurrection, of Lazarus, and Judas's betrayal denote an ongoing interest in stitching together in vibrant and celestial colors the dissembled pieces the Black life and of Black bodies.
The destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is a fitting and jarring place to begin this evening's investigation-- this conversation on memory, history, ethics, reparations. As I see it, the painting's blur the fault lines of destruction. The soothing ambience of sea-like clouds encumbers epic narratives, intertextual gender, and homosexual violence.
Is the portrait designed to deceive the audience? Is religion here the source of moral outrage without any textual resources for political and social accountability? Tanner seems to be haunted by a question Reverend Dr. Iva Carruthers raised in a recent essay on religion and reparations, quote, "What manner of Christianity and Christians could appropriate and twist the word of God to so profoundly justify the protracted dehumanization of millions of persons on the basis of their skin color and to serve their earthly and personal beneficial interest," end quote.
Many of Tanner's portraits belie a buried anxiety directed at interrogating violence and oppression through the moral imaginary. His preoccupation with death, the Resurrection, and community underscore through its erasure, the political consequences of following, according to Howard Thurman quote, "a Jew of Palestine, who was a member of a disinherited people." Where, one my speculate, is the political term in Tanner's artwork? Where is reparation?
As Harvard Divinity School continues to develop new curricula opportunities to theorize, investigate, and understand the monetary benefits secured by universities, religious orders, corporations, federal and state municipalities, and individual entrepreneurs from the slaughter of Indigenous populations and enslave-- and the enslavement of Africans, my colleagues and I have been asked to facilitate public conversations on the biblical, historical, and ethical frameworks needed to navigate the thorny public reckoning of the living and the dead.
As scholars of religion, we have turned to textual, scripture, and philosophical sources to uncover what is often in plain sight. Tonight, I want to focus on the political imaginary with an African American ethics. Please join me in exploring ideals we take for granted. Sit with me. Consider how a constitutional democracy that is safeguarded on the one hand by ideals of equality and equal protection under the law and on the other hand punctuated by religious liberty and pluralism condoned and remained silent as non-whites were systemically killed and denied basic human rights?
Here is my developing argument. Systemic violence and oppression are too often portrayed in contemporary public debates and are reduced to individual bad actors, persons falling short of the norms and obligations of a loosely agreed upon social contract among law-abiding citizens. I call this engagement a form of moral inquiry. It hinges on two contested starting points. First, individuals are unencumbered, as it were, detailed from a community and its norms and obligations. Second, within a right space society, we assume individuals, institutions, and legislation can prevent and protect individuals and groups from systemic harm without, as the late Charles Mill argued, quote, "rethinking, purging, and deracializing"-- and I would also argue the degendering-- "the nation's guiding political and economic resource that political liberalism.
Now, within this guiding framework, I argue, moral increase too often remain committed to securing public apologies and reconciliation, both demanding varying forms of forgiveness from the living and dead. This might explain why institutional studies and inquiries into historic atrocities seem to be reduced to public pledges, statements of regret, and community programming. What theological or political beliefs trigger a desire to forgive slaveholders, their beneficiaries, their financiers, one might ask. Why do institutions seek forgiveness for past harms and crimes?
Matthew Potts offers an intriguing analysis of the utility of forgiveness. He writes forgiveness is, quote, "a self-reflexive and non-retaliatory ethical posture that begins and ends in failure," end quote. I am inspired by his argument. I'm also convinced by it.
And yet I keep asking myself what am I? What are we, the descendants of enslaved Africans, left holding after a self-reflexive move? Will we, like Tanner, flee one land of bondage for another, where individual success is achieved at the expense of our souls and collective emancipation? If one thinks forgiveness is necessary for mental health or social purposes, can we link it to politics and the political imaginary?
Tanner's is a cautionary tale for those entering the barren, unmarked graves of the slaughter. The framing discourse of how we enter the investigation will inform both the political possibilities and the limits of the achievable outcomes. If our public inquiry remains burdened by moral inquiry alone, the outcomes will remain captive to the debates that focus on the justificatory grounds, right, of enslavement.
This is not the case for others who have sought justice for systemic harms against them. Reparation debates, for instance, for Holocaust survivors and those in Japanese internment camps often took a different tone. Few, if any, mainline newspapers ask if the Germans were justified in their racist beliefs of Jews. Heartbreaking accounts from survivors of Japanese internment camps were taken at face value. Indeed the morality of concentration internment camps was not a conversation starter, whereas debates on Black suffering and death are stalled before they are developed. They are burdened by claims that enslavement was justified based on historical norms, followed by a lengthy discussion of federal programming, like affirmative action, as failed to redress historic harms.
Underlying these debates is the insidious belief in the moral failure of Black people. If they would only follow the path of other ethnic minorities, such as white Jews, Eastern Europeans, Asians is a common refrain. This line of thinking assumes justice demands personal liability and responsibility. Robert Fullinwider debunks this notion, quote, "The real issues," he argues, "are corporate responsibility, the responsibility of the nation as a whole, and civic responsibility-- the responsibility of each citizen to do his or her part in honoring the nation's obligations," end quote.
This all speaks to the limits of moral inquiry. I want to propose the following model for developing conceptual ideals for expanding and potentially transforming institutional and social structures. I call this the political imaginary.
If we briefly suspend moral inquiry to focus on the political, the conversation will start with examining the crime at hand, exploring the short and long-term ramifications and determining the recourse of action of said crime. Of course, this assumes the subjects of the crime are treated as human and for citizens deserving of and protected by the reigning legal system.
When we suspend moral inquiry to focus on citizenship and human rights, the discourse shifts to law, social structures, the Constitution, and crimes against victims. The debate at hand might assume the following three beliefs. First, enslaving human beings was a crime. Second, for nearly 100 years following emancipation Jim and Jane Crow vis-a-vis state and non-state actors alike violated constitutional amendments that guaranteed citizenship, voting rights, and equal protection under the law for all Blacks. Third, federal and state laws failed to protect African Americans and African descendents from lynching, police brutality, economic exploitation, and white violence.
In this framework we bracket the conditions under which the crime emerged and instead focus on the political economy produced under said conditions. The model I am developing is not uncommon. Then Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons launched in 2004 a rather unorthodox commission to explore if the University owed reparations for its connections to the slave trade. President Simmon's unflinching stance-- which I might add happened during the first two years of her presidency and during $1,000,000,000 capital campaign-- has been widely admired but rarely imitated.
She massive linked moral inquiry to the political imaginary with one assertion-- the University-- and nation as a whole, I might add-- had violated human rights. As she noted in The New York Times, quote, "How does one repair a kind of social breach in human rights so that people are not just coming back to it periodically and demanding apologies?" end quote. This model has served a trite but controversial claim-- enslaved Africans and their descendants were injured systemically by institutions, governments, and corporations.
Frederick Douglass was far more eloquent in his condemnation of the crimes committed against Blacks. In 1850, he wrote, quote, "Only when we contemplate the slave as a moral and intellectual being can we adequately comprehend the unparalleled enormity of slavery and the intense criminality of the slaveholder." Next slide, please. And here it's important to keep in mind that Du Bois argued, as early as 1896-1897, that part of the issue is this idea that the Negro was the problem-- not simply an example of the problem, but the very embodiment of the problem that the nation faced.
Now, President Simmons, without implicitly or explicitly acknowledging Du Bois or Douglas, in many ways seams to accentuate what these men were articulating. She accentuated this idea from her presidential pulpit to grapple with the moral and political implications of social marginalization of the real life effects of what it means to be a problem.
Now, in her Zoom address to the Harvard class of 2021-- next slide, please, next, please-- President Simmons ascribes her alienation in graduate school. And in many respects, for example, is the kind of flesh of Douglass' argument-- in the flesh of what it feels like to walk and exist as the problem.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- Product of a segregated upbringing in Houston, an undergraduate study at an HBCU, I'm ashamed to say that in my youth I secretly bought into the prevailing racial assumptions of the day-- that someone like me would be ill-prepared to benefit and contribute to study at the university of Harvard's stature. I expected to be flat footed, if not oafish in the company of well-heeled and urbane students who had the advantage of the best education and experiences.
While not outwardly immobilized by fear of failing the biggest test of my life, I was inwardly terrified that I would fail to measure up. Uncertainty and malaise governed my early days at the University. Harvard was, you see, a place steeped in other people's traditions-- traditions that I could not easily access. My reaction was very much akin to the French expression denoting window shopping [FRENCH]. Those of us who are outsiders are often as mere observers looking through windows, salivating and wondering how we might ever be able to attain a sense of inclusion, acceptance, and respect.
Just as when as a child I was banned from white establishments, I identified as the outsider looking enviously at others at Harvard who not only had full access to the University's history and traditions but who also could so easily see themselves reflected in them. Few things that I could see at Harvard at the time represented me.
[END PLAYBACK]
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: And so her [INAUDIBLE] points, I want to argue, to the political injury, not simply a form of self-deception or feelings of inferiority, which is often how we characterize students who feel alienation at elite institutions. But, in fact, she argues that her very body had been marked and that an outsider, she was not given the privileges, the rights, and responsibilities due someone who had been admitted to graduate program. This, I argue, is her attempt to focus on the political injury against Black and Brown students who enter institutions of higher learning where they are tolerated but neither wanted nor respected.
[? Douglas's ?] Simmons sketch, Political Pathways, I argue, designed to dismantle the structural means through which enslavement, colonialism, and anti-Black and Indigenous violence survived, flourished, and reproduced themselves. If we assume the framing discourse on African American enslavement we'll shape and inform our political and moral outcomes, I suggest we turn to Katie Cannon's womanist ethics and Du Bois' double consciousness as heuristic guides for imagining what I have called elsewhere reflective deliberation.
Within this category ethics is what Cannon calls the, quote, "The dialectical and synchronistic interplay between the invisible institutions of African wisdom traditions an Anglo-American theopolitical [INAUDIBLE]. The doubleness here is, not all consuming or reflective of the multiple and competing epistemologies developed in the new world, but nonetheless engenders a theoretical construct in and through which, as Du Bois noted in The Souls of Black Folk, the racially construct itself and group that might then allow them to strive towards an unknowing self, group, [INAUDIBLE] that transgresses social and political norms.
Reflective deliberation then mask a sharp-- or rather makes a sharp hermeneutical turn toward self, group transformation but differently socially constructed norms at the individual and institutional level undergo substantial, and substantive, and ongoing critical interrogation, assuming knowledge is contingent and always insufficiently temporal to adjudicate evil, suffering, and oppression. And yet the contingency of knowledge engenders within womanist ethics, Cannon argues, ongoing efforts to, quote, "debunk, disarm, and detangle ideals that seek to idealize rather than inform or characterize."
In the material sense, reflective deliberation is the embodiment of Higginbotham's counter-public spheres, where texts like the Bible, sermons, singing, and exhortations are performative tools designed to affirm, cajole, censor, and transform. At this meta-ethical level, we are duty bound within reflective deliberation to assume our starting points are always under interrogation.
With this backdrop, public reckonings of African enslavement should lead to political outcomes that reflect the vastness of our technologies, of our technological capacity, the vastness of our political commitment, and economic wealth. We should also remain vigilant to the limits of our ability to fix or correct the ongoing nature of anti-Black suffering and oppression.
Contrary to ongoing scholarly debates, we should be suspicious of re-inventing and retrieving existing conceptual schemes-- such as social debt, Negro problems, respectability politics, fungibility, and the slave-- as if those categories are the only way out of our problem. Yes, they denote helpful and needed historical markers and theoretical constructs, to be sure they are necessary framing tools for developing a political imaginary. Michelle Alexander's work is a case in point.
The New Jim Crow handed us a necessary conceptual tool for explaining, for instance, new dimensions of the prison industrial complex system. Here's another riveting example. George Floyd's cry for his deceased mother before a subsequent murder by a white police officer triggered global multiracial, intergenerational, and inter-religious condemnation and protest against police brutality. The cry-- "mama, mama"-- transgress the boundaries of the familiar. It spoke to us in ways that legislation could not.
[AUDIO PLAYBACK]
- --ask you who graduate today what you are prepared to do.
[END PLAYBACK]
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: And it transgress, right, what was familiar, creating witnesses around the world to the strangers, the Samaritan as it were. So reflective deliberation seeks to engender this same kind of generous spirit. It seeks to mobilize, seeks to expand what we think is possible, the norms of what we think are possible.
There are two things to reconcile more inquiry and political engagement to make both theoretically robust and relevant. Now, a brief sketch of how do we get here. Now, debates for reparation date back to the Civil War when General William Sherman issued a special order for 40 acres and a mule for soon to be emancipated African-Americans.
During Reconstruction, Senator Charles Sumner and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania, for example, argue for, quote, "land redistribution" to the formerly enslaved. Blacks also initiated their own legal efforts for compensation for unpaid labor a half a century earlier, dating back to 1783. For example, 80-year-old Belinda, a free woman in Boston, sued her former enslaver for unpaid wages. Abolitionist David Walker also called for restitution and compensation as well in his 1829 appeal.
Now, the mid-20th century witnessed a firestorm of calls for reparations as well. Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and scholars and activists like Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, a Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King Jr., our own Preston Williams and Charles Ogletree call for reparations in varying forms, ranging from the abolition of capital punishment to a guaranteed minimum wage and annual income.
James Forman's 1969 Black Manifesto is the best known religiously inspired argument for reparations in the mid-20th century. Forman called for $500 million for Black institutions and organizations from what he called, "white Christian churches and Jewish synagogues," end quote. At the federal level, the late Congressman John Conyers' bill to create a commission to study reparations for slavery and segregation was introduced to Congress in 1989 and has been widely used to support nationwide commissions on slavery and reparations.
Now, the debates' reparation teeter between examining the moral culpability of whites and the political consequences of individuals and corporations benefiting and profiting respectively from past and present Black enslavement, exploitation, and oppression. Next slide.
Bernard Boxill, long before Charles Mills' acclaimed racial contract asserted two important claims about white obligations and reparation in a liberal society. First, whites benefited from a social contract designed to benefit them at the expense of marginalized groups. Second, individual whites' all reparations, quote, "even though they have been merely passive recipients of benefits" end quotes, and rewards.
Now, here is an intriguing use of moral inquiry. The violation of the ideal social contract, not necessarily the crimes against the enslaved and exploited, seem to be the motivating factors for reparation. Now, Boxill distinguishes compensation from reparation. Compensation, he argues, is due immediately after an injustice has occurred. Former NAACP Legal Defense Fund Head Jack Greenberg further delineates compensation by arguing that it may be given, quote, "to victims of the atrocity" that are small in number or have been smaller in number.
Now, reparation for Boxill on the other hand may be offered to rectify past injustice. It is also an acknowledgment of an historical transgression. Quote, "The case for reparation to Black and colonial people depends precisely on the fact that such people have been reduced to their present condition by a history of injustice," end quote.
The evidence of injustice is an acknowledgment of wrongdoing, he argues. And he adds, quote, "The injurer implies that the injured has been treated in a manner that benefits him," end quote. Put differently, the apology acknowledges the equal political standing of both parties.
In an ideal setting, this move is noteworthy. However, the early Du Bois reminds us of an alarming social norm. The Negro's plight is not contingent on social and economic barriers per se. The negro within a white supremacy society is the problem-- someone who is innately inferior, inadequate, and desperately in need of discipline.
The discipline here is in line with what Anthony Pinn calls rituals of reference, which, through violence, reinforce Black criminality and the dire need to subdue and subsequently kill Black and brown bodies. Afro pessimist thinkers like Frank Wilderson III extend Pinn's argument and suggests something more alarming. And so Black violence is the source of American ingenuity, a necessary act to sustain and reproduce the nation's political economy.
Now, the endemic nature of Black suffering and death, scholars like Wilderson might suggest, bolsters the third shift in debates on reparation. The move focuses on reparation as a tool to transform society without moral inquiry. Scholar activists, such as Robin DG Kelly, Angela Davis, and Bryan Stevenson advocate this move.
Indeed, Kelly notes, quote, "If we think of reparation as part of a broad strategy to radically transform society, redistributing wealth, creating a democratic and caring public culture, exposing the ways capitalism and slavery produce massive inequality, then the ongoing struggle reparations holds enormous promise for revitalizing movements for social justice," end quote. Transforming policing, prison abolition, and mass incarceration, especially of juveniles, are additional critical sites of engagement within the model of reparation that's rooted fundamentally in the notion of social transformation.
Critics, of course, will raise deep concerns about the political viability of any form of reparation and especially one that threatens the current political economy. Such reservations should remind us of two points. First, counter arguments are needed both to sustain ongoing deliberations and to avoid falling prey to a tyrannical charismatic leader or dangerously rigid political imaginaries. Second, the model I am proposing is not designed to take us to a promised land. Instead, it encourages ongoing struggle and reflection until then.
In closing, I want to turn back to Henry Ossawa Tanner. His acclaimed religious art is a reminder of the ethical limits of our struggles in an early Black and white painting, which is seen on the screen of Judas, discovered by art historian Jeffrey Richmond-Moll in Tanner's archives a few years ago at the Smithsonian. Judas is one-- or rather, Judas is on his knees, back straight, looking up, wearing a turban or some type of hair cloth.
This rendering of Judas defines and defies depictions of him as a self-consuming trader. Tanner humanizes Judas, art historian argue, specifically Molly [? Hayde ?] and suggests that by portraying Judas in this way, in a quote, "post usually associated with the return of the prodigal son right really high, Judas is transformed before our eyes."
[? Hayde ?] suggests that sketching Judas in this way denotes Tanner's ongoing belief that he portrayed this people by spending much of his adult life in France. The price of international success had been tainted might I suggest the limits of his artistic moral inquiry. Success failed to materialize a political imaginary, one that could upend the terrains of race and religion.
Now, Tanner leaves us with a stinging question. At what price will we portray the people who need our talents to help them fight for liberation? Now, please return to the previous slide. That's not playing yet.
And by having Tanner's image before us, I want to push the very limits of the Black-white binary and try to determine if we can discover a way out of the white normative gaze, which too often defines us in very rigid categories. And I'm hoping that the artwork can somehow penetrate the very possibility of what could sit on the horizon.
The goal is not to figure out what is politically expedient at this point. I've laid out a plan that I think argues that we can be expedient with a certain set of norms and expectations through deliberation. And yet, Tanner is a way through his complicated life to speak to both the moral and political limits of our engagement but also to the moral and political possibilities of what we can imagine.
Now, in the address we saw earlier, I want to highlight a different point that President Simmons makes at the very end. And in many respects, she puts forth a similar question but does so through a challenge to the graduating class. Let us listen.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
- I've come to ask you who graduate today what you are prepared to do to acknowledge and address the historic biases and inequities that so many continue to experience. Will your actions point us in a more uplifting direction? For just as we recount the moral bankruptcy of those who cruelly enslaved others, we also tell the story of those who are equally guilty because they refuse to challenge the practice of slavery. In the future, the history of these times will reveal both what we do and what we fail to do to address the unjust treatment of marginalized groups.
[END PLAYBACK]
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: This challenge, I argue, in many ways speaks to the many ways that we are challenged to discover--
- --come to ask you who graduate--
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: --new possibilities. Tanner assumed he would discover his emancipation through art. Many of us assume we will earn our progressive badges and statements of regret, social protests, and public reckonings. In those noble acts, we nonetheless fail to articulate a political imaginary, which demands sustained attention to the political economy and social structures.
This is the ethics of reparation. And so before we open it up for discussion. I just want to recap a point articulated by Ruth Simmons. And this is the whole notion that we have failed in many cases to articulate the degree to which our past is not simply about bad judgments, about a failure to live up to a text.
Simmons argues it is about violations against human beings. And so often, it's difficult for us to see Blacks as human beings. And so when debate emerges of reparations, we see the problem. We see examples of criminality. We see failure.
And what I'm asking with the help of Tanner and Simmons and so many other noted thinkers is that we try to suspend judgment of the Black as we talk about reparation and think about this through a legal and moral and political imaginary, one that allows us really to engage not simply the harms but what are the outcomes needed for this ethical reparation.
Now, I want to end with one last clip. And thank you all for your patience with the-- thank Ream for your help with the clip. But there's a last clip I would like to play before you open it up for questions.
[VIDEO PLAYBACK]
[END PLAYBACK]
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Thank you so much. Really excited to join the conversation with my colleagues Diana and Melissa as well as with the listening audience.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Thank you, Terrence. The powerful note to end on that photo montage was breathtaking. And the Ella's song, that version was powerful. Thank you so much for an extraordinary presentation. And you underscore the complexity of reparations and the need for us to imagine beyond what we can currently conceive of. And you provide so many tools, including a framework.
And one of the tools I want to highlight and ask you about-- because one of the points you make is the fact that when we think about reparations, we shouldn't think about trying to get to the promised land. It's going to require ongoing struggle and reflection until death. And I think that's so important for us to highlight. Because it just-- it emphasizes that this is a long view work, generational work.
And so with the requirement for imagination and reflection, you offer Katie Cannon's notion of reflective deliberation. And you said that she indicates that reflective deliberation seeks to mobilize and expand the norms of what we think is possible. So I'd love for you to expand on that.
What does she mean when she says, we have to seek reflective deliberation requires, that we seek to mobilize and expand the norms of what we think is possible? And how can we use this practice to advance the work of reparations, particularly thinking about religion and the fact that religion requires faith, involves faith for many people? How can this reflective deliberation be utilized as a resource, as a tool for this work?
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: No, thank you. That's a great question. And just one point that I probably didn't clarify well on the paper. So I actually developed reflective deliberation and conversation with the great Katie Cannon.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Wow.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: I use her-- her work helped frame it along with Du Bois. And part of what I was trying to capture as we theorize this very complicated problem is, how do we begin to understand both our rich moral traditions, our religious practices in ways that do not foreclose others from entering into the conversation but also that speaks to even the limits of our traditions? I think we can hold on traditions in a very thick way, in a way that really speaks to the truthfulness of them without then condemning others or using our traditions to kill others.
And I try to frame it in conversation really with the best of Black church traditions. And I have argued in conversation with other extraordinary folks society homiletics like Brad Braxton and others that we think of the Black sermon in particular as well as the worship experience in this kind of dialogical way, in a way that assumes that when you enter that space, you are entering a space for social validation that might be a subtext.
You're entering this space also then to hear, as the old folk would say, what does sayeth the Lord? And even though that might be seen as pious for some people, but this idea of suspending your judgment as you listen, it sounds like a fancy idea. But the very act of listening, the very act of engaging the minister, engaging a soloist includes the suspension where you then are both motivated, both cajoled, both animated by what you hear.
And part of this exercise then is that for the singer and for the preacher, you have to acknowledge that you hear them and then speak back. And in that dialogical exchange, sometimes miracles actually happen. People are actually moved.
And part of what I've been trying to figure out, well, how do I take the best of these counter public traditions =d then bring them to the academy, which I think sorely needs them? And part of what I argue is that we too often in our debates say, well, here's what I've come to fight for. Here's what I'm going to die for.
And then forecloses are offered to all opportunities. And I would argue that what if we actually enter the conversation say, OK, we might have to give up something. I hear someone-- a lot of women are saying, but we already give up so much. And I really mean that more theoretically in terms of, are we willing to bend slightly when truthful claims emerge that speak to the best of our traditions?
And so what this looks like, I think, it really varies upon the context. But I'm just at the very basic level trying to make a case that we have to conceptually rethink what it means to have conversations about our deeply held commitments. If we take seriously Allen Callahan notion of The Talking Book, it means then that we are actually seeking something from the text.
And so what I want to ask folks on these committees and people in government to say, are you actually listening to the victims of this unjust crime? And if we're listening, do we actually hear to the point where they are pushing us, those in power, not simply to tweak, but to fundamentally transform these structures?
And as I'm speaking, I'm thinking of city of Hartman and some of the ways in which these existing structures. When we think we're actually penetrating and making moves, we're actually in many respects the pawn of those in the engagement that in some ways, people are animated. They are in some ways-- they seek enjoyment when they see Black and brown bodies fighting over affirmative action reparation, social justice.
And we're in this vicious circle. And so I want to acknowledge that but also think of someone like Lewis Gordon who says, look, the very conditions for these engagements are created through our acts of engagement. So I don't want to surrender to the power of hegemony. And I also want to recognize its unbending power.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I appreciate that because what I hear so strongly is that you're calling for space, space for reflection, for folks in this work to listen for something new to emerge. And whatever sector, whatever realm that is, not coming in with a grip on one foregone conclusion and an idea of what you think is going to happen or how it's going to happen but the being nimble and flexible and open for something new to emerge and, I would even add in the context of people who believe, something for the divine, a way for the divine to bring possibilities and bring forth miracles.
So I appreciate that. I appreciate that, this resource, the power of listening and reflection. So thank you. Thank you so much.
DIANE MOORE: Well, thank you so much, Terrence. Professor Johnson for this really illuminating framing. I heard a couple of things. And I just want to-- I mean, I heard many things. But I want to maybe try to underscores-- I think what I hear is your foundation both to hopefully represent what you were saying but also to ask then strategies, if you will, for what it means aside from deep listening and that dialectic for identifying what you call here-- you make this comment, sorry. I'm sorry.
I've got four things going on. You've really sparked so many ideas in my head. But you say how we enter the investigation sets the outcome. I just love that frame. Because essentially then, what you're saying is when we have this individualized notion, what I think you're calling moral inquiry, that we are setting ourselves up for a particular strand of ideological and social constructs relevant to then whatever outcomes we can come to.
And those outcomes, as I hear you say, are always going to be insufficient to really wrestle with confront the legacies of these abominations that we continue to reproduce today. So then I hear you're engaging in this idea of what are the then patterns, what is it that we can do to create new structures or to be aware of the structures that exist that do end up negatively determining outcomes that we would otherwise be open to an imaginative-- the political imaginary, as you say.
So I'm struck by two things. You started this whole talk by saying that scholars of religion uncover what is often present in plain sight. And I think that that's what you're inviting us to do here is interrogate the frameworks and structures of our lives that then determine these particular kinds of outcomes and then to open up and engage with possibilities beyond those rigid structures.
And I'm just struck by Chief Oren Lyons' comment in a really powerful video where he speaks about rather than have a bill of rights, he says we should have a bill of responsibilities. And I just wonder if, first of all, does that resonate with what you're saying relevant to accountabilities and responsibilities?
And when you think about then breaking down these structures or even seeing these structures that need to be broken down, what specifically would you recommend relevant to the nature of how those who want to move beyond these structures, what opportunities, what ideas, what strategies that maybe develop further this notion of the dialectic that you are presenting relevant and in conversation with the wonderful Katie Cannon?
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: No, thank you. You and Melissa are asking very difficult questions. We're supposed to just theorize and not have the answer. But Thank you for pushing me. And as you were talking, I kept going back to President Simmons' powerful quote. As you know, she initiated this grand study at the university level of African enslavement. And I was struck when she used the term human rights.
And to me, it changed even how I saw the starting point. When I was at Brown, when she announced the study, I was like, one, why are we studying slavery? Because we know people don't care. It's simply a conversation that we'll have at a cocktail party and we'll pat ourselves on the back and move on.
But then as I read more closely what she was doing, it was like, no, I want to examine whether or not we owe reparation. Like, whoa, wait a minute, that's a different conversation. That is changing the narrative and changing structurally the narrative. You can argue about outcomes or whatever.
But that starting question, I think, fundamentally changed the scope of Brown's report and could have changed the scope of other university's reports. And I'm not sure anyone else has followed that model. So that's one example in terms of the starting point is about investigating our role or trying to come to terms with this. It's, what do we owe these people?
And, again, I think it's a very powerful statement for someone in power and especially for the first. As we all know, the first in any position is simply there often to make sure that the next person can succeed who is another. And so I commend her for that radical move.
So that shifts the conversation. The conversation is about what financially do we owe and how do we begin to then parse out that kind of debt. So I think that changes the conversation. And I think secondly, what changes the conversation is that the expectations then are people sitting around the table will change.
This is not about a dislike. This is not about blaming white people. This is not about making African-Americans feel better about themselves. All the language that right now, I think, is being used in some ways to condemn what most people call critical race theory but actually don't know, that people are using a certain kind of language to mischaracterize what political struggles have attempted to achieve.
And so I think by sitting at the table with the notion of reparations on the table changes in the very questions we're asking. We are now thinking through what are the structural changes. Because as you know, talking about the finances is a major structural issue. And so that then creates another set of conversations.
So I think those two examples really speak to the ways in which we can radicalize our conversations on campus. And I think-- and, again, I think more inquiry is really helpful. But I'm trying to push myself on that because that's what's comfortable for me in terms of, oh, let's reflect. Let's contemplate. And I think that's extraordinary. But now, I'm trying to push my own scholarship to say, well, what does this look like politically?
And then third, if we have reparations on the table, it then changes then what Lewis Gordon calls are political commitments. What are the political commitments behind this particular study? Not in the ideal sense, but how do the ideals then translate into specific structural changes in terms of, at least at the university level, how we operate.
And I think a great example of this within Christian churches in particular are the ways in which they have been challenged over the last 67 years by Black theologians, feminist scholars, womanist scholars, queer studies try to rethink the governing norms of how we apply scripture to not only to life but to our doctrine. And so I think this idea of listening to the radical other not simply to include but as a way to unsettle and then hopefully dismantle the very table that we all assemble around as we discuss these very important issues.
DIANE MOORE: Great, right, well, thank you. Thanks so much.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: So [INAUDIBLE] there are a lot of questions.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Melissa, do you want a response?
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: Well, actually, I want to throw in a question. And I'll read the question and then also add something. This question speaks to-- addresses Dr. Simmons. Let me just read the question from Hunter Limbaugh.
"The impediments to progress toward the understanding that has to precede the will to act are not in the academy. How do we translate your ideas and the challenge of Dr. Simmons into a clearly necessarily broader cultural conversation?" And Hunter thanks you for the thought-provoking presentation.
And I just want to add, I really appreciate you including that last charge from Dr. Simmons, the question about how are you-- how folks are going to take up the mantle and address these ongoing biases and discrimination and identifying and highlighting the problematic position of people who don't respond in addition to people who do commit over the acts of racism. So Hunter's question and also speak a little bit to Dr. Simmons's question and charge in terms of the challenge before us.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Sure, I mean, there's a lot here. And, again, I think in terms of at the university level, her charges-- look, how do universities begin to really model behaviors that acknowledge decades' long absence of real philanthropic giving to HBCUs?
That's one example in which we can see a translation culturally this idea that our giving HBCUs are simply an afterthought. And at this very particular moment, the charge is then, how do we support institutions that have been designed to in some ways-- and in some ways, they're really designed to benefit those who were not able or not allowed to enter PWIs.
But what I think is really important as a secondary note is that I think we need a broader vision around an interrogation of HBCUs as examples for rethinking higher education. What I find fascinating is that many HBCUs particularly like Morehouse and Spelman and the Howards of the world are a kind of home for young intellectuals who are seeking new ways of imagining the self, the community, and what knowledge looks like.
And what am I trying to say? That students go with the expectation that they are seeking something that they didn't get in high school. And historically, professors saw their mission as helping to transform these students. There was a mission that drove HBCUs that I'm not sure we will find in other institutions.
In many respects, higher education has become a way or a means to which we credentialize people. We become professionalized and prepared for the working world. And yet, I'm not sure students come to these places to be transformed or to rethink ideas or to be pushed.
And even though certain folk would argue that this idea that, oh, free speech, we need free speech because white students are fearful to talk in class because they're going to be out shouted by Black and queer students, you name them, the so-called left, what I would argue is that I think that's a really bad historical analysis.
Because the assumption is then that when others, non whites enter PWIs that they aren't threatened and that somehow they don't have to learn or there's a lack of recognition that they come to these spaces with multiple languages and that their very existence demands that they speak multiple languages in the classroom.
And to me, free speech is about, well, how then do we extend that to say, no, we've all come here to learn multiple discourses to engage difference. And that difference simply on identity but difference in terms of, how do we, epistemologically, see the world in varying ways that then seeks to challenge, to push what is normal and normative.
And so this idea of do we think about how do we transform cultures, I think, well, why don't we actually start studying specifically HBCUs and other institutions that service underrepresented students? I think there are models there that we totally ignore because they're not fancy. They're not what's normative. And, in fact, our challenge as people who engage art, who talk about politics is, again, how do we seek out those things that are right in front of us but we ignore, we take for granted?
DIANE MOORE: Great, well, thank you. Thank you. I've got another-- I continue to hear you speak. And I feel like so central to your critical message is this fundamental shift, again, accounting to Oren Lyons about this notion rather than the focus on individual capability and achievement, which I think is so much at the heart of the American narrative of rugged individualism of individual autonomy of freedoms that we actually ignore the interconnection that is true about not only our interconnection with one another and responsibilities, therefore, relevant to that, but also our inner relationship with the Earth itself, which is also a part of what he's representing.
So I just-- when I hear you think about these paradigm shifts and these changes and responding to some of the questions in the Q&A, I can't help but potentially encourage us to be thinking fundamentally like, what does it mean to make that shift away from what I would call the fiction of the autonomous self and really wrestle with the accountabilities and interrelationships, interconnections that is just true about the human condition.
And I just wonder, can you talk a little then about is that a relevant shift to what you're trying to represent here in terms of motivations or vehicles for actually rethinking what is, again, so common around us and before us and within us around these structures? And is that representing what you're getting at relevant to then potential actions people could take just to do a shift of imagination around our accountabilities and responsibilities? Or is that a little off of your commentary?
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Well, no, I think it's connected. And it's connected in part because I simply want to create the conditions for these new political imaginaries to emerge. And so the direction your group might take it I don't think have ownership of it.
I simply want to say, how do we facilitate-- because we're going to get pushed back. And I simply want to facilitate the conversation. So I think one great example is this idea as I mentioned earlier on The Talking Book and African-American traditions in terms of biblical hermeneutics. Historically, African-Americans have read the text as this kind of ongoing conversation.
And, again, I think the implications of that are profound. And the common example is exodus narrative, where African-Americans-- look, despite what the enslavers said, I actually see that God freed the children of Israel. So God can-- Yahweh can do that for them. Then I believe in that promise.
And what was I think brilliant is that they didn't wipe out and said, oh, no, we're going to replace the children of Israel. This is not denying your African roots or origins of Judaism. But they're saying, we're not going to not knock out those people. And yet, we actually want to join them and join in the promise and then use that promise then to expand the very possibility of our freedom in spite our unfreedom in an enslaved world-- in an enslaved society.
And so that example speaks to how, again, you have a text that's guiding that's normally for the community. And then you engage in a way that you pool out what is necessary, again, for expanding but not expanding for individualistic purposes but expanding based on notions around justice and around freedom to speak to human flourishing and speak to protecting nature and the Earth.
DIANE MOORE: Thank you.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: This is fascinating. I appreciate your comment about the interconnectedness. And, Terrence, when you mentioned that this is about creating the conditions for these new ideas to emerge and for really for this work of reparations because it-- really, the heart of the matter is creating conditions where we remember who we are and our connectedness to each other and the transformation that's required for us as human beings to be able to imagine that there is another way. So I guess-- I don't know. Diane, do you have a question? Or is there a question in the Q&A that you think--
DIANE MOORE: Yeah, I was just-- I was just going to say maybe we might have time for one more here. And it's from our colleague Dan McKanan.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: I was just looking at that, yes.
DIANE MOORE: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, Terrence, you may or may not the answer to this. And if you don't, then we can move on to another question. But Dan is asking. He's intrigued by your Brown University's process. And he says, he's curious. Has Brown actually begun to pay reparations? And if so, how are they structured?
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Yeah, fortunately, I have the answer to that. I know they-- they've had several committees. And they've done a lot of programming and created community links and links to local public education and public high schools. I'm not sure-- I don't think they're calling reparations. But I know there's a lot of outreach and some of which includes, I think, monetary distribution.
DIANE MOORE: Right, right, because there's the will. And then there's the way. And then there's the actual process.
MELISSA WOOD BARTHOLOMEW: And I think it just highlights what the crux of your argument in your presentation, the need for imagination. This is not easy work. And so many people have come before us making these arguments and making other arguments to try to get our country to the point of preparation for this. And it's powerful that you are a part of this legacy of scholars making this case.
And the resounding message that I'm taking away from your presentation is our need to hold on to our capacity to dream and to imagine and utilize strategies to help us get to a place beyond where we are right now. So I'm really grateful for you, Terrence, for this, all that you've offered us.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Yeah, thank you.
DIANE MOORE: And I agree. And the other really resounding power of what you're saying is to be engaged in a process of dialectical process of listening and responding in ways that are sometimes really uncomfortable but so critical for the political and moral imagination that you are so beautifully inviting us to consider. So thank you. Thank you so much.
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: Yeah, thank you always.
DIANE MOORE: We are--
TERRENCE L. JOHNSON: It's a pleasure.
DIANE MOORE: Yeah, we're just about out of time. I want to thank everyone for being here in attendance and for joining us for this conversation. Absolutely, we want to thank you, Professor Johnson, for your work on these critical timely issues and your courage to put them forward. And the kind of clarity that you have and the vision that you invite us to share is very inspiring, I think, for all of us.
The recording will be available on our website in a few days' time as are all the recordings of the series. We hope that you will all join us next week for our fifth session, the fifth session in our webinar series entitled Slavers and Slavery-- A Dialogue with Descendants that will feature Professor Tracey Hucks and Dain and Constance Perry, who are racial justice advocates and contributors to a documentary film entitled Traces of the Trade-- A Story from the Deep North.
And in that session, Professor Hucks will lead a discussion on slavery and the slave trade that focuses on New England and the DeWolf family of Rhode Island understood as the largest slave trading family in the United States. Dain Perry is a direct descendant of the DeWolf family. And he and his wife Constance will reflect on this legacy and share information about the reparative and healing work that they have devoted their lives to conducting in response.
And finally, I just want to acknowledge that this is important and challenging work and that we encourage audience members to reach out to others in their own communities to ponder, process, and engage in further reflections about what was heard and experienced in today's session. So thank you all again for being with us. We hope to see you again next week.
And finally, once again, Terrence Johnson, thank you for your work and your imaginative vision for what's possible for us. Thank you.
SPEAKER 2: Sponsors, Religion and Public Life; the HDS Office of Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging; the Harvard & the Legacy of Slavery Initiative; HarvardX.
SPEAKER 3: Copyright 2023, The President and Fellows of Harvard College.