Scott - Judgment of History
Scott - Judgment of History
Scott - Judgment of History
Named after one of the founders of American anthropology and the Columbia
Department of Anthropology, the Ruth Benedict Book Series is inspired by
Benedict’s passionate engagement with the critical political, aesthetic, and theo-
retical problems of the twentieth century but places them in the global condi-
tions of the twenty-first. Contributions to the series explore contemporary
critical thought in politics and aesthetics through a deep knowledge of the global
condition in specific localities and regions. The scope of the series is capaciously
theoretical and determinately international with special emphasis on settler-
colonial, postcolonial, and capitalist regimes. The books present crisp interven-
tions in a multiplicity of disciplines, but are also statements whose reckoning
cuts across the critical humanistic and social sciences.
Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason, Talal Asad
I Am the People: Reflections on Popular Sovereignty Today, Partha Chatterjee
ON THE
JUDGMENT OF
HISTORY
A C K N OW L E D G M E N T S —89
N O T E S —91
I N D E X —109
P R E FA C E
History, Race, Nation
not just defiance, but refusal of what was supposed to have been
history’s judgment.
This became more apparent to me while following the Muel-
ler hearings in the summer of 2019. Special Counsel Robert
Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election
and the Trump administration’s collusion with it was, in effect,
a judgment of history—or at least it was anticipated to be one.
Many had looked to Mueller as a savior: he would expose the
crimes of the Trump administration, correct the record of lies
we had been enduring, and bring justice to the land. Instead, as
soon as the report was issued, its contents were misrepresented
by Attorney General William Barr. Misrepresented is the wrong
word, flatly denied is better; Barr offered a conclusion that the
report, which stated clearly that it could not exonerate the presi-
dent of the charge of obstruction of justice, had declared him
innocent of that crime. Worse, few Americans read the hun-
dreds of pages of the report, members of Congress included. Its
careful delineation of issues, and its indictment and conviction
of Trump associates for any number of illegal activities, did not
reverse the disastrous course of things; it surely did not convince
most Republican legislators of the dangerous path they had cho-
sen to follow. They spent their time during the hearings attack-
ing the veracity and objectivity of the report and its author, even
as they rarely disputed the conclusions it had reached. Their cra-
ven submission to Trump, their willingness to condone crime in
the interests of political ambition, was horrifying to behold. As I
lamented this situation to a friend, she sought to console me by
pointing out that, if nothing else, these corrupters of democracy
would be condemned by the “judgment of history.”
As a historian, I know that there is no closure for history, no
single story that can be told. I am aware of the number of histo-
ries being written that challenge the validity and coherence of
the master narratives with which we have been schooled. Still, I
Preface—xi
and tragic harshness of the state that in the name of its always
threatened and never certain salvation, requires us to accept
acts of violence as the purest form of reason and of raison d’Etat.”26
With raison d’état comes a new temporality: “It is an indefinite
temporality, the temporality of a government that is both never-
ending and conservative. . . . The art of government and raison
d’Etat no longer pose a problem of origin: we are always already
in a world of government, raison d’Etat, and the state.”27 I would
add that raison d’état is legitimated by its definition as (a humanly
created) agency of progress, as the telos of history. And not just
the telos (the internal directional drive of history), but its immu-
table instrument: “we are always already in a world of govern-
ment, raison d’Etat, and the state.”28
“ ‘Statehood,’ ” Schmitt wrote, “is not a universal concept,
valid for all times and all peoples. Both in time and space, the
term described a concrete historical fact. The altogether incom-
parable, singular historical particularity of this phenomenon
called ‘state’ lies in the fact that this political entity was the
vehicle of secularization. The conceptual elaborations of inter-
national law in this epoch had only one axis: the sovereign ter-
ritorial state.”29 The state, a “marvelous” accomplishment of
human reason, is the instrument that subsumed religion to its
secular will, thereby giving rise to order among the “civilized”
states of Continental Europe. I have written elsewhere of the
ways in which the subsumption of the religious to the political
was conceived in terms of gender: women were to religion what
men were to politics. 30 In this view, the state, progress, and the
necessary direction of history are as one, with white European
men in the lead.
The presumption that the state was the ultimate culmina-
tion of history’s forward-moving path characterized postcolo-
nial political organization as well. Gary Wilder describes the
way in which alternative visions of political organization at the
xviii—Preface
what the Nazis had wrought. 38 If the Holocaust has been ruled
an unspeakable evil, these instances ought to be as well. They
all belonged in the proverbial dustbin of history. In the progres-
sive narrative presumed by these actors, the past marks the
morally unacceptable and, in evolutionary terms, the errors or
failures of “immature” or “uncivilized” human rationality are
on display there as lessons for the present about what must be
avoided in the future. Although the evil took different forms
historically, it had in common race as the marker of national
identity. Indeed, it is racism and its relation to the nation-state
that are at the heart of all three cases.
Could the nation exist without racism at its core? At Nurem-
berg the issue was avoided by depicting the Nazis as anachro-
nistic or extreme, a state like no other. In this way, the ethnon-
ationalism that characterized those other nations lived on
unchallenged in the wake of the Tribunal. Even as its members
looked to a nonracial future in a new South Africa, the TRC
was unable to address the structural issues—economic especially—
upon which state-sponsored racial oppression had rested,
thereby permitting inequality (a racialized capitalism) to per-
sist despite the political enfranchisement of the majority black
population. The reparations movements offer a counterpoint to
these two cases. In contrast, they take racial inequality as foun-
dational to American national identity, and call for a rewriting
of US history attentive not to singular linearity or homogeneity,
but to the plural operations of power and difference.
My aim is not to rehearse the entire contexts in which these
cases are situated, but to explore the ways in which the
appeal—at once moral and political—to the judgment of history
was associated with the nation-state. If justice were to be real-
ized, it was by means of juridical action; some notion of a state-
sanctioned rule of law was tied up with the realization of the
judgment of history. Nuremberg was a formal international
Preface—xxiii
Nuremberg, 1946
legal proceedings looked like. “We must never forget that the
record on which we judge these defendants today is the record
on which history will judge us tomorrow,” Jackson said in his
opening statement. 4 By adhering to the technical requirements
of the rule of law, the Tribunal would establish its moral cre-
dentials. Jackson was adamant about holding a proper trial,
despite objections from other world leaders, some of whom
would have preferred summary executions. Citing Woodrow
Wilson, he stated that the trial aspired to “give international
law the kind of vitality which it can only have if it is a real
expression of our moral judgment.”5 International law was the
collective demonstration of the reason of state, universalist in
its claim to prosecute crimes against humanity. Law was the
expression of morality, the means by which justice was to be
realized. The word justice carries connotations of both the jurid-
ical and the moral; here the two were conflated.
The court was tireless in establishing an “objective” histori-
cal record in order to deliver the “ultimate verdict of history.”
“We must summon . . . detachment and intellectual integrity to
our task,” Jackson exhorted his colleagues, pointing to reams of
documents as well as live testimony detailing Nazi crimes. The
aim was to disclose the evil in a way “so painstakingly and with
such clarity that the world could never forget.”6 The documents
established the indisputable record of individual guilt, the legal
basis upon which punishment would be administered, even as
Nazi organizations were also on trial and even as state institu-
tions were deemed responsible for criminal policies. “The idea
that a state, any more than a corporation, commits crimes is a
fiction. Crimes always are committed only by persons.”7 The
distinction between states and individuals may well have looked
ahead to a rehabilitated Germany in the postwar era, a poten-
tial ally in the coming Cold War. It was not the German people,
4—The Nation-State as the Telos of History
Jackson said, but their leaders who were on trial. Yet despite
the careful distinction between states and individuals, the
court could not escape a certain ambiguity; it could not refrain
from attributing the evils it was adjudicating to the German
nation-state, even as those punished were its individual repre-
sentatives. It was Germany, after all, that had violated the cov-
enants of international law, Germany whose deeds needed to be
exposed and condemned to prevent their return, Germany that
had lost its place in the family of “civilized” nations.
The contrast between evil and civilized recurred in the
course of the trial, reflecting the presumption that the forward
march of history resulted in a civilization somehow free of all
evil. “Germany” was the antithesis of the victorious nation-
states; a collective guilt was attributed to its people. Ironically,
this image of Germany—as a homogeneous totality—echoed
the National Socialist representation of the state and its volk.
Here the Tribunal’s view of history as ultimately embodied in
nation-states operated to occlude the fact that there were Ger-
mans who resisted or opposed Nazi oppression, who tried to
stop the disaster that Hitler and his coconspirators were impos-
ing. 8 If there were glimpses of such people and their actions in
the documents assembled by the Tribunal, they were more
often described as victims than as agents of history; they were
victims on whose behalf the jurists had assembled to enact some
form of retribution. This was a story of states as totalities, not as
sites of perpetual political conflict.
Historians and political theorists have written a great deal
about Nuremberg as it involved the technicalities of interna-
tional law, the origin of theories of human rights, and the defini-
tion of crimes against humanity. They have parsed the language
of “aggressive warfare,” a term left deliberately vague in the Lon-
don Charter (1945), which established the Nuremberg Tribunal.
The Nation-State as the Telos of History—5
This view took for granted that the (now) democratic nation-
state was the apex of historical evolution and the instrument of
justice. We might call it the unconscious underpinning of the
way in which judgment was articulated at Nuremberg. How to
reconcile the evils of the National Socialist state with this view
of history?
in the American south.”15 In fact, the man who coined the term
genocide at the time of the Tribunal refused its application to the
US treatment of African Americans. When a group presented a
petition to the United Nations in 1951 titled “We Charge
Genocide: The Crime of the Government Against the Negro
People,” Raphael Lemkin insisted that “racist legislation and
the social practice of lynching had nothing to do with his con-
cept of ‘genocide’ ” and he dismissed the authors of the petition
as “un-American” and probably communist. 16
In this connection—and in contradistinction to it—a book
by the law professor James Q. Whitman documents in stun-
ning detail the importance for Nazi jurists and policy makers of
American race law. America served as a model for addressing
immigration, miscegenation, second-class citizenship, and seg-
regation. Its “distinctive legal techniques” were carefully stud-
ied and, in some cases, implemented—although the Germans
considered the one-drop rule for determining racial identity
too harsh. 17 The treatment of Native Americans during the
American conquest of the West was, however, a model for the
German pursuit of lebensraum in the territories of Eastern
Europe. 18 Whitman concludes that “American white suprem-
acy, and to some extent Anglophone white supremacy more
broadly, provided. . . . some of the working materials for the
Nazism of the 1930’s. . . . But in Nazi Germany supremacist
traditions and practices acquired the backing of a state appara-
tus far more powerful than anything to be found in the world of
the daughters of British Imperialism and far more ruthless than
any that had ever existed in Europe west of the Elbe.”19 There
was surely a difference between racial discrimination per se and
“racial persecution carried to the point of extermination,”20 but
did that make the Nazi state an extreme example, or an excep-
tion to the policies and practices of other nation-states? Was
Nazism a “historical parenthesis” (as Benedetto Croce had
The Nation-State as the Telos of History—9
Even as he insisted that no precedent was being set for the treat-
ment of other nations, Jackson also denied that Germany under
Nazi rule was a nation-state at all; it was not an extreme exam-
ple, but an exception—for a number of reasons. First, the
authentic German nation had been captured by a band of
criminals—among them the individuals whose cases were
before the Tribunal. 38 The National Socialist party was not in
any sense a political party, even if its leader had been elected to
office: “In discipline, structure, and method . . . [it] was not
adapted to the democratic process of persuasion. It was an
instrument of conspiracy and of coercion”—in short a criminal
organization comprising “overlords” and their followers. 39
The question of individual responsibility for state crimes
became a precedent of the Nuremberg trials, although it raised
difficult challenges to ideas about the limits of obedience to
national rule—When did that rule become criminal and who
was to judge? When did the sovereign autonomy of the nation-
state demand respect? When did it exceed its boundaries? For
the purposes of Nuremberg, the planning and implementing
of aggressive warfare—violations of the sovereignty of other
nation-states, allied with crimes against humanity—became the
test; the scale was international, not domestic. But what counted
as acceptable applied only to other established “civilized”
nation-state entities; the colonial appropriation of nonstate ter-
ritories didn’t count as unacceptable “aggressive warfare”—even
though the violent appropriation of land and people was cer-
tainly aggressive, as is evident in Schmitt’s description: “The
power of indigenous chieftains over completely uncivilized
peoples was not considered to be in the public sphere; native use
14—The Nation-State as the Telos of History
After the war it turned out that the Jewish question, which
was considered the only insoluble one, was indeed solved—
namely by means of a colonized and then conquered
territory—but this solved neither the problems of the
minorities nor the stateless. On the contrary, like virtually
all other events of our century, the solution of the Jewish
question merely produced a new category of refugees, the
Arabs, thereby increasing the number of stateless and
rightless by another 700,000 to 800,000 people. And
what happened in Palestine within the smallest territory
and in terms of hundreds of thousands was then repeated
in India on a large scale involving millions of people.54
One could never, in the ordinary sense of the words, found a poli-
tics or law on forgiveness.
—Jacques Derrida, Forgiveness
Negotiated Settlement
be forgotten. Yet its call to victims to forgive what they had suf-
fered implied the need to forget. If forgiveness did imply forget-
ting, some argued, they would be experiencing a double loss:
first, the death in struggle of their family or comrades and, now,
the loss of that death to history.
The Commission adhered scrupulously to the rule of law,
demonstrating the contrast between its commitments and those
of the oppressive apartheid regime. In this way it operated as a
quasi-judicial body. On the one hand, the TRC functioned like
a court when it deposed witnesses, and when it considered and
granted requests for amnesty. On the other hand, since it lacked
the ability to punish, its authority was limited to moral counsel:
forgiveness was endorsed as an individual response to the
crimes being exposed. Jacques Derrida described the TRC as
exhibiting a “confusion between the order of forgiveness and the
order of justice,” the one an individual’s unconditional offering,
the other the prerogative of the state or its representatives.6 For
forgiveness to be meaningful, Derrida says, it must be uncondi-
tional, beyond any sovereign power and with no instrumental
purpose; forgiveness can have nothing to do with judgment. It
is not a matter for law or the state. “Forgiveness remains hetero-
geneous to the order of politics or of the juridical as they are
ordinarily understood.”7 He cites Tutu’s account of the testi-
mony of a woman who refused the Commission’s request to for-
give the murderers of her husband. “A commission or a govern-
ment cannot forgive. Only I, eventually, could do it. (And I am
not ready to forgive.)”8 Derrida goes on to point out that the
woman may also be suggesting that it is not her place to forgive;
only her dead husband has that right. If forgiveness means some-
how forgetting the sin, her action amounts to his double death.
As a survivor, she cannot substitute for him, even if she is a
victim as well. “Pure and unconditional forgiveness,” he writes,
The Limits of Forgiveness—27
Historical Accountability
PERPETRATORS
BENEFICIARIES
the parties to the conflict. And it made all parties to the conflict
responsible for their victims; the members of the liberation
struggle and the agents of the apartheid state were deemed
equally culpable. As history moved progressively from an evil
past to a redeemed future, the focus was less on power dynamics
and more on the shape and behavior of the state. The logic of
evil state/victims/benevolent state prevailed. The conflict was
decontextualized and depoliticized: the defenders and resisters
were, in effect, denied their different histories. The imposition
of the rule of law, taken to be objectively unconcerned with
inequalities of power, was here at odds with the particular judg-
ment of history that the repudiation of apartheid was meant to
achieve. It also removed from the table scrutiny of the ongoing
power imbalances and political differences within the new
regime, especially in relation to the racialized capitalist organi-
zation of the economy.
did not entirely lose their “exteriority,” and elements of the past
(structures of inequality based on race, on the racialization of
class) retain their “disquieting familiarity.”
The clear distinction between past and present as a way to
the future was impossible to establish within the practical lim-
its imposed on the TRC. But the distinction operated nonethe-
less and in two contrary ways. It gave the TRC’s insistence on
forgiveness a strong moral claim (as a necessary bridge to the
future), and—at the same time—it undermined attention to
the enduring consequences of the political and economic com-
promises that were being made (and that the TRC had no abil-
ity to control). The end of apartheid did signal a historical
event; as at Nuremberg crimes against humanity were attrib-
uted to an evil regime now declared past. But the full extent of
a judgment of history (an analysis of the structural roots of the
evil and of the importance of contests for power and the role of
the protagonists in those contests) was not realized; in fact, it
was indefinitely deferred.
3
Calling History to Account
our wages has been kept back and deduct what you paid
for our clothing and three doctor’s visits to me, and pull-
ing a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we
are in justice entitled to.2
Anderson, who was living in Ohio, sent the letter to the New
York Daily Tribune, thus making clear the ironic intent of his
writing. More was at stake than monetary payment; this was an
attempt to publicly expose the continued blindness of a former
slaveholder to the wrongs he had committed. It was a way of
calling to account the institution of slavery itself.
Calling to account in a broad sense is what I think the repa-
rations movement is about—account in the sense of a tally of
what is owed, but also in the sense of being answerable, being
held accountable. Even when represented in monetary terms, it
is not only financial compensation but historical accountabil-
ity—a judgment about history—that is ultimately at stake. The
need for historical reckoning is enormous for a country that has
neglected the role of slavery in its very creation. A growing
number of historians have shown that cotton cultivation and
the enslaved labor that supported it were the key to the Indus-
trial Revolution, to the creation of financial institutions, man-
agement techniques, and global markets—all of which enabled
the rise of American capitalism and its international economic
ascendancy. Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman write that “Amer-
ican slavery is necessarily imprinted on the DNA of American
capitalism.”3 Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose article from 2014 in the
Atlantic helped reopen the conversation on reparations, adds
that “racism remains, as it has been since 1776, at the heart of
this country’s political life.”4 The reparations movements say it
is time to take account of these facts.
But how to account for wrongs so destructive, for practices
that have now been condemned as “crimes against humanity,”
Calling History to Account—53
Debt
amended than social customs, and even the North never fully
conformed its racial practices to its professions” proved pre-
scient (although he was persuaded to join the unanimous opin-
ion of the Court in the end). 22 The ability of law (coming from
legislators or the courts) to enact justice in its moral sense was
limited. Brown did unleash a host of important actions to imple-
ment the ruling, including the tremendous gains of the civil
rights movement in the years that followed, but it also did not—
could not—address the geographic segregation, in cities espe-
cially, that even after Brown held school segregation in place. As
Coates puts it: “For a century after emancipation, quasi-slavery
haunted the South. And more than half a century after Brown v.
Board of Education, schools throughout much of the country
remain segregated.”23 The results of this segregation served to
compound the poverty and indebtedness in which much of the
black population finds itself still today.
The Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of
1965 are important landmarks in the history of antidiscrimina-
tion law in the United States. They brought the problem of dis-
crimination to the center of American politics and provided the
means for enforcement in individual and collective cases and
the grounds for legal redress in the areas of public accommo-
dation, employment, education, and voting rights. But their
impact has been less thoroughgoing than anticipated—the lat-
est example is the impact of the Supreme Court decision in
2013 ending federal oversight of voter-suppressing states, which
had the effect of unleashing voter suppression in those states in
2016 and 2018.24
Affirmative action was a complement to the antidiscrimi-
nation legislation, aimed particularly at integrating the work-
force and higher education. Arguably it has had a measure of
success in higher education, increasing the numbers of so-called
“diverse” students and faculty and drawing attention to the
Calling History to Account—61
Accounting
value of the labor that had been stolen from them, but money
could not compensate for other losses (family members, human
dignity, life itself ). The black abolitionist David Walker (1829)
insisted that “the greatest riches in all America have arisen from
our blood and tears”;35 a generation later (1854) another black
abolitionist, Martin Delany, called for a “national indemnity . . .
for the unparalleled wrongs, undisguised impositions, and
unmitigated oppression, which we have suffered at the hands
of this American people.”36 Delany did not specify what this
indemnity amounted to—he couldn’t, given the wrongs he enu-
merated. After slavery ended white and black groups organized
to demand pensions for the formerly enslaved, sometimes as a
practical measure (to assure support for elderly freed women
and men), but also as a statement of principle (now that enslave-
ment was recognized as an illegal practice, those subjected to it
were owed some form of restitution). Attempting to discredit
the very idea that pensions were legitimate, the federal govern-
ment pressed fraud charges against some of the organizers of
these pension societies, and even jailed a few of them. There was
an unsuccessful lawsuit (1915) by the formerly enslaved that
claimed as recompense taxes the United States had levied on
cotton. The court refused the claims on the grounds of the sov-
ereign immunity of the nation; the judges referred the plaintiffs
to their former masters for compensation (suggesting that it was
individual “contractual” relationships and not a state-sanctioned
system of enslavement that were at issue). 37 In all of these efforts
the theme not of victimhood but of stolen labor predominated.
Here was Sojourner Truth in 1868: “We have been a source of
wealth to this republic. Our labor supplied the country with cot-
ton, until villages and cities dotted the enterprising North for its
manufacture. . . . Beneath a burning Southern sun have we
toiled, in the canebrake and the rice swamp, urged on by the
merciless driver’s lash, earning millions of money.”38
Calling History to Account—65
blacks need to know the land of their forebears when its civili-
zations were verifiably equal to any in the world.”47 They needed
to know this history in order to become agents of their own his-
tory. Reclaiming the history and culture of Africa required
coordination with those nations. Robinson cited a declaration
on reparations from a meeting of the Organization of African
Unity in 1993 that pointed to “the damage done to Africa and to
the Diaspora by enslavement, colonialism and neo-colonialism.”48
The authors of the declaration state that they are “fully per-
suaded that the damage sustained by the African peoples is not
a theory of the past but is painfully manifested from Harare to
Harlem and in the damaged economies of Africa and the black
world from Guinea to Guyana, from Somalia to Surinam.” The
declaration calls for economic reparations and cites historic
precedents—German reparations to Jews, US compensation to
Japanese-Americans interned during the Second World War—
but it also recognizes the limits of that claim.
Loss
Revisioning History
Preface
1. www.marxists.org / history/cuba/archive/castro/1953/10/16 .htm.
Thanks to Julie Skurski for reminding me of this.
2. Telford Taylor, Nuremberg and Vietnam: An American Tragedy (Chi-
cago: Quadrangle, 1970), 184.
3. www.researchgate.net/post/ The_arc_of_the_moral_universe
_is_long_but_it_bends_toward_justice.
4. Michael Luo, “American’s Exclusionary Past and Present and the
Judgment of History,” New Yorker, August 17, 2019.
5. John Lewis comment cited by Timothy Egan, “The Smoking
Gun Is Trump Himself,” New York Times, September 28, 2019.
6. “Citizen Comey Is Fretting Over Vote: I Feel Stuck,” New York
Times, October 12, 2019.
7. Susana Narotzky, “ ‘A Cargo del Futuro’ Between History and
Memory: An Account of the ‘Fratricidal’ Conflict During Revo-
lution and War in Spain (1936–39),” Critique of Anthropology 27,
no. 4 (2007): 425.
8. Heinrich Regius [Max Horkheimer], Dawn and Decline, cited in
Michael Löwy, Fire Alarm: Reading Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of
History,” trans. Chris Turner (London: Verso, 2016), 32.
92—Preface
24. Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, trans. G. L. Ulmen (Candor,
NY: Telos, 2006), 149.
25. Schmitt, 131.
26. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège
de France, 1977–78, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Picador,
2007), 266–67.
27. Foucault, 259.
28. Foucault, 259.
29. Schmitt, Nomos, 127.
30. Joan Wallach Scott, Sex and Secularism (Princeton: Princeton Uni-
versity Press, 2018).
31. Gary Wilder, Freedom Time: Negritude, Decolonization, and the Future of
the World (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
32. Nicola Perugini and Neve Gordon, The Human Right to Dominate
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 30.
33. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso,
2009), 134–35.
34. Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2012).
35. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Har-
court Brace, 1966), 230.
36. Arendt, 184.
37. Cited in Adam Ashforth, Witchcraft: Violence and Democracy in South
Africa (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 365.
38. Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New
York: Penguin, 2001), 33, 216.
7. Derrida, 39.
8. Derrida, 43.
9. Derrida, 45.
10. Sitze, The Impossible Machine, 193–200.
11. Peter Thomas, “Historical-Critical Dictionary of Marxism:
Catharsis,” Historical Materialism 17 (2009): 263.
12. Kader Asmal, Louise Asmal, and Ronald Suresh Roberts, Recon-
ciliation Through Truth: A Reckoning of Apartheid’s Criminal Governance
(Cape Town: David Philip, 1997), 208.
13. Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts, 49.
14. Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts, 47.
15. Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts, 11.
16. Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts, 214.
17. Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts, 48.
18. Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts, 214.
19. Asmal, Asmal, and Roberts, 9.
20. Desmond Mpilo Tutu, foreword to To Remember and to Heal, ed.
H. Russel Botman and Robin M. Peterson (Cape Town: Human
and Rousseau, 1996), 7–8.
21. Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, 43.
22. Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 279.
23. D. M. Davis, “The South African Truth Commission and the
AZAPO Case: A Reflection Almost Two Decades Later,” in
Anti-Impunity and the Human Rights Agenda, ed. Karen Engle, Zinaida
Miller, and D. M. Davis (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2016), 129.
24. Alejandro Castillejo-Cuéllar, “Knowledge, Experience, and
South Africa’s Scenarios of Forgiveness,” Radical History Review 97
(2007).
25. Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 279.
26. Tutu, “Speech: No Future Without Forgiveness (Version 2),”
2003, Archbishop Desmond Tutu Collection Textual 15, https://
digitalcommons.unf.edu/archbishoptutupapers/15.
27. Cited in Jill Staufer, Ethical Loneliness: The Injustice of Not Being Heard
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 121.
2. The Limits of Forgiveness—99
were often demoted or lost their jobs entirely since white teach-
ers were given priority in newly integrated schools.
21. “Memorandum by Mr. Justice Jackson,” unpublished, 2. See
David O’Brien, “Justice R. H. Jackson’s Unpublished Opinion
in Brown v. Board of Education,” SCOTUSblog. I am grateful to
Robert Post for this reference.
22. “Memorandum by Mr. Justice Jackson,” 1. Jackson succumbed to
the pressure for a unanimous decision. This may have had to do
with Cold War imperatives: the USSR was using racial injustice
in the United States as an indictment of capitalist democracy.
23. Coates, Eight Years, 334.
24. Despite dogged resistance from those (especially in the South)
who sought to undermine the laws if they could, both acts opened
a period of heightened expectation and significant change. More
African Americans voted and won office, even in the South,
where federal oversight of states with long records of voter sup-
pression led to important reform. In reaction, racial gerryman-
dering of electoral districts intensified and party realignments
(the Democrats became the face of liberal policies, the Republi-
cans of white conservatism) sharpened political divides based on
race.
25. Some critics argue that when affirmative action is redefined in
terms of “diversity,” it takes the inclusion of blacks (and other
minorities) to be not so much for their benefit—as a form of rep-
aration or compensation—as for the benefit of white majorities
who will become more accepting of “others” when exposed to
them.
26. John David Skrentny, The Ironies of Affirmative Action: Politics, Cul-
ture, and Justice in America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996).
27. Angela Hanks, Danyelle Solomon, and Christian E. Weller,
“Systematic Inequality: How America’s Structural Racism
Helped Create the Black-White Wealth Gap,” Center for Amer-
ican Progress website, www.americanprogress.org/issues/race/re
ports/2018/02/21/447051/systematic-inequality/3.
104—3. Calling History to Account
44. David Scott, “Preface: Debt, Redress,” Small Axe 18, no. 1 (2014): ix.
45. See Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparation, and
Knowledge After the Genome (Boston: Beacon, 2016), chap. 4, for a
discussion of the ways DNA has been used to fortify reparations
claims.
46. Forman did not rule out armed struggle in the United States
either. In his Manifesto peaceful demands for a Southern land
bank, black publishing houses, black TV networks, and skill-
training centers as well as a Black Anti-Defamation League sat
alongside declarations of war, in the form of calls for disruptions
of church services, sit-ins, and other unspecified means of self-
defense and national liberation.
47. Robinson, The Debt, 17.
48. Robinson, 218–20.
49. Robinson, 216.
50. Coates, Eight Years, 288.
51. Coates, xiii.
52. US Congress, HR 40, Commission to Study and Develop Repa-
ration Proposals for African-Americans Act, 115th Congress
(2017–18), www.congress.gov/ bill/115th-congress/ house-bill/40.
53. Coates, Eight Years, 37.
54. Coates, 43.
55. Coates, 138.
56. Coates, 68.
57. Coates, 80.
58. Coates, 69 (my emphasis).
59. See Sarah Juliet Lauro, The Transatlantic Zombie: Slavery, Rebellion and
Living Death (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press,
2015), especially “Introduction: Zombie Dialectics—‘Ki Sa Sa
Ye?’ (What Is That?),” 4.
60. Lauro, 4.
61. Here I want to disagree with Adolph Reed’s dismissal of Coates’s
arguments as suggesting that racism is “an intractable, transhis-
torical force. . . . [that] lies beyond structural intervention.” In
contrast, I read Coates not as an “exhortation to individual
106—3. Calling History to Account
Epilogue
1. Human Rights Watch, “South Africa: Attacks on Foreign
Nationals,” April 15, 2019, www.hrw.org/news/2019/04/15/south
-africa-attacks-foreign-nationals#.
Epilogue—107