Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair

by Duke L. Kwon

the most important aspect of this letter is the light it sheds on what is, at heart, its essential theme: reparations. Jourdon Anderson’s letter was, fundamentally, a call for his former master, one who had long benefited from Anderson’s unrequited labor, to begin the work of repair. This book is a long overdue response to Jourdon Anderson’s letter, a response that seeks to engage seriously with his essential theme.

racism, as used in this book, has three elements to it. First, classifying human beings into distinct “races” due to presumably fixed and hereditary physical characteristics. Second, assigning notions of inferior mental or moral capacities correlated to those physical characteristics. Third, pushing people who are seen to have those physical, mental, and moral qualities to the margins of a given social order.

Some, for example, view racism personally, as a form of personal prejudice whose remedy is personal repentance. Others view it socially, as a form of relational estrangement that requires racial reconciliation. Still others view it institutionally, in terms of discrete institutional injustice whose redress lies in institutional reform. Each of these accounts holds important truths about the nature of racism and what it means to respond faithfully to it. Even so, we believe that none of these capture the whole truth, that still another view of racism is required. Our conviction is that racism is best understood culturally, as a force that shapes the entire ecosystem of meanings, values, ideas, institutions, and practices of American culture. Seeing racism in this way—as embedded in an entire cultural order—is important not only because it reminds us that each of us, simply by virtue of living in this culture, is implicated in and affected by the reality of American racism but also because it reminds us just how expansive the work of repairing racism ultimately will be.

the best way to understand the cultural order of racism is through the lens of White supremacy.

we have met more than a few sympathetic people who have suggested that we use different language precisely on these grounds: “I agree with what you’re trying to say. But can’t you just find a different way to say it?” In considering these suggestions, two things have become clear to us. First, to cease to use the language of White supremacy, even though it is historically accurate and broadly used in minority communities, simply because it offends the sensibilities of White people is, in our view, to perpetuate the logic of White supremacy itself.

the church’s responsibility derives from its need for missional integrity.

Latin American theology

Our final conviction (developed in chapter 7) is that as the church undertakes this work of reparations it must mirror the threefold theft wrought by White supremacy: not only the theft of wealth (as is generally understood) but the theft of truth and the theft of power as well.

Our final intended contribution is our insistence that reparations requires what the Christian community refers to as repentance. Which is to say, the work of reparations requires us to become different kinds of people.

The simple truth, historically speaking, is that the White middle class was created by entitlements. The fact that those who have themselves most benefited from entitlement tools are also those who most frequently raise concerns about the bestowal of those tools upon African Americans is a fact that warrants serious moral reflection.

The way to heal from American racism is not to change our words but to change the social order that put those words in our mouths in the first place.

This different way of seeing racism serves as the foundation of this work: racism is not simply a matter of personal prejudice, relational division, or institutional injustice but rather a fundamental cultural (dis)order that is both the source and sum of all these. Because of this, personal repentance, relational reconciliation, and institutional reform—though important—are not enough, indeed can never be enough, to overcome its power. Because racism is a comprehensively broken culture, what is needed—if we are to truly heal—is comprehensive cultural repair.30

The segregated structures of American life function as a sort of cataract to true sight. But this social structure is not simply a cataract. It is also coercive. It not only blinds us from seeing; it also pressures us not to see.

This coercive force with which the American order meets those who dissent from it is a powerful obstacle to sight. Indeed, it is an incentive to turn away from sight to the relative safety of blindness. These social obstacles to seeing the truth about American racial history are critical to understand. Not so that White Americans can excuse themselves from the work of seeing, but because overcoming these social obstacles is the first step toward an honest vision of ourselves.

But in time a problem emerged. If, as the European powers claimed, the goal of imperial expansion was to bring culture to the unenlightened and religion to the unconverted, what happens when the project succeeds? What happens when the slaves adopt the master’s culture? What happens when the unconverted convert? On what basis do they remain enslaved? This was precisely the question facing slave owners in the American colonies at the end of the seventeenth century.

To be Black was to possess lesser mental, emotional, spiritual, and relational capacity; it was to be inferior. It also came to signify moral deficiency, an innate tendency toward laziness, theft, duplicity, and lust. To be Black was to be dangerous. As a result of these notions of personal inferiority and moral danger, Blackness also came to take on a new meaning: social marginalization.

much of the nation remained deeply opposed to African American equality. And in 1877, when the federal government ended its commitment to Reconstruction and withdrew military forces from the South, this opposition consolidated power with astonishing speed. Almost overnight, communities across the United States, especially (though not exclusively) in the South,35 reestablished a hierarchical racial order as the basis of social and political life.

In 1954, the landmark case Brown v. Board of Education successfully challenged the legitimacy of White supremacy in public schools. In 1955, the Montgomery Improvement Association, led by Martin Luther King Jr., challenged its legitimacy in public transportation. In 1957, the Little Rock Nine challenged the legitimacy of states to obstruct federal integration law. In 1958, the NAACP Youth Council carried out a sit-in protest to challenge the legitimacy of segregated lunch counters in Kansas and Oklahoma. In 1960, student groups carried out sit-in protests in businesses across the United States. In 1961, the Freedom Riders challenged the legitimacy of segregation in interstate travel. In 1962, James Meredith challenged the legitimacy of segregated public universities. In 1963, some 250,000 people gathered in Washington, DC, to protest racial inequality at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. In 1964, college students from across the country joined the Freedom Summer movement in Mississippi to challenge its legitimacy at the polls. That same year, protests in Memphis challenged the legitimacy of segregated churches. In 1965, protestors challenged White supremacy in police departments in Selma, Alabama, and Los Angeles. In 1966, King moved to Chicago to protest the role of White supremacy in housing inequality, and the Black Panther Party emerged in Los Angeles to address it. In 1967, in Loving v. Virginia the Supreme Court rejected state bans on interracial marriage...

This theft, every bit as much as the Declaration of Independence, is the legacy of both Thomas Jefferson and the republic for which he stands.

the economy we have was not inevitable, that with a different account of the world, things might have been otherwise.

When asked in 1970, “Why did you single out the church?” Reverend Calvin B. Marshall III, chairman of the NBEDC, responded without hesitation: “Because the church is the only institution claiming to be in the business of salvation, resurrection, and the giving and restoring of life. General Motors has never made that kind of claim.”

For several months in 1969, reparations had become a public conversation in the American church. Even more remarkable, it was a conversation about the American church.

disapproval of the manifesto’s message and methods.

White supremacy’s greatest ally in America has not always been the church’s formal institutions or congregations but instead its scattered and informally gathered individuals.

the church by its nature exists to be a healer of the very kind of wounds inflicted by the extractor, captor, and oppressor known as White supremacy. The church is called to lift up and love the downtrodden, despoiled, captive, brokenhearted, and oppressed. The church must take seriously the work of repair because, in the most profound way, love is simply who we are.

In every generation, American Christians, both Black and White, have lamented and borne witness to the same observation: the church bears significant responsibility for the evils of White supremacy in America.

the effect of White supremacy is a multidimensional cultural theft of African Americans, then we may see the church as having inhabited three different roles in relation to that theft: as perpetrator, as accomplice, and as silent bystander.

When the Supreme Court ruled in 1954 that segregation in public schools was unconstitutional, the national leadership of major denominations, including the Southern Baptist Convention and the Presbyterian Church (US), publicly endorsed the decision to the dismay of many of their own members. Thus, it was not always denominational leadership but prominent Christian leaders, local churches, and lay members who allied themselves with segregationist forces and preached against desegregation.

he did these things not primarily as a response to personal guilt—he, his parents, and grandparents never owned a single slave—but rather, as a simple yet profound response to the Bible’s call to love your neighbor as yourself. And so, love he did, extending compassion to countless neighbors who had fallen among thieves on the Jericho roads of antebellum America.

according to the Christian Scriptures, reparations is not less than the logic of restitution, but it is undoubtedly more. We believe that the Bible commands us to return our neighbors’ stolen things when we are guilty of their theft, and we believe that the Bible also commands us to restore their stolen things even when we are not. We believe that it is necessary to reckon with our culpability in the pursuit of racial repair, and we believe that it is also necessary as Christians to reckon with our essential calling in this world—our missional identity, integrity, and responsibility to love our despoiled neighbors as ourselves.

King likewise acknowledges the necessity of this deep work of God. Speaking of the Samaritan’s singular example, he notes that “no law in the world could have produced such unalloyed compassion, such genuine love, such thorough altruism.”

Does law ever change minds? Or create empathy ?

the work of reparations assumes a uniquely Christian character when it is a willing response to the unenforceable obligations of love. The moral power that restores our robbed neighbors even at great cost originates far beyond the reach of the laws, customs, and coercions of society, and even the demands of the church. It begins within. And it begins with God.

the call of reparations is not merely for a check to be written or for a debt to be repaid but for a world to be repaired.

“The question is not, ‘If I stop to help this man in need, what will happen to me?’ The question is, ‘If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?’”2 And so he went.

White Americans ought to look not simply to their own instincts but to the instincts of African Americans,