Ida B. Wells and “Color Line Justice”: Rethinking Reparations in Feminist Terms

Abstract

In contrast to sterile forms of apology or the evasions of color-blind political discourse, calls for reparations explicitly link the realization of democratic ideals to a history of antiblack violence and exploitation. I explore three dimensions of Ida B. Wells's antilynching writings that anticipate and enrich contemporary demands for reparations for slavery and Jim Crow. First, Wells's commitment to truth-telling, a centerpiece of reparations efforts around the world, models how to criticize received understandings of both past and present and revise them in the service of more democratic ways of life. Second, her gender-and sexuality-conscious analysis of the political and economic causes and effects of antiblack violence adds a dimension that is missing from many reparations arguments. Third, Wells both advocates an active citizenry and demands collective responsibility for the protection of black citizenship; in so doing, she reveals the racial and gendered underpinnings of contemporary disavowals of responsibility for racial justice, dressed up as "personal responsibility," and offers a powerful rebuttal.

The Strange Fruit of the Tree of Liberty: Lynch Law and Popular Sovereignty in the United States

“…It was for this reason that the myth of interracial rape played an outsized role in the ideology of Lynch Law. As a ritual of retribution, spectacle lynching sought to redeem the social hierarchies that made both patriarchy and white supremacy possible as interlocking forms of social domination (Balfour 2015).…”

“…While the tradition of black political thought-like all robust intellectual traditions-speaks with many voices, scholars have drawn on authors in this tradition to shed light on the foundational role that anti-black oppression has played in the formation of Euro-American modernity (Hanchard 2010;Mills 1999;Olson 2004), urging theorists to rethink many of the central categories of Western political thought. In the U.S. context, much of this work has focused on the relationship between democracy and race (Balfour 2011;Bromell 2013;Turner 2012), and some has addressed the question of peoplehood (Allen 2006;Frank 2010;Rogers 2012). However, scholars have yet to fully explore the practices by which racialized peoplehood has been constituted and sustained.…”

“I Can’t Vote if I Don’t Leave My Apartment”: The Problem of Neighborhood Violence and its Impact on the Political Behavior of Black American Women Living Below the Poverty Line

“…Accordingly, in this article, I shift away from the study of more public forms of anti-Black state-sanctioned violence, usually experienced by Black men, and occasionally video recorded and made viral for the world to see (Bryant-Davis et al 2017;Laniyonu 2019;Loyd and Bonds 2018). Instead, I focus on the more gendered forms of residential violence, typically experienced by Black women and femmes behind closed doors, violence which eclipses easy distinctions of public and private (Ritchie 2017;Balfour 2015;Haley 2016;Miller 2010;Hill-Collins 1998Williams 2012;Lentz-Smith 2020;Roberts 1999;Feimster 2011;McGuire 2011;INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence 2016).…”

“This Unfortunate Development”: Incarceration and Democracy in W. E. B. Du Bois

“… 30. General William Tecumseh Sherman’s promise in Savannah of forty acres for the formerly enslaved remains unkept. For more on the unfulfilled promise of reparations, see Lawrie Balfour (2003; 2015), William Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen (2020), and Lawrence Svabek (2021). …”

“…are peripheral to the major extant scholarship on Du Bois's political thought (e.g., Reed 1997;Balfour 2011;Gooding-Williams 2011;Winters 2016;Chandler 2022). This essay aims to draw together these two bodies of scholarship to consider Du Bois as a thinker of prisons and democratic life-who underscores the tension between carceral institutions and democratic politics.…”