Repair and reparations - Tracing Center

Goodwin Liu nomination sent back to White House

Posted August 7th, 2010 by James DeWolf Perry
Category: Repair and reparations Tags: Barack Obama, Goodwin Liu, Judicial nominations, Reparations for slavery, Traces of the Trade

James DeWolf Perry is a regular contributor. He appears in the film Traces of the Trade and is the Tracing Center’s director of research. This entry is cross-posted from James’ own blog, The Living Consequences, and the opinions expressed are his own.

President Obama’s nomination of controversial law professor Goodwin Liu to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit has been blocked by Senate Republicans and returned to the White House.

Professor Liu became the subject of controversy in late March, in part due to remarks he made on a panel convened to discuss our documentary, Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North. That evening, in response to the topic of reparations for slavery, Liu observed that any effort to compensate for our nation’s history of slavery and racial discrimination would inevitably require trade-offs which would diminish the privileges enjoyed by people who benefit from that history today.

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Philadelphia: The President’s House and Slavery

Posted May 26th, 2010 by Christie Gibson
Category: History, Repair and reparations

Christie Gibson is a staff member at the Tracing Center and regularly posts material intended to raise awareness and stimulate discussion related to the history of slavery and anti-racism. This content reflects the views of the respective authors and not necessarily those of the Tracing Center or its staff.

The National Park Service at Independence National Historical Park in Philadelphia is working with the City of Philadelphia and community partners to improve the interpretation of the slave quarters at the President’s House, home to George Washington and John Adams in the 1790s. For more information, check out their site.

Coming to the Table on CNN.com

Posted May 21st, 2010 by Christie Gibson
Category: Repair and reparations

Yesterday’s top story on CNN.com and its most emailed article of the day was about Betty and Phoebe Kilby, two Coming to the Table participants, and their commitment to healing from the legacy of slavery.

Ron Bailey responds to Gates

Posted May 20th, 2010 by Christie Gibson
Category: Repair and reparations

Ron Bailey, one of the professors interviewed in Traces of the Trade, responds on H-Net to Henry Louis Gates, Jr.’s op-ed.

Reparations and African complicity in the slave trade

Posted April 23rd, 2010 by James DeWolf Perry
Category: Repair and reparations Tags: Barack Obama, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Reparations for slavery, Slave trade

Professor Henry Louis (“Skip”) Gates, Jr. has an op-ed in this morning’s New York Times in which he takes on the issue of reparations for slavery.

Gates will, no doubt, attract enough controversy for his general approach to the issue. He is convinced that our society must address the issue of reparations, and that we must reach a “just and lasting agreement,” which he believes will have to be “a judicious (if symbolic) gesture to match such a sustained, heinous crime.”

Remarks like these will land any public intellectual in the U.S. in hot water these days. Just consider the case of Goodwin Liu, whose mild remarks related to reparations at one of our events in 2008 became a central issue in his nomination by President Obama for a seat on the Ninth Circuit.

However, this essay is most notable for telling difficult truths about the central role of Africans in the transatlantic slave trade, and thus about the shared culpability of people of different races in the resulting history of slavery.

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