As part of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology Colloquium Series, Tasseli McKay presents "The Time is (Never) Right for Reparations."

"America's long history of unreconstructed racial atrocity demands a peculiar relationship to time. For more than three centuries, debates over reparations to Black Americans have raged in courts and legislatures and across the social sciences, humanities, and the law. Nowhere are the oddities of American time on richer display then in the temporal vitiation of reparations proposals, framed as either far ahead of their time or far too late to be relevant."

"The time for reparations, it seems, will never be right. But what if the time is now? Bringing together concepts of time and haunting from sociology, anthropology, and literature with a new and painstaking economic accounting of the damages of mass incarceration in Black communities, I propose reparations as an essential strategy for grappling with the simultaneity of past and present. Based on the massive, definite, and readily quantifiable burdens that mass captivity has imposed on contemporary Black Americans, often quietly shunted to women and kept from view by their invisible labour, I argue for a multi-trillion-dollar federal reparations package."