THE REPARATION GENERATION: TRUTH TELLING IN PURSUIT OF RACIAL JUSTICE IN THE U.S.

The Black reparations movement in the U.S. is a broad, diverse, multi-pronged approach to securing redress for historical injuries, including slavery, Jim Crow segregation, and their endur ing legacies in American society today. While reparations activism and advocacy tends to be associated with demands of restitution and compensation, non-material forms of redress have become an important tool of building racial reconciliation and healing. My paper discusses recent truth telling initiatives which are rooted in the restorative justice process and draw on the experience of the 1990s South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission which investigated the apartheid-era human rights violations. This overview of emblematic truth telling projects at the federal, civic, and grassroots levels shows a growing and widespread willingness among European Americans to engage in honest yet painful discussions about the nation's collective past and persistent structures of white privilege. Whether an individual or a community-based process, truth telling entails intellectual and emotional work on one's own racial bias and prejudice, one's entanglement in webs of power and privilege, and a commitment to social transformation. These multiple and dispersed civic initiatives have, over the last decade, laid the foundation for a national truth telling process, which may be the most powerful reparative justice measure that Americans as a nation can accept today.