Further Trouble for Unsettled Waters: Attention to Gender in the Debate on Balck Reparations

Source: (2007) In Jon Miller and Rahul Kumar, ed., Reparations: Interdisciplinary Inquiries, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, Pp. 130-150.

“…In this chapter I explore the extent to which a lack of attention to gender when it comes to questions of race and racial progress risks compromising the reparations project in ways that ought to concern us. I begin in Section 6.2, by considering how attention to gender might affect our understanding of the relevant harms experienced during slavery and Jim Crow, as well as the way in which certain expectations concerning the ontology of race- and gender-based oppression, if allowed to underlie our ways of thinking about reparations, risk effecting the subtle exclusion of many of the particular injustices suffered by black women. In Section 6.3, I turn to the significance of paying attention to gender and gender inequality when it comes to articulating the remedies required by historical justice. Given the complex differences at work within the communities who stand to benefit from reparations, my specific worry is that certain ways of thinking about racial justice and racial progress risk leading to the perpetration of further injustices against those who might lack the authority and the resources to define the nature of repair — a result that, from the standpoint of a movement that acts under the banner of justice, ought to be highly worrying. Finally, I conclude by raising and assessing what I take to be likely objections to my suggestion that gender must find a place as a category of analysis in the discourse on reparations.” (excerpt)