Dear reader,
The best part about having a postdoc is the time. And over the past few years I’ve had time to explore important side projects from grad school and time to get them published. So now, as I close my first year as a professor, I’ve got some fun things coming out.
Years ago, in my second year of graduate school, my colleagues Jenn M. Jackson and David Knight brought me on for a paper on reparations. We mostly focused on public opinion data with that paper. It was my first conference paper in grad school— we took it to APSA and MPSA. It was my first presentation in the American Politics workshop at UChicago. I learned so much about what it is to write a standalone paper from that process, as well as how to analyze data, and how to carry myself at conferences.
Fast forward to years later and Jenn, David, and I submitted a paper for the RSF Journal Special Issue on Reparations. We got a chance to be a part of this excellent issue analyzing reparations from various social science perspectives.
For our paper, “Limited Scopes of Repair: Black Reparations Strategies and the Constraints of Local Redress Policies,” my co-authors and I wrote about two important local reparations cases that were geographically close but differed in their orientation. We compared the government initiated Evanston reparations program to the grassroots advocacy in Chicago for reparations for torture survivors. We were curious about the policy processes in both cases, as both are first of their kind efforts to offer monetary redress from the government.
We believe that each case is instructional from both processes and program critiques. We carefully assess the processes of building each policy from the ground up: gathering support, dealing with resistance, and policy design. In light of critiques of the programs, we offer deliberative marginalization as a concept to describe the (even inadvertent) exclusion of the most vulnerable from policy design process. This is, we think, the nature of producing (even social justice oriented) policy due to the constrained nature of government.
Though reparations is a worthy pursuit, critiques of the programs demonstrate the limits of what is possible within government systems. And this is not a bad thing— it simply means reparations as an idea and a demand is perhaps too big for one policy program alone to handle. It means there’s more work to be done to achieve such a major goal—work that includes rethinking the very systems that govern us.
Read and cite our paper (and the rest of the special issue) and do let me know what you think!