RADICAL REPARATIONS

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.”