In 2019 Evanston, Illinois passed the first local reparations program for Black Americans in the United States. This legislation has been joined by other localized legislative efforts across the U.S. though the federal-level push for reparations remains stagnant. Evanston serves as a notable case study illustrating how reparations initiatives can be conducted within a local government framework. Drawing on 11 interviews with city council members and other stakeholders in Evanston and an analysis of over 200 government documents spanning from 2018 to 2020, this study unveils the intricacies of executing reparations models in local policy. This study finds that previously developed reparations models are implemented in overlapping ways to mitigate potential legal challenges. Additionally, the discourses utilized by stakeholders are shaped by colorblind racism, the white racial frame, and post-racial attitudes to rationalize the adoption of reparations within the city’s jurisdiction. This article contributes to reparations and the sociological body of literature by addressing the implementation of the localized political discourse and subsequent reparations models.
BellJ. M.HartmannD. (2007). Diversity in everyday discourse: The cultural ambiguities and consequences of “Happy Talk”. American Sociological Review, 72(6), 895–914. https://doi.org/10.1177/000312240707200603
3.
BittkerB. I.BrooksR. L. (2007). The Constitutionality of Black Reparations Part 2: Law, Citizenship, and the State. Redress for Historical Injustices in the United States: On Reparations for Slavery, Jim Crow, and Their Legacies, 1, 143–159.
CraemerT.CraemerT. H. O. M. A. S. (2019). Comparative analysis of reparations for the holocaust and for the transatlantic slave trade. The Review of Black Political Economy, 45, 299–324. https://doi.org/10.1177/00346446198362632018.
10.
DarityW.FrankD. (2003). The economics of reparations. American Economic Review, 93(2), 326–329.
11.
DarityW. A.MullenA. K. (2020). From here to equality: Reparations for black Americans in the twenty-first century. University of North Carolina Press.
12.
DavisA. M. (2014). Apologies, reparations, and the continuing legacy of the European slave trade in the United States on JSTOR. Journal of Black Studies, 45, 271–286. https://www.jstor.org/stable/24572848
13.
DavisJ. (2020). The public use of reparations: How land-based reparations can satisfy the public use requirement of the takings clause. Minnesota Law Review, 104(4), 2105–2156.
GillR. (2000). Discourse analysis. In BauerM.GaskellG. (Eds.), Qualitative researching with text, image and sound (pp. 173–190). Sage Publications Ltd.
17.
HanssonS. (2018). Defensive semiotic strategies in government: A multimodal study of blame avoidance. Social Semiotics, 28(4), 472–493. https://doi.org/10.1080/10350330.2017.1334358
MunfordC. J. (2007). Reparations: Strategic considerations for Black Americans. In MartinM. T.YaquintoM. (Eds) Redress for historical injustices in the United States. Duke University Press.
PowellC. M. (2018). The rhetorical allure of post-racial process discourse and the democratic myth. Utah Law Review, 2018(3), 523–577.
30.
RobinsonS. (2018). A racial reckoning of a progressive ideology in public discourse. International Journal of Communication (Online), 12, 4689+.
31.
RobinsonM. D. R.ThompsonJ. (2020). Evanston Policies and Practices Directly Affecting the African American Community, 1900—1960 (and Present). Reparations Stakeholder Authority of Evanston.
