Quantification and the Claims for Reparations for Slavery in the United States

Hannah Judson, SUNY Stony Brook University

Despite 185 years since the abolition of racialized chattel slavery in the United States, the federal government of the US has been reluctant to acknowledge the legacy of slavery. While local governments and institutions have provided piecemeal reparations, broader claims to reparations at the national level have gone unfulfilled. Academic intervention on the issue of reparations is varied: economists and economic sociologists have provided many models for calculating the costs of reparations; legal scholars have constructed the legal and moral case for providing reparations; and social movements scholars have traced the history of the push for reparations and social movement mobilization around the issue. Brought together, I argue that these scholarships leave us with an incomplete understanding of how and why particular claims to reparations go unfulfilled. Drawing on the literature on valuation and commensuration, I begin exploring how the process of quantification works within the realm of claims for reparations for slavery in the United States.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 60. Economic Mobility