A review by wchereads
Reparations and Reparatory Justice: Past, Present, and Future by Mary Frances Berry, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, V. P. Franklin

challenging informative

2.5

Thank you to #netgalley for providing the e-arc. This book was published on April 9th, 2024.

While this book had good information on: 
  • how racism absolutely did NOT end even though "legalized slavery" ended (and on that note: slavery never really ended either, it just took on different forms)
  • how institutions like banks and universities benefited from slavery and they, along with megarichs, should be the first to foot the cost of reparations, contrary to opponents of reparation claiming that it would be yet another taxpayer burden (like we actual taxpayers got a say in where our taxes go? I WANT my taxes to go towards free school lunches not fucking bombs)
  • the history of African Americans fighting for their rights and deserved payments + how the US government tried their absolute hardest to weasel out of their obligations
  • discussions and suggestions of infrastructures that reparations can fund

it wasn't exactly an engaging book and reading it was an frustrating experience. Part of it was due to how technical the language is, though this is not a point of criticism, just something I'd like to point out to new readers.

The book is separated to two parts: part I consists of speeches and documents and part II consists of articles and essays. Part I can be a bit dry due to the nature of those text, but I was also annoyed by the amount of whole lot of nothing languages like thanking the United Nations and the US American president for the progresses made and what an honour it was to have them here and whatever. Those can be easily edited out and nothing of essence would've been lost. Part II was definitely more interesting to read.

I also think part I could benefit from moving Chapter 9 and 10 to the front as those could be good for readers unfamiliar with reparation to go through first (it's me, I'm readers).

Have I mentioned how editing could make this book better? WHY are ISRAEL and REPARATION JUSTICE/SUCCESS mentioned in the same paragraph? TWICE? IN THIS CURRENT CLIMATE? I am not pretending to be a very informed person, since I myself am not educated until after October 2023. But IN TWENTY TWENTY FOUR? I am going to hope that this text is ARC only and the published version does NOT normalize the so-called state of Israel. 

Some ableist words have also been used in this book - namely the r-word (as a verb) and "crippling". Yes I know the r-word has other meanings but at this point let's just not. There are other words one can use to mean "going backwards" or "preventing progress". And instead of "crippling", might I suggest "devastating", "undermining", "undercutting", or "defunding"?