Slave descendants’ views regarding national policies on reparations: A Martinican perspective

Abstract

French

The present study concerned the views regarding the acceptability of possible national policies related to slavery by people whose families were directly affected in the past. It was conducted in the island of Martinique (an overseas French department), and 298 descendants of slaves participated. Three qualitatively different personal positions were found; these positions were designated Skeptics (28% of the sample), Reparationists (35%) and Undetermined (37%). For people holding a Skeptic position, nothing meaningful can be done to repair the horrors of slavery. However a national policy that includes public acknowledgment of past wrongs can be considered as tolerable provided it is accompanied by material compensations. For people holding a Reparationist position, any national policy that involves public acknowledgment of past wrongs is considered as acceptable, whether or not it is accompanied by material compensation. Policies of amnesia and/or exaltation of the past or policies that involve only material compensations are viewed as not acceptable. In addition reparation policies are considered as more acceptable in cases where socio-economic integration of slave descendants has been achieved than in cases where it has not. For people holding an Undetermined position, slavery and the slave trade are part of the deep past; as a result, it is difficult to have strong views about it or about related policies. These three personal positions were related to educational level and religious involvement in a meaningful way. In particular, undetermined people were less educated and more religious than others.

Keywords

Martinique national policy reparations slave trade slavery

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Anderson

(2008) Unified Social Cognition. New York: Psychology Press.

Anderson

(2013) Unified psychology based on three laws of information integration. Review of General Psychology 17(2):125–132.

Barkan

(2001) The Guilt of Nations: Restitution and negotiating historical injustices. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Berg

(2009) The debate over reparations for slavery. In: Berg

Schaefer

(eds) Historical Justice in International Perspective. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 69–91.

Blatz

Philpot

(2010) On the outcomes of intergroup apologies: A review. Social and Personality Psychology Compass 4(11): 995–1007.

Campo

Mastin

Frazer

(2004) Predicting and explaining public opinion regarding U.S. slavery reparations. Howard Journal of Communications 15: 115–130.

Camus

(2006) The commemoration of slavery in France and the emergence of a black political consciousness. The European Legacy: Toward new paradigms 11(6): 647–655.

Camus

Munoz Sastre

Sorum

Mullet

(2014) French people’s positions regarding national policies about illicit drugs: A preliminary study. Social Indicators Research 118(12): 1191–1204.

Cooper

(2012) From slavery to genocide: The fallacy of debt in reparations discourse. Journal of Black Studies 43(2): 107–126.

10.

Cottias

(2000) Le triomphe de l’oubli ou la mémoire tronquée? In: Devoir de Mémoire-Martinique Committee (ed.) De l’esclavage aux réparations. Paris: Karthala, 95–103.

11.

Craemer

(2009) Framing reparations. Policy Studies Journal 37(2): 275–298.

12.

Cunningham

(2004) Prisoners of the Japanese and the politics of apology: A battle over history and memory. Journal of Contemporary History 39(4): 561–567.

13.

Dawson

Popoff

(2004) Reparations: Justice and greed in Black and White. Du Bois Review 1(1): 47–91.

14.

Draper

(2010) The Price of Emancipation: Slave-ownership, compensation, and British society at the end of slavery. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

15.

Eltis

(2001) The volume and structure of the Transatlantic slave trade: A reassessment. William and Mary Quarterly 58(1): 17–46.

16.

Geggus

(1989) Sex ratio, age and ethnicity in the Atlantic slave trade: Data from French shipping and plantation records. Journal of African History 30(1): 23–44.

17.

Giner-Sorolla

Castano

Espinosa

Brown

(2008) Shame expressions reduce the recipient’s insult from outgroup reparations. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 44(6): 519–526.

18.

Gueye

(2011) Memory at issue: On slavery and the slave trade among Black French. Canadian Journal of African Studies 45(1): 77–107.

19.

Hofmans

Mullet

(2013) Towards unveiling individual differences in different stages of information processing: A clustering-based approach. Quality and Quantity 47(6): 555–564.

20.

Huffington Post (2003) Obama opposes slavery reparation. Available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/02/obama-opposes-slavery-rep_n_116506.html.

21.

INSEE (2012) France in figures. Available at: http://www.insee.fr/fr/pdf/france-en-bref-2012.pdf.

22.

INSEE (2013) France in figures. Available at: http://www.insee.fr/fr/pdf/france-en-bref-2013.pdf.

23.

Johnston Conover

Searing

Crewe

(2002) The deliberative potential of political discussion. British Journal of Political Science 32(3): 21–62.

24.

Katznelson

(2005) When Affirmative Action Was White: An untold story of racial inequality in twentieth-century America. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.

25.

Kpanake

Mullet

(2011) Judging the acceptability of amnesties. Conflict Resolution Quarterly 28(3): 291–313.

26.

Licata

Klein

Gély

(2007) Mémoire des conflits, conflits de mémoire: Une approche psychosociale et philosophique du rôle de la mémoire collective dans les processus de réconciliation intergroupe. Social Science Information 46(2): 563–589.

27.

López López

Pineda Marín

Murcia León

. (2012) Forgiving the perpetrators of violence: Colombian people’s positions. Social Indicators Research 114(3): 287–301.

28.

López López

Roa Bocarejo

Roa Peralta

. (2016) Prohibition, regulation or free market: A mapping of Colombian people’s perspectives regarding national drug policies. Social Indicators Research, on line first. doi: 10.1007/s11205–016–1366–6.

29.

Lovejoy

(2011) Transformations in Slavery: A history of slavery in Africa. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

30.

Löytömäki

(2012) Law and memory. Griffith Law Review 21(1): 1–22.

31.

McGary

(2003) Achieving democratic equality: Forgiveness, reconciliation, and reparations. Journal of Ethics 7(2): 93–113.

32.

McWhorter

(2001) Losing the Race: Self-sabotage in Black America. New York, NY: Harper.

33.

Miller

(2008) The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and culture of the slave trade. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

34.

Mukashema

Mullet

(2015) Attribution of guilt to offspring of perpetrators of the genocide: Rwandan people’s perspectives. Conflict Resolution Quarterly 33(1): 75–98.

35.

Mullet

Nann

Kadima Kadiangandu

Neto

. (2010) The granting of forgiveness in an intergroup context: African and Asian social representations. Social Science Information 49(2): 195–214.

36.

Neto

Pinto

Mullet

(2013) The acceptability of military humanitarian interventions. International Perspectives in Psychology 2(1): 73–84.

37.

New York Times (1998) Clinton in Africa: The overview. In Uganda, Clinton Expresses Regret on Slavery in US. Available at: http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/25/world/clinton-africa-overview-uganda-clinton-expresses-regret-slavery-us.html.

38.

Pétré-Grenouilleau

(2004) Les Traites Négrières: Essai d’histoire globale. Paris: Gallimard.

39.

Pettigrove

(2004) Unapologetic forgiveness. American Philosophical Quarterly 41(3): 187–204.

40.

Philpot

Hornsey

(2008) What happens when groups say sorry: The effect of intergroup apologies on their recipients. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34(5): 474–487.

41.

Quirk

(2014) The Anti-Slavery Project: From the slave trade to human trafficking. Philadelphia, PA: Pennsylvania University Press.

42.

Rodriguez

(2007) Slavery in the United States. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

43.

Schepers

Hofmans

(2009) TwoMP: A MATLAB graphical user interface for two-mode partitioning. Behavior Research Methods 41(2): 507–514.

44.

Shriver

(1995) An Ethics for Enemies: Forgiveness in Politics. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

45.

Tetlock

Armor

Peterson

(1994) The slavery debate in antebellum America: Cognitive style, value conflict, and the limits of compromise. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 66(1): 115–126.

46.

Thomas

(2006) The Slave Trade: History of the Atlantic slave trade, 1440–1870. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

47.

Tibbles

(2008) Facing slavery’s past: The bicentenary of the abolition of the British slave. Trade Slavery & Abolition: A journal of slave and post-slave studies 29(2): 293–303.

48.

Van Bueren

(2004) Slavery as piracy – The legal case for reparations for slavery. In: Walden

(ed.) Racism and Human Rights. Dordrecht: Springer, 41–53.

49.

Vergès

(2010) There are no Blacks in France: Fanonian discourse, ‘the Dark Night of Slavery’ and the French civilizing mission reconsidered. Theory, Culture & Society 27(2): 91–111.

50.

Walvin

(2007) A Short History of Slavery. London: Penguin.

51.

Washington Post (2008) House issues an apology for slavery. Available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/29/AR2008072902279.html.

52.

Winbush

(2003) Should America Pay? Slavery and the raging debate on reparations. New York, NY: Harper.

53.

Wohl

MJA

Hornsey

Bennett

(2012) Why group apologies succeed and fail: Intergroup forgiveness and the role of primary and secondary emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 102(2): 306–322.

54.

Yamamoto

Chon

Izumi

. (2001) Race, Rights and Reparation: Law and the Japanese American internment. New York, NY: Aspen Law & Business.

55.

Yamamoto

Hye Yun Kim

Holden

(2007) American reparations theory at the crossroads. California Western Law Review 44(1): 1–85.