Working Through Trauma Commemoration With Reparations

In the wake of the George Floyd protests of 2020, the role of reparations in remedying racial disparities re-entered mainstream discussion. The purpose of reparations is to pay African Americans money to make up for the generations of mistreatment and discrimination Black people in America have suffered as a result of slavery. The idea has been treated with varying degrees of seriousness by the government, with some states fully dismissing the idea and others seriously entertaining its merits. California is one state making moves toward instituting reparations: the state recently formed the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans. This committee met recently to discuss, among other logistics, if all Black Californians should receive reparations or just the specific descendants of enslaved people (excluding those whose family members arrived in the US more recently). 

Much like other race-related topics in America, reparations are a contentious issue. Even some people who are sympathetic to progressive racial causes take issue with reparations, suggesting that the people living today are too far removed from the time of the trauma to justify paying them reparations. However, it is undeniable that the socioeconomic effects of American slavery are still observable today, appearing in areas that include but are not restricted to educational achievement, incarceration, healthcare, etc. In order to explore the merits of reparations to rectify the wrongs of American slavery, I turn to sociological concepts that seek to illuminate the construction and memory of cultural trauma. 

In her article “Marking Time in Memorials and Museums of Terror: Temporality and Cultural Trauma,” sociologist Christina Simko creates a framework that describes how African American museums commemorate the cultural trauma of the Black American experience. The framework contrasts methods of remembering that require “acting out” with those that require “working through.” The main difference between the two, Simko argues, is that “working through” trauma supposes that trauma flows from the time of the trauma to the future, and as a result the event’s effects are ongoing. By contrast, museums that favor “acting out” represent trauma and its effects to be confined to the time of the event. Although neither perspective is better or worse than the other in remembering the past, they each offer distinct perspectives on how the traumas of the past affect our present day.

This framework can usefully be applied to how reparations should be approached. More specifically, I think that “working through” trauma directly correlates to the argument in support of reparations: it makes an effort to directly tie historic events to the present in order to demonstrate how trauma (and its ongoing impact) is not truly relegated to the past. Similarly, those who believe reparations should be paid to descendants of slaves view the trauma of slavery as continual and ongoing, not merely confined to the time when slavery occurred. The reason to commemorate this temporal reality in this way is because it is also the material reality—the effects of slavery are what contribute to the routine discrimination and marginalization of Black Americans every day. 

So, what does acknowledging the ongoing impact of the past on the present have to do with reparations? I believe that reparations are a valuable way—in line with the “working through” method of commemoration—to address and correct the ongoing effects of slavery. I argue that reparations is a form of trauma commemoration, just as museums are. Simko’s framework allows us to recognize that the past and present are inexorably linked, and reparations are a tangible way to connect the impact of past trauma to the present day in order to rectify those wrongs. Those of us alive today might not be responsible for the sins of our forefathers, nor the direct sufferers of the particular injuries of chattel enslavement. However, by paying reparations, non-Black Americans can begin to amend the deep and enduring harms of slavery, which are very much still active today. Reparations task forces, such as the one in California, are paving the way for a future that both acknowledges past cultural trauma and actively works not to reproduce it in the present.