The following passage from a recent New Yorker piece inspired this post. Although the piece is about British history, the issues it raises are also the subject of rancorous debate in the US.
“The public narrative about Britain’s imperial past matters because it is keenly felt to license present injustice…. A myth countered, a history deepened, and a gesture of recompense. There may never be an end to reckoning, but such beginnings might help historians imagine broader forms of recovery and repair. That, too, could be a kind of progress.” - Maya Jasanoff, Misremembering the British Empire, published in the print edition of the November 2, 2020, issue of The New Yorker, with the headline “Operation Legacy.”
That first sentence - “The public narrative about Britain’s imperial past matters because it is keenly felt to license present injustice” - is never clarified or explained. Its oddly passive construction - “is keenly felt” invites the question: who exactly is feeling this? And while we’re at it: who is using a rose-colored historical narrative about Britain’s imperial past to license injustice? And what injustices is the author alluding to?
Jasanoff clearly feels past abuses should be revealed and some sort of historical debt paid, starting with a gesture of recompense and proceeding to a possibly never-ending reckoning. What does that mean in concrete terms? What’s the reckoning plan? What’s the reckoning goal? When is enough enough, reckoning-wise? On a related note, what is reckoning meant to accomplish?
Jasanoff writes of “recovery and repair”, which I’m taking to mean what reckoning is meant to accomplish. So what does recovery and repair entail? She doesn’t say, but I have asked progressives in my debate club and gotten the response: the end of racism, poverty and inequality. My follow-up questions: should a nation’s shameful history dictate its current policies? Can’t governments effectively address racism, poverty and inequality without a narrative of shame and reckoning? What do shame and reckoning add to the equation?
But the shame and reckoning folks are more about justice than policy. And the justice angle isn’t just about long-ago history but the legacy of that history: current victims of past crimes. Determining a legacy, though, is not an exact science. It’s pretty easy to simply draw lines between historical events and say current ills are the result of past wrongs (a process that often involves ignoring evidence and events that don’t follow the narrative). It’s another thing to rule out alternative explanations. And even in cases where the causal link is clear, that in itself does not confer blame, responsibility, or a debt to be paid long after the original culprits have died.
Of course, there are clear cases where the government should address the consequences of past wrongs, especially when the past in question is relatively recent and the victims or their immediate offspring are still living. As in the case of federal housing policy in the 1960s-70s, which specifically sought to address the effects of redlining. Here’s how the first director of the Housing and Urban Development (HUD) explained an essential mission of his agency: “…personnel were encouraged to begin to do what they had not been doing; namely, to put families into homeownership situations in the central city in areas that had previously been redlined.”
Unfortunately, this early attempt to undo the effects of redlining mostly just made things worse. For example, HUD’s Fair Housing Administration (FHA) programs had “a national default rate 3 to 4 times the conventional market, and in many urban neighborhoods it routinely exceeds 10 times.” (John Wake “50 Years of Failure – U.S. Affordable Housing Programs and the Black Home Ownership Rate”). Which leads me to another question: might conceiving government actions as repaying a historical debt encourage bad policy making? That is, might such initiatives pay too much attention to the symbolism (big debts demand big spending) and too little on what actually helps people.