As a child growing up in rural Oklahoma, John Hope Franklin viewed Tulsa as the land of opportunity - his family planned to relocate there in the early 1920s, hoping to move into a nicer home and gain better access to job opportunities.
But when race riots broke out in Tulsa in 1921, many of the family's possessions were stolen, and their hopes of moving were dashed. It was at that time when then-six-year-old Franklin first desired reparations for black Americans, he recalled Monday at the opening of this year's Franklin Humanities Institute Annual Symposium, "Reparations in Perspective."
Franklin, the namesake of the Franklin Humanities Institute and a James B. Duke professor emeritus of history, set the tone for the panel by defining reparation as "recompensation for deprivation of opportunity and property."
The five panelists, with expertise ranging from Classical Greek injustice to reparations for American racial slavery, discussed the implications of reparations on identity. The panel was held for a physical audience of about 100 people and a worldwide audience via webcam. The majority of the panel concentrated on the plight of blacks in America, and the question of reparations for both slavery and the Jim Crow era.
Grant Parker, assistant professor of classical studies and a panelist, emphasized the extent to which reparations are meant to erase the memory of a victim's pain.
He concentrated on the aftermath of the Pelopennesian War in ancient Greece, a case after which reparations were offered because of the need to ease the pain of victims. However, he said, that situation was "not one about race and slavery, rather politics of remembering and not remembering."
Extending this idea of memory as an inherent problem in offering reparations, Orin Starn, associate professor of cultural anthropology, discussed the case of Native Americans. He argued that American nostalgia and national imagery surrounding Native Americans have given them an advantage, never extended to blacks, in arguing for reparations. Starn pointed to flourishing Native American casinos that raise $200 billion in annual revenue for about 300 tribes as one example of U.S. support of the Native American population. Starn defined the casinos as "not formal reparations... yet [they] are surrounded by a feel of atonement," and praised the casinos as encouraging tribal revitalization.
Chungmoo Choi, associate professor of East Asian languages and literature from the University of California at Irvine, continued the discussion of the role of memory in reparations by citing the case of forced Korean prostitution during Japanese occupation.
Her argument was that in the case of these women "the only evidence [of the crime] is memory of pain and shame, something that cannot be materially objectified... which challenges our conventional idea of reparation."
The last two panelists, Adrienne Davis, professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's School of Law, and Wahneema Lubiano, associate professor of literature at Duke, discussed the justifications and necessity for reparations to black Americans. Davis discussed the role of slavery in building American prosperity and the injustice of omitting them from the benefits of this prosperity. Lubiano concentrated on numerous reasons to continue to discuss reparations for blacks, citing historical "activity of the state in the aid of theft," referring to the theft of free labor from slaves.
A follow-up conversation to the panel will be held Wednesday at noon in the John Hope Franklin Center.
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