Radical Reparations

September 1, 2023

With the idea of reparations for the descendants of enslaved Black Americans coming to the fore, Hunter, who coined the term #BlackLivesMatter, insists that strictly economic reparations are not enough. He argues for a many-faceted approach to healing the Black community, focusing on political, intellectual, legal, economic, spatial, social, and spiritual needs. Bound to stir conversation. Prepub Alert.

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January 1, 2024
A heartfelt exploration of disenfranchised Black lives and what long-awaited reparations for slavery could look like. In 2018, Hunter, a professor of sociology and African American Studies and "coiner of #BlackLivesMatter," began working with Congresswoman Barbara Lee to develop Truth, Racial Healing, and Transformation (TRHT) "as a significant marker and movement toward repair after four hundred years of living with and in the sin of slavery." In this work, the author delineates seven forms of reparations for formerly enslaved people--political, intellectual, legal, economic, social, spatial, and spiritual--in the form of parables based on historical events. The first story takes place days before President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1965, legitimizing, among other things, Black property ownership rights in Jubilee, South Carolina, which was founded in 1865 by Rev. Calvin John Calhoun and his small congregation using the provision of 40 acres stipulated by Gen. Sherman's Special Field Order Number 15. In a second parable, a longtime Black housekeeper for the Hoffmans, a white family living in a Jewish settlement in Uganda, has just been awarded the deed for the spacious house in 1979 and moved in, along with her family, as the Hoffmans departed for Israel--before being caught in the coup d'etat that deposed former president Idi Amin. Hunter also looks at the descendants of an enslaved African father and son, set adrift after Britain abolished the slave trade in 1827. They arrived in South Africa and started a business that was eventually ruptured by apartheid. Though occasionally long-winded, the deeply layered parables touch on all levels of psychic and physical wounds involved in the history of slavery in the U.S. For another powerful case for reparations, turn to David Montero's The Stolen Wealth of Slavery. A moving collection of human stories underscores a hope for "radical reckoning."

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Starred review from January 8, 2024
Inspired by the work of W.E.B. DuBois, Derrick Bell, and Octavia Butler, sociologist Hunter (Chocolate Cities) offers an imaginative and exhilarating vision of slavery as “a founding premise of the current human condition,” utilizing this idea as a launch point for his argument that “radical reparations” need to extend beyond the merely financial. In between autobiographical chapters in which he lays out his philosophical and sociological framework, Hunter unspools three alternate-history “parables” that demonstrate the broad societal impact of slavery and colonialism. The first takes place in an alternative America in which the fulfillment of Civil War general William T. Sherman’s promise of 40 acres to repay formerly enslaved people has yielded a Black territory in South Carolina on the verge of gaining independence. The second imagines that Zionist plans for a Jewish settlement in Uganda came to fruition and delineates the impact on the local African people as the settlers begin to abandon the area for a newly formed Israel. The third narrates a multi-century family history about the descendants of Nigerians kidnapped into Arab slavery, tracking their escape from India, establishment of successful business ventures in South Africa, and later political struggle against apartheid. Evocatively portraying the unresolved damage that slavery, racism, and displacement have on the descendants of those who first experience it, Hunter’s uncanny parables refract the violent contours of today’s world. Readers will be spellbound.