Racial Justice, Reparations, and the University

There is a global movement that takes reparations for colonization and slavery as a point of departure for and as a strategy in the pursuit of racial justice. This movement looks different in different geographical contexts, but thought across the scales of community, city, nation, region, and planet, reparations are not simply a desired outcome of a particular case of injury, but a paradigm of justice with its own intellectual scaffolding, historical memory, and social practices. We understand the university as an ideal site to think these various scales simultaneously, so as to connect the different parts of the movement and to offer students an authentic, real-world problem that fully implicates them no matter their identity. This is the “why” of this edition of the Sawyer seminar. But there are two questions that we intend to answer over the course of two (perhaps two and a half) days with students, community organizers, organizations working towards reparations at the level of the state of New Jersey, national partners, and international experts. These questions are: 1) what is/should be the role of the university in the movement of reparations? 2) How should university-based scholars, administrators, and students do this work with and in communities?

Image credit: Layqa Nuna Yawar (2018). Radical Impermanence.[City of Newark Mayor Ras Baraka Citywide Mural Project]. https://layqa.info/Radical-Impermane

Host or Publisher Sawyer Seminar at Rutgers Newark