The Many Problems with Race Reparations in the United States (Part Two)

“The analyses attempting to quantify reparations, cited above, will likely encounter strong and ongoing resistance, if only based on the price tag alone.”

Editor’s note: The following constitutes the second installment of a two-part piece on the topic by Jonathan Church. The first installment can be found here.

Two Models of Reparations: Tort Model (Corrective Justice) and Atonement Model (Distributive Justice)

In his 2004 book Atonement and Forgiveness, Roy Brooks devotes chapters four and five to two principal models for reparations discussed in the literature: the tort model and the atonement model. On the tort model, he writes:

“Whether white or black, opponents as well as proponents of the black redress movement typically conceptualize the question of slave redress through what can be called the ‘tort model.’ Although it can appear in legislative form, the tort model is primarily a litigation approach to slave redress. It operates upon a certain set of premises—compensation and, for some proponents, punishment or even white guilt. Many proponents of the tort model would be satisfied if the government or a private beneficiary of slavery were simply to write a check for X amount of dollars to every slave descendant. In response, some white Americans, such as the neoconservative Charles Krauthammer, would gladly have the government write that check as a means of closing the books on the American race problem—a kind of justice on the cheap.”