Tanner’s religious engagement on canvas emerges from the competing and overlapping aims of Black church traditions, what Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham describes as counter-public spheres, where the spiritual, political, economic, and educational aspirations of African Americans find a nurturing home. Along these lines, Tanner makes three important moves in his art: First, Tanner identifies religion as a private, public, and heuristic tool for interrogating human existence; second, through re-narration and color, Tanner obscures the Enlightenment’s white/black binary, where blackness is the negation of whiteness, the absence of soul and humanity; third, Tanner seems to be preoccupied with feelings of abandonment and desolation in his art. Paintings of the resurrection of Lazarus and Judas’s betrayal denote his ongoing interest in stitching back together in vibrant and celestial colors the disassembled pieces of Black life and of Black bodies.

Tanner’s painting Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah is a fitting, and jarring, place to begin an exploration into memory, history, and the ethics of reparations. The painting blurs the fault lines of destruction and leaves unaddressed a father’s willingness to sacrifice his daughter for a few pieces of gold. The soothing ambiance of sea-like clouds encumbers the epic narrative’s intertextual gender and homosexual violence. Is this portrait designed to deceive the audience? Is religion here the source of moral outrage without any textual resources for political and social accountability? Tanner seems to be haunted by the kind of question the Rev. Dr. Iva Carruthers raises in a recent essay on religion and reparations: “What manner of Christianity and Christians could appropriate and twist the word of God to so profoundly justify the protracted dehumanization of millions of persons on the basis of their skin colour and to serve their earthly and personal beneficial interests?”²

Many of Tanner’s portraits belie his anxiety about interrogating violence and oppression at the hands of Christian men and women. His preoccupation with death, the resurrection, and community underscore the political and economic consequences of following a religion that had been, on the one hand, distorted by Europeans and Anglo-Saxons. On the other hand, the religion employed to justify African enslavement emerged from a central figure, the mystic and theologian Howard Thurman called “a Jew of Palestine.” That is, Jesus, like the descendants of African enslaved people, was a member of a disinherited people. Tanner’s engagement with historic Palestine leaves one wondering if the answer to the moral problem of blackness—what I have called elsewhere the moral beliefs of Black inferiority and inhumanity based on the clash between Christianity and liberalism in twentieth-century America—is to be found outside the United States among the so-called ruins of civilization. Tanner’s racially opaque artistic imaginary leaves one burdened with enduring questions: Where, one might speculate, is the political turn in Tanner’s artwork? Is Black freedom both cursed and blessed by historic ties to the narratives of the Old Testament? Is reparation possible among a people and in a land where the gods seem to have abandoned African descended people?

Tanner’s global pursuit of reconciliation and reparation is a cautionary tale for those entering the barren, unmarked graves of the slaughtered. The framing discourse—how we enter the investigation—will inform both the political possibilities and the limits of the achievable outcomes. If our public inquiry remains burdened by moral inquiry without political and economic justice, then the outcomes will remain captive to debates on the justificatory grounds of enslavement and subjugation without any thought about current material mediation. This is not the case for others who have sought justice for systemic harms against them. Reparation debates for Holocaust survivors and those in Japanese internment camps often took a different tone. Few, if any, mainline newspapers asked whether the Germans were justified in their racist beliefs of Jews. Heart-breaking accounts from survivors of Japanese internment camps were often characterized as crimes against humanity. The morality of concentration and internment camps was not a conversation-question, whereas debates on African enslavement and reparations stall conversations before they get off the ground. Claims that enslavement was justified based on historical norms are often followed by a lengthy discussion of federal programs such as affirmative action, which are characterized as failed efforts to redress historic harms.

With such a framework established, these “debates” are burdened with undue emphasis on the individual based on American exceptionalism and racial uplift ideology. And underlying the discourse is the insidious belief in the moral failure of Black people. If they would only follow the path of other ethnic minorities such as white Jews, Eastern Europeans, Asians, etc. is a common refrain. This line of thinking assumes that justice is defined by “personal liability” and responsibility. Robert K. Fullinwider debunks this notion. “The real issues are corporate responsibility—the responsibility of the nation as a whole—and civic responsibility—the responsibility of each citizen to do his or her part in honoring the nation’s obligations.”⁴ Responsibility, then, is a political obligation that could be developed into a political and economic vocabulary etched into a discursive model for transforming institutional and social structures. One might call this the political imaginary.

If we suspend moral inquiry to focus on the political, the conversation will start with examining the crime at hand, exploring its short- and long-term ramifications, and determining the recourse for said crime. Of course, this assumes the subjects of the crime are treated as human beings and/or citizens protected by the reigning legal system. When we suspend moral inquiry to focus on citizenship and human rights, the discourse shifts to the law, social structures, the Constitution, and crimes against victims. The debate might then assume the following three beliefs: first, that enslaving human beings is a crime; second, that for nearly one hundred years following emancipation, Jim and Jane Crow violated constitutional amendments that guaranteed citizenship, voting rights, and equal protection under the law for all Blacks; third, that federal and state laws failed to protect African descendants from lynching, police brutality, economic exploitation, and systemic white violence. In this framework, we bracket the moral conditions under which the crime emerged and instead focus on the political economy produced under said conditions.

The model I am developing is not uncommon. In 2004, then-Brown University President Ruth J. Simmons launched a rather unorthodox commission to explore whether the university owed reparations for its connections to the slave trade. President Simmons’s unflinching stance—in the first few years of her presidency and during a billion-dollar capital campaign—has been widely admired but rarely imitated. She masterfully linked moral inquiry to the political imaginary with one assertion: the university—and nation, I might add—had violated human rights. As she asked in The New York Times: “How does one repair a kind of social breach in human rights so that people are not just coming back to it periodically and demanding apologies?”⁵

Her model asserts what should be an unremarkable argument: that enslaved Africans and their descendants were injured systematically by institutions, governments, and corporations. Frederick Douglass was far more bombastic in his condemnation of the crimes committed against Blacks when he wrote in 1850: “only when we contemplate the slave as a moral and intellectual being . . . can [we] adequately comprehend the unparalleled enormity of slavery, and the intense criminality of the slaveholder.”⁶ Ruth Simmons seems to accentuate Douglass’s argument by using her presidential pulpit to grapple with the moral and political implications of social marginalization. In her Zoom address to the Harvard Class of 2021, she described her own alienation in graduate school. Her moral outcry points to the political injury against Black and Brown students who enter institutions of higher learning where they are tolerated but neither wanted nor respected. Douglass and Simmons sketch political pathways designed to dismantle the structural means through which enslavement, colonialism, and antiblack and Indigenous violence survived, flourished, and reproduced themselves.

Assuming that the framing discourse on African enslavement will shape and inform our political (and moral) outcomes, I suggest we also turn to Katie Cannon’s womanist ethics and W.E.B. Du Bois’s double consciousness as heuristic guides for imagining what I have elsewhere called reflective deliberation. Within this category, ethics is what Cannon calls the “dialectical [and] syncretistic interplay between” the “invisible institutions” of African wisdom traditions and Anglo-American theo-political epistemes.⁷ The doubleness, here, is not all-consuming, nor does it reflect the multiple and competing epistemologies birthed in the New World. But it nonetheless engenders a theoretical construct in and through which the racially constructed self and group might strive toward an unknowing self/group/human that transgresses and troubles social and political norms, as Du Bois noted in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). Reflective deliberation, then, makes a sharp hermeneutical turn toward self/group transformation.

Put differently: socially constructed norms, at the individual and institutional level, undergo substantive and ongoing critical interrogation. They do so because knowledge is contingent and always insufficiently temporal for adjudicating evil, suffering, and oppression. And yet, Cannon argues, the contingency of knowledge engenders within womanist ethics ongoing efforts to “debunk, unmask, and disentangle” ideals that seek to idealize rather than inform or characterize.⁸ In the material sense, reflective deliberation is the embodiment of Higginbotham’s counter-public spheres, where texts like the Bible, sermons, singing, and exhortations are performative tools designed to affirm, cajole, censure, and transform. At this meta-ethical level, we are duty-bound within reflective deliberation to assume that our starting points are always under interrogation.

With this backdrop, public reckonings of African enslavement should lead to political outcomes that reflect the vastness of the nation’s technological capacity, political commitments, and economic wealth. We should also remain vigilant to the limits of our political and economic abilities to fix or correct the ongoing nature of antiblack suffering and oppression. Contrary to ongoing scholarly debates, we should be suspicious of reinventing and retrieving existing conceptual schemes such as social death, Negro problems, respectability politics, fungibility, and the slave. The constructs are helpful and necessary and should be appreciated for their significant role in shaping Black political thought. However, they are sources of inspiration, rather than binding contractual categories. We are charged with building new political imaginaries reflective of the struggles we face.

Michelle Alexander’s work is a case in point. Her book, The New Jim Crow, handed us a necessary conceptual tool for explaining new dimensions of the prison industrial complex. At issue is the extent to which our inherited conceptual schemes can explain the depths of Black suffering. For instance, George Floyd’s cry for his deceased mother before his subsequent murder in 2020 by a white police officer triggered global multiracial, intergenerational, and interreligious condemnation and protests against police brutality. The cry, “Mama!” transgressed, albeit momentarily, the boundaries of the familiar, urging witnesses to attend to the stranger, the Samaritan, as it were. Reflective deliberation seeks to engender the same spirit of imagination and mobilization. It seeks to reconcile moral inquiry and political engagement to make both theoretically robust and relevant.

Debates on reparations date back to the civil War when General William T. Sherman issued a special order for 40 acres and a mule to be given to soon-to-be emancipated African Americans. During Reconstruction, Senator Charles Sumner and Congressman Thaddeus Stevens of Pennsylvania argued for “land redistribution” to the formerly enslaved.⁹ Blacks also initiated their own legal efforts for compensation of unpaid labor a half century earlier, in 1783. For example, 80-year-old Belinda, a free woman in Boston, sued her former enslaver for unpaid earnings. Abolitionist David Walker also called for restitution and compensation in his 1829 Appeal.¹⁰

The mid-twentieth century witnessed a firestorm of calls for reparations too. Members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and scholars and activists such as Angela Davis, Stokely Carmichael, A. Philip Randolph, Martin Luther King, Jr., Preston Williams, and Charles Ogletree called for reparations in a variety of forms, ranging from the abolition of capital punishment to a guaranteed minimum wage and annual income.¹¹ James Forman’s 1969 Black Manifesto is the best-known religiously inspired argument for reparations. Forman called for $500 million for Black institutions and organizations from “Christian white churches and Jewish synagogues.” At the federal level, the late Congressman John Conyers’s bill to create a commission to study reparations for slavery and segregation was introduced to Congress in 1989 and has been widely used ever since to support nationwide commissions on the matter.

The debates on reparations have teetered between examining the moral culpability of whites and the political consequences of individuals and corporations benefiting and profiting, respectively, from past and present Black enslavement, exploitation, and oppression. Long before Charles Mills’s acclaimed The Racial Contract, Bernard Boxill asserted two important claims about the obligation of whites to make reparation in a liberal society: First, that whites benefited from a social contract designed to benefit them at the expense of marginalized groups. Second, that individual whites owe reparations “even [if] they have been merely passive recipients of benefits” and rewards.¹² Here is an intriguing use of moral inquiry in which the violation of the ideal social contract, not necessarily the crimes against the enslaved and exploited, seem to be the motivating factors for reparation. Boxill distinguishes between compensation and reparation. Compensation, he says, is due immediately after an injustice has occurred. Reparation, for Boxill, may be offered to rectify a past injustice. It is also an acknowledgment of a historical transgression: “The case for reparation to black and colonial people depends precisely on the fact that such people have been reduced to their present condition by a history of injustice.” The evidence of injustice is an acknowledgment of wrongdoing. Boxill notes that by it “the injurer implies that the injured has been treated in a manner that befits him.”¹³ Put differently, the apology acknowledges the “equal” political standing of both parties. In an ideal setting, this move is noteworthy.

However, the early Du Bois reminds us of an alarming social norm: that the Negro’s plight is not contingent on social and economic barriers per se. Instead, as Lewis R. Gordon argues, within a white supremacist society the Negro is the problem—as someone whom this white society deems to be innately inferior, inadequate, and desperately in need of discipline. The discipline here is in line with what Anthony Pinn calls “rituals of reference,” which, through violence, reinforce Black criminality and the dire need to subdue and subsequently kill Black and Brown bodies. Afro-pessimist thinkers like Frank Wilderson III implicitly extend Pinn’s argument and suggest something more alarming: that antiblack violence is the source of American ingenuity, a necessary act to sustain and reproduce the nation’s political economy.

The endemic nature of Black suffering and death, scholars like Wilderson might suggest, fosters the third shift in debates on reparation. This move focuses on reparation as a tool to transform society without moral inquiry. Scholar-activists such as Robin D. G. Kelley, Angela Davis, and Bryan Stevenson advocate such a move. Indeed, Kelley notes:

If we think of reparation as part of a broad strategy to radically transform society—redistributing wealth, creating a democratic and caring public culture, exposing the ways capitalism and slavery produced massive inequality—then the ongoing struggle for reparations holds enormous promise for revitalizing movements for social justice.¹⁴

Transforming policing, prison abolition, and mass incarceration, especially of juveniles, are additional critical sites of engagement within a model of reparation that is fundamentally based on social transformation. Critics, of course, will raise deep concerns about the political viability of any form of reparation, and especially one that threatens the current political economy. Such reservations should remind us of two points: First, that counterarguments are needed both to sustain ongoing deliberations and to avoid falling prey to a tyrannical charismatic leader or dangerously rigid political imaginary. Second, that the model I am proposing is not designed to take us to a promised land; instead, it encourages ongoing struggle and reflection that does not end until we die.

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s acclaimed religious art is a reminder of the ethical limits of our struggles. An early black-and-white painting of Judas was discovered by art historian Jeffrey Richmond-Moll a few years ago in Tanner’s archives at the Smithsonian. In the painting, Judas is on his knees, back straight, looking up. Wearing a turban, this rendering of Judas defies depictions of him as a self-consuming traitor. Tanner humanizes Judas, portraying him in a “pose usually associated with the return of the Prodigal Son,” art historian Milly Heyd writes.¹⁵ She suggests the sketch denotes Tanner’s ongoing belief that he had betrayed his people by spending most of his adult life in France. The price of international success had, I suggest, been tainted by the limits of his artistic moral inquiry. His success failed to materialize a political imaginary, one that could upend the terrains of race and religion.

Tanner assumed he would discover his emancipation through art. Many of us assume we will earn our progressive badges in statements of regret, social protests, and public reckonings. In those noble acts, we nonetheless fail to articulate a political imaginary, which demands sustained attention to the political economy and social structures.

Tanner leaves us with a stinging question: At what price will we betray the people who need our talents to help them fight for reparation? In the aforementioned address to the Harvard Class of 2021, Ruth J. Simmons (then the president of Prairie View A&M University) raised a similar question to the graduating class. Standing on the grounds of Prairie View, the former plantation that enslaved 400 African descendants, she was both erudite and homiletic as she challenged them:

I’ve come to ask you who graduate today what you are prepared to do to acknowledge and address the historic biases and inequities that so many continue to experience. Will your actions point us in a more uplifting direction? For just as we recount the moral bankruptcy of those who cruelly enslaved others, we also tell the story of those who are equally guilty because they refused to challenge the practice of slavery. In the future, the history of these times will reveal both what we do and what we failed to do to address the unjust treatment of marginalized groups. Among all that you will have learned at Harvard, I hope that the consciousness of your responsibility in the struggle for equality remains with you. While the legacy of enslavement, racism, discrimination, and exclusion still influences so much of contemporary attitudes, we must never conclude that it is too late to overcome such a legacy, for it is never, never too late to do justice. . . . Today, you earned your laurels as a scholar, but taking up the cause of justice, you will earn your laurels as a human being.¹⁶

Simmons’s sermonic call beckons the listener to pursue justice in and beyond familiar political terrains, and to be circumscribed by the political obligation of responsibility for the individual and collective as well as for the nation. She reframes the project from one calling for an apology for past crimes against African enslavement and instead sketches a political imaginary punctuated by moral inquiry and executed by doing justice.

Tanner and Simmons both appeal to the political imaginary through the dread and destruction of Black life. Their visions create the possible conditions for structural, institutional, individual, and group change through financial and political mediation. This is the necessary spirit of an ethics of reparation.

Terrence L. Johnson is Charles G. Adams Professor of African American Religious Studies at HDS. He is the author of Blacks and Jews in America: An Invitation to Dialogue (Georgetown University Press, 2022, with Jacques Berlinerblau); We Testify with Our Lives: How Religion Transformed Radical Thought from Black Power to Black Lives Matter (Columbia University Press, 2021); and Tragic Soul-Life: W.E.B. Du Bois and the Moral Crisis Facing American Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2012). He also serves as co-editor of the Duke University Press Series “Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People.”