A New Life for the Intellectual History of Reparations?

Nearly five years ago, the Society of U.S. Intellectual Historians hosted a roundtable discussion centered around Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “A Case for Reparations” essay published by The Atlantic that same summer. At the time, Coates’ essay gave us at the blog—along with a remarkable guest blogger—the opportunity to consider what the debate over reparations to African Americans for slavery, segregation, and legalized discrimination has looked like over the course of the last fifty years. While that summer was consumed with both debating what reparations should look like, side-by-side with continuing coverage of Black Lives Matter protests, few could have expected the reparations debate to not only continue into 2019, but to now become a critical part of the Democratic Party’s primary campaign season.

With debates about reparations returning to the public eye, I felt it important to remind our readers of the fantastic work done by writers here at S-USIH several years ago to capture the recent history of reparations. Certainly, that work was also part of a longer historical narrative—one that, looking back, I wish I’d done more to highlight and connect to our ambitious project. It may also be time to come back to our reparations roundtable to think through how this debate became such a mainstream one, after many years of being centered largely within African American social, cultural, and intellectual spaces.

The rise of “American Descendants of Slavery,” or ADOS, as a movement has also contributed to the growth of the reparations debate. Often identified online via the hashtag #ADOS, this group argues for the need to identify people in the United States who are specifically descended from enslaved Africans brought to North America.  Their group represents both the ways in which online spaces have increasingly become important to national and international political and cultural debates, and how questions of African American identity become more, not less, complicated.

This latter point should not be a surprise. Growing rates of immigration from sub-Saharan Africa have already been cause for debates about Black identity in the United States. The ADOS movement does, however, come at a particularly important time in historic commemoration of the past, too. With this year being both the 400^th anniversary of the famed 1619 selling of black African slaves in Jamestown, and the centennial of the “Red Summer” that saw bloody anti-Black race riots across the United States, intellectually we find ourselves at a crossroads when it comes to identity and “Blackness.” That the reparations debate is heating up once more almost seems like perfect timing.

Revisiting our roundtable from 2014 will, I hope, be of help to people seeking to think about the reparations debate, where it came from, and where it is going. Certainly, it will not disappear any time soon.