This talk was part of the "Humanities and Public Life" symposium, a part of the Research 150 Sesquicentennial Conference in Spring 2018. 

ABSTRACT:
In June 2014, celebrated social critic Ta-Nehisi Coates published a persuasive article in The Atlantic entitled “The Case for Reparations.” He argues that, “Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole.” But, what metrics are used to quantify a moral debt? And what does it mean for a country to be whole? Repairing the past through debt repayment is a seductive concept, but reparations rely on the myth of singularity or the philosopher in Plato’s cave who unlike all others is able to comprehend an eternal truth. Ethnographic studies of reparative social justice movements, however, complicate truth claims. For example, the designation of perpetrators and victims, who owes vs. who is owed the debt, is never easy. Using the failures of international donor aid and development as a case study, this talk considers successive attempts at reparations from colonialism (a reparation for slavery) to new indigenous and sovereignty movements that attempt to link rights to allodial land titles and/or forms of cultural citizenship. This talk challenges contemporary calls for reparations by engaging the question of what it means to be human, conceived anthropologically and philosophically, in the 21st century.