Atonement

A precursor of the atonement model, this early and elegant articulation of slave redress gave way to a more earthly demand for it in the years following the Civil War. Whether centered on compensation through the tort model or apology under the atonement model, the black redress movement is an attempt by black Americans and others to secure redress from the federal or state governments for stolen capital on behalf of the slaves, free blacks, and their descendants.

While both the tort model and the atonement model seek redress from the government for the harms slavery and Jim Crow have caused to the slaves, free blacks, and their descendants, the tort model has a secondary purpose, which falls beyond the scope of the atonement model. This is the attempt to seek nonapologetic redress through litigation from private parties who profited from slavery directly. Corporations that have profited from slave labor and wealthy white families whose fortunes were built on the backs of blacks are the main targets of this pursuit. Many blacks today can, in fact, trace their roots back to specific plantation families whose descendants are alive today.

There are no assurances that the museum will be built on the Mall, "which sends the message that the story of black Americans is ancillary to the central narrative of American history," and the government is obligated to pay only 50 percent of the cost, with the balance coming from private donations. Most important, from the perspective of atonement, there is no apology for slavery attached to the legislation.

When the German politician does not identify with the Jewish schoolteacher - when he does not see a common humanity - we have the makings of the Holocaust. But when he does identify with her humanity, when he understands that people of different religious and racial backgrounds have equal moral and legal standing, he is not likely to treat her in barbaric ways. A common morality provides a basis for mutual identification between victim and perpetrator. If this common bond is breached by the commission of an atrocity, the wrongdoer has at the very least a moral obligation to atone for his acts. It is through the process of atonement that the common bond of humanity is restored.

The perpetrator reclaims his position in the community of moral beings through apology and reparations. The similarities between the redress movement leading up to the Civil Liberties Act and redress movements in other parts of the world, including South Africa , Japan , and Australia, plus other domestic redress movements, such as movements by Native Americans and Hawaiians, are too important to overlook. These movements are less about money than about atonement - apology plus reparations.

Properly speaking, redress received under the tort model is not a true "reparation." This term has a very specific meaning that is inextricably tied to the idea of atonement. A reparation makes an apology believable. It turns the rhetoric of apology into a meaning, material reality.