BSTP-Sponsored Reparations Speaker Series (RSS): "Reparations as Earnest Money"

Irami Osei-Frimpong, Ph.D. student, in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Georgia, will be giving the BSTP-Sponsored Reparations Series seminar. His talk is entitled, "Reparations as Earnest Money". The seminar is hosted by the Department of Molecular Psychiatry.

Seminar Series Introduction Video

https://yale.box.com/s/l4hyl5urrlylabei46uaofzf0mdul6mn

Abstract:

In this talk on reparations for racial justice, I argue for why the state needs to demonstrate that the rights extended to the harmed group do not depend on the electorate's caprice.

Since the United States has an attested history of capitulating to anti-Black elements of the population, any reparations plan that does not redress the institutional conditions that abet the persistent capture of state power by the nation’s anti-Black factions is insufficient. This means that reparations are not merely going to concern rebuilding and repairing predominantly Black institutions in line with the contemporary wealth of the nation; rather, reparations are going to inform the way the state enables the conventions of predominantly White political and non-political institutions, e.g., families, churches, and schools.

This institutional restructuring is part of establishing the sociological condition of fraternity recalled in the French national motto liberte, egalite, fraternite. The relevance of fraternity for politics is often given short shrift because families are not obviously politically relevant, but this talk accounts for why the quality of fraternity—abstracted from the biological family-- needs to be established within the state’s culture as a precondition for liberty and equality to emerge.