Amos Wilson. Lindy West. Abhijit Naskar.
Justice requires not only the ceasing and desisting of injustice but also requires either punishment or reparation for injuries and damages inflicted for prior wrongdoing. The essence of justice is the redistribution of gains earned through the perpetration of injustice. If restitution is not made and reparations not instituted to compensate for prior injustices, those injustices are in effect rewarded. And the benefits such rewards conferred on the perpetrators of injustice will continue to “draw interest,” to be reinvested, and to be passed on to their children, who will use their inherited advantages to continue to exploit the children of the victims of the injustices of their ancestors. Consequently, injustice and inequality will be maintained across the generations as will their deleterious social, economic, and political outcomes. Amos Wilson.
When faced with a choice between an incriminating truth or a flattering lie, America’s ruling class has been choosing the lie for four hundred years. White Americans hunger for plausible deniability and swaddle themselves in it and always have – for the sublime relief of deferred responsibility, the soft violence of willful ignorance, the barbaric fiction of rugged individualism. The worst among us have deployed it to seduce and herd the vast, complacent center [eg]: ‘It’s okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. You earned everything you have. Benefiting from genocide is fine if it was a long time ago. The scientists will figure out climate change’. Lindy West.
We have to, not should, but have to, get ourselves involved in the system known as politics. In order to clean the sewage, you must get down in the sewage and get your hands dirty. The cleaning cannot be done by simply wishing for somebody else to take action. You, my brave soldier, have to get your hands dirty – that too against all odds. Abhijit Naskar.
