![]() ![]() ![]() We should locate the origin of reparations in the moment when this violence is not yet a lingua franca and its reversibility is possible: when that which should not have been possible is at the same time that which could not ever have been possible. Bringing the question of reparations back to its origins is necessary in order to address them outside of the vicious circle of imperial violence. The deferral of reparations, though, is not only strategic but part of the imperial onto-epistemological order that makes victims’ descendants who are asking for reparations appear to turn toward the past, while perpetrators’ descendants congratulate themselves on looking forward to the future. ![]() When in May 1969, James Forman interrupted the Sunday morning communion at New York’s Riverside Church in order to read a few demands from the “Black Manifesto,” he ended with a comment on temporality, stating, “Our patience is thin, time is running out we have been slaves too long.” Responses mostly focus on how to quell claimants’ urgency and buy the time necessary for these demands to appear again as if they come after the violence. Every once in a while, like a seasonal phenomenon, responses have to be given about reparations claims, as if they’re a ticking bomb to be defused. ![]()
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