Episode 67, 48 min listen
Join me as we talk with Darryl Heller, the chair of the South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission. We will discuss how the commission is bringing a restorative justice lens to its approach to reparations in South Bend, Indiana. This conversation offers practical and insightful ways to consider the very important and complex subject of reparations at a local level.
AUDIO PLAYER
You can access this episode wherever you listen to podcasts via our pod.link.
ADDITIONAL REFERENCES
Learn more about the work of the South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission.
Explore the history, attend an event, or plan a visit to the Indiana University Civil Rights Heritage Center.
Read Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair by Danielle Sered.
In her book, Danielle Sered talks about her work at Common Justice. Common Justice develops and advances solutions to violence that transform the lives of those harmed and foster racial equity without relying on incarceration.
Learn more about restorative justice work in South Bend and explore available resources at the Restorative Justice Collaborative Hub.
DARRYL'S BIO
Dr. Darryl Heller is the director of the IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center and an assistant professor of Women’s and Gender Studies. He received his BA in Philosophy from the College of Charleston, MA in American Studies from Columbia University, and his PhD in History from the University of Chicago. While living in New York City he co-founded the Amistad Institute, a nonprofit organization with the mission to design, develop, and implement educational programs for inner-city communities. He currently teaches and facilitates discussions on the topics of racism and white supremacy, the history of racial construction, and the intersection of race and gender. Dr. Heller serves on the board of several community organizations focused on economic equity and restorative justice, and chairs the South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
-Introduction
Ame Sanders 0:11
This is the State of Inclusion podcast, where we explore topics at the intersection of equity, inclusion, and community. In each episode, we meet people who are changing their communities for the better, and we discover actions that each of us can take to improve our own communities. I'm Ame Sanders. Welcome.
Over the years, I've personally struggled with how to consider the tough and complex challenge of reparations. As a result, I've barely touched on this subject in past interviews, with no episode fully focused on reparations. My guest in this episode offers so much practical wisdom on how to both think about reparations and proceed at a local level. I hope this episode proves as helpful and insightful for you as it did for me.
Before we start, a small aside. You know, our guests freely share their stories with us, so we make the podcast, our newsletter, and related content free as well. However, if you'd like to support us, grow our work, and help offset some of our production costs, you can find a link to our Support Us page in the show notes. We're happy that you found us, grateful that you listen, and thankful for your support.
So today, we are happy to welcome Darryl Heller. Darryl is the director of the Civil Rights Heritage Center at Indiana University in South Bend, Indiana, where he is an assistant professor. Darryl also chairs the 13-member Reparatory Justice Commission for the City of South Bend. Welcome Darryl. Thanks so much for joining me.
Darryl Heller 1:59
Yes, and thank you so much for having me.
-Indiana University South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center
Ame Sanders 2:02
Wow, there are so many topics we can talk about, and we'll cover a lot here today. But let's start with your work at the Civil Rights Heritage Center. Tell us a little bit about the center and what it does, what you offer the students and what you offer the community.
Darryl Heller 2:15
That's a great place to start. The IU South Bend Civil Rights Heritage Center is located in what was a former indoor swimming pool, the natatorium that was built in 1922. Despite the fact, however, that it was South Bend's first municipal or public swimming pool, it fully excluded African Americans for the first 14 years of its existence and then segregated them for the next 14 years. So, for almost 30 years, African Americans either could not use that facility, though they paid for it through their taxes, or were segregated by day--able to use it only one day a week. It was the activism and insistence of the African American community and their allies that continued to push for inclusion so that when it closed in 1978 and it sat as an abandoned building for almost another 30 years, the community decided that this was one of the remaining symbols of the local civil rights movement and the civil rights struggle here in South Bend.
Through a collective effort with IU South Bend, with the City of South Bend, with community organizations and activists, it was decided to turn this space into a Civil Rights Center that now functions on multiple levels within the community. Though it's affiliated with IU South Bend, it really serves as the bridge between the university and the broader South Bend community, particularly for communities that have been historically marginalized. So, it functions not only as a museum, as a space to preserve that history of struggle, but it also serves as a community space. Out of it we operate a fully circulating library that's available to the broader community that has text and books and information on African American history, LGBTQ studies and women's studies, Indigenous studies, Latinx studies. Again, voices and the perspectives of people who have historically been marginalized or silenced.
But we also use the space as a community space, where community organizations hold their meetings there. We do lectures. We do panel discussions on both local and national issues. I'm really trying to bring together broad sections of the community in conversation with one another to address the issues that continue to plague us, particularly as they relate to civil rights and social justice.
-Restorative Justice Concepts
Ame Sanders 5:00
One of the areas of your work that interested me most was your work around restorative justice and also reparations. Since you're leading the South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission, I wondered if we could talk about those concepts a little bit before we jump into what the Commission is doing. Maybe you can just talk a little bit about how you see restorative justice and reparations and the intersection of those things.
Darryl Heller 5:28
Yeah no. That's a really important question because the discussion of reparations that's kind of been in the national ether, pretty much since Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote his "The Case for Reparations," I think really brought it to the forefront. We've seen both pushback against that, and we've seen a lot of folks kind of grappling with this issue. What is often thought of as reparations is a payment for harms that have been done in the past, particularly as it relates to the African American community. More broadly to people of color, but we were focusing particularly on the African American experience.
I think that that perspective of reparations as a payout or reparations as a one-off compensation is a narrow understanding of reparations. I think of reparations much more embedded within the restorative justice framework, where restorative justice isn't just looking at compensation for harm that's been done or for an injustice that's been done to someone.
Restorative justice is really looking at how do we repair harm and how do we heal from it? And that's not just healing for the person who has been harmed, but healing for the person who did the harm or the perpetrator. Even more importantly, for the larger community. Because harm doesn't happen just between individuals, it really affects a much broader swath of people, including those related to those who are harmed or who perpetrated and to the community around both of those parties.
-A Process for Reparations
So, reparation is but one step, in my perspective of a restorative process, where before we can even repair harm through reparations, we have to identify the harm itself. We have to know what it is we're actually addressing.
So, the first thing is recognizing it and acknowledging that a harm has happened. Then there needs to be some, not just acknowledgment--well, both recognition of the harm and then acknowledgment, ideally by the person or entity that perpetrated the harm. The acknowledgment that they harmed someone and take ownership and responsibility for it. That's part of accountability, which is an important part of this process as well. In the best situation, which is they actually expressed some remorse or in acknowledging harm, there's an apology like, "I'm sorry," or "I didn't mean to hurt you," or "I recognize that I hurt you and I'm really sorry that that happened." That's a part of the healing. That's the recognition.
I know you were going to just mention this, but the brokenness that harm creates. It breaks relationships. Once harm has been acknowledged, then there's some kind of repair. The question is, how do you fix it? My son's mother is an elementary school teacher. When the little kids hurt each other, they hit each other, and one kid is crying, and the other is like standing in the corner with their head down and looking down; it's not about punishing the kid. For the kids that hit the other one, the question you ask them is, "How are you going to fix this? You did something to someone, and we need to fix it. So let's together, work out what that fix will look like and what it needs to happen."
Ultimately, and ideally, who leads that direction of repair is the person who's been harmed, the person who has had something taken away from them, whether it was property, or whether it was just even their own dignity in a harm that happens. They need to they need to lead the repair or at least be the leading voice in helping to shape what the repair would look like. And by repair I mean, you know, very much the same thing as reparations. How do we repair that harm? But that only comes after those first steps have been taken.
Then there's a final step, which is that we acknowledge the harm, we work to repair it, and then what do we need to do to make sure that that doesn't happen again? For me, that's the most important part because the non-reoccurrence is--some describe it as non-recurring, some describe it as preventative, like transformation--and I think that last step of how do we make sure it doesn't happen again is part of the transformative part of restorative justice and therefore reparations itself.
Ame Sanders 10:33
So, that is really a great description of the process and it makes me think about how challenging this work must be. Because, as you said, many in the different communities you were talking about said they only talk about payment, monetary payment for this. That in itself is difficult enough to consider because the debt is enormous. But when you put it in perspective of all of those steps, it is a much bigger process. So, maybe you can talk a little bit then about what you guys are doing in South Bend and how you're tackling this?
-A Multi-Level Challenge
Darryl Heller 11:01
Yeah. Let me just say one other thing, particularly when it comes to reparations within the framework of restorative justice. Often, restorative justice is addressing harms that happen between individuals. When I talk about restorative justice, I actually mean two kinds of harm. One is that it happens between individuals, so the question of how to fix it is an important question to ask in this process. But then, people think of transformative justice as the kind of harm that happens through institutions, systems, and structures. Those aren't necessarily identifiable by individuals, but we can see the systemic harms that have been historically produced and that continue to perpetuate themselves and operate to the marginalization or oppression of individuals, but mostly of the groups.
So, when we think about racial harm, we can talk about it on multiple levels. We can talk about racial injustice and the history of racism, and white supremacy has been one of the bedrocks of our national structures and culture, and so on. So, we think of transformative justice, so the harms that happen to communities, and particularly in our case, what we're really trying to address is the harm that has historically been perpetrated against people of African descent. Historically, that's taken the form, beginning with slavery, all the way through Jim Crow, lynching, and the kind of racial violence that people of African descent experience throughout the nation.
It wasn't just located in the South, but it was a national phenomenon. All the way through the playout of Jim Crow, we kind of thought, or some had hoped, that the Civil Rights Movement would ameliorate or at least begin to repair that. But then the backlash that has happened, that we now see in our current political situation, political context, where we have a Supreme Court that argues that we live in a colorblind society now, though that's news to most of us. But, as well as the kind of rhetoric that we hear, some of it is directed at the border and immigration and who particularly is being targeted. But, there are multiple kinds of structures and systems that are perpetuating harm.
So, when we talk about the transformations that are necessary to ensure that those harms both stop and are not repeated in the future, we're talking about much bigger and complex responses and the kinds of reparations that are necessary, again, within the restorative justice framework, as you say, become much more complex. I think different communities around the country have been grappling with this in different ways.
For a minute, Evanston has had a particular response and I think that they have been the first community to actually take reparations and begin to make compensation. They've also come under attack. There's now currently a lawsuit based on the same colorblind rhetoric. I would say it's a tactic of white supremacy to thwart any kind of acknowledgment. We'll see how that plays out in that jurisdiction.
-The Commission, Early Days
But for us, we're kind of taking it very deliberately here in South Bend. Let me just say a word about how the commission itself was formed. The South Bend Reparatory Justice Commission really grew out of a resolution that one of the city council members submitted a year and a half ago now, in January or February of 2023. It wasn't a terribly well-written resolution, but it put the conversation of reparations into our community. In the common council--we call our city council a common council--but our common council kind of took that resolution and reworked it, and then reintroduced it in October of last year, October 2023, and put together a 13 member, Reparatory Justice Commission to look at what reparations could and should look like here in South Bend. One of the things about South Bend, it does have a fairly significant African American community. I forget the exact statistics, but we're roughly 26% of the population here in South Bend. And South Bend, like every other northern city and many other cities throughout the country, has a long history of racial segregation. The history of the natatorium being but one example of the kind of racial injustice and marginalization that took place. Both the residential segregation,, and also within education, within economic opportunities. The healthcare disparities within South Bend mirror the health disparities that are national as well as the wealth gap. These were all produced, not just by national policies. National policies kind of set a tone in one sense, but they were also constructed through active local actions, and local actors need to take responsibility or be accountable for this historical production that we are still living in the aftermath of.
So, the Commission had come together, and we spent the first couple of months just kind of building our own internal structure and really kind of figuring out what do we, as this particular Commission, mean by reparations. What is it that we're looking for? What are the areas that we need to be investigating? Then we spent the last six months doing public forums because again, within a restorative justice framework, it's those who have been most harmed who have who should have a voice and need to have a voice if real healing and repair is going to take place both in terms of identifying the harm and what the repair itself needs to be. So, we've held numerous public forums to invite community members to talk about their experience of racial injustice here in South Bend. And we're in a place where our charge is really local.
So we're not talking about slavery because slavery wasn't really a factor here in Indiana, and certainly not in the night in South Bend. But what we have heard is stories from people about not being able to purchase property because of being Black, being denied medical care or not given full medical services, or experiences in schools where they were marginalized and treated differently. Those are the kinds of stories that we're collecting.
We give ourselves an 18-month total timeline, where we spend the first year building our structure, having community input, and at the end of our first year to have a preliminary draft of the report. Then we would take that report, that preliminary or draft report, submitted back to the community, back to the city, and put it back out into the public to get more input. I have a full and final report with recommendations for repair and the kinds of transformations that need to happen to ensure that those harms that have happened in the past and are currently operative cease and don't continue to take place going forward. So, we hope to have that done by the summer of June 2025.
Ame Sanders 19:23
Wow, that's quite a quite a task that you've taken on, or your group has taken on. I think it's very interesting to have these public forums and community conversations, and very consistent with your view of restorative justice and understanding how people in the community who have been harmed or whose families have been harmed see that harm. It also is interesting that you've chosen to draw your circle around local actions, which seems more realistic for a city to take on because there obviously were harms that were perpetrated nationally, and on a broader scale. But, I love the way you said that the local actors need to take accountability for the local things that happened.
-Why a Singular Focus On African American Experience
One question I have for you though is how did you decide which group to focus on? Because many people we've already talked about, you know, immigrants, our Latinx community, our Native Americans and indigenous communities--what is the lens through which you're looking at this and which groups are you addressing?
Darryl Heller 20:37
Yeah, we're very specifically looking at the African American experience. The history of people of African descent in this country has a very particular history. Again, it was the only group that, over multiple generations, endured enslavement and dehumanization on a racial scale. It's really important, and our commission does acknowledge this--the first harms occurred against the Indigenous people. There's an absolute necessity and need for those harms to be addressed. But that's a different history than the history of African Americans. I think it's really important not to mush those harms as if they're all the same. I think for the integrity and dignity of those who have suffered that they really need to be disaggregated and taken in their own right. So, our focus is really the African American experience.
Let me say that I'm a historian by training, and one of the things that I think, or one of the reasons we're having this conversation today about reparations, is because this country, our society, and our culture has not done the first step of restorative justice. They haven't acknowledged the harm that's been perpetrated. There's no acknowledgment that slavery--and not just slavery, but the ideology that made racialized slavery a thing, which I would argue that the ideology is white supremacy--that that ideology has been an ongoing thread throughout the history of this country.
Some of my own research at the moment is looking at the early Continental Congress and the conversations that were happening in the compromises that embedded slavery, and not just slavery, racialized slavery into our Constitution that we haven't fully owned that. We've haven't fully acknowledged that and then the repercussions that have come from it. Then unless and until we acknowledge that and really kind of take ownership of it, I don't think that we can fully resolve the questions we're grappling with today still. So, the fact that slavery ended in 1865, we know that that morphed into Jim Crow.
So the question is, how do we as a nation even understand our founding words of "we, the people" or "all men are created equal" but that didn't mean universal inclusion? That the myth that's been perpetrated allows us to cover over and not be able to fully address the ways that we've fallen short of not just living up to those words but really acknowledging the full humanity of all the members of our body politic and all the members of our community and culture.
So, you see that replicated against immigrants and particularly south of our border. But I mean, there's a gender aspect to this. Women have been historically marginalized, and voices have been muted. That's another thing that I think that we have to acknowledge: the patriarchy of our society that continues to permeate much of the structures and institutions. I think we'll see some of that come out if the current election process, and we have a woman at the top of our ballot, and putting a woman of color at the top of our ballot will mean I think we'll see how far we've still yet to go in the responses to that.
-Arguments Against Reparations
Ame Sanders 24:30
You probably have a lot of challenges in your community, and moving this forward today, I would guess, given all of the conversations that have happened. It makes me want to ask you a bunch of questions about that. So, the first question is, I hear this, and I know you probably do too, I hear people say, "This is something that happened in the past. I did not do this. I am not the person who did this. And how should I be responsible for, fo reparations today, for things that happened in the past and I didn't have anything to do with?" Do you hear that in your community and how do you guys respond to that?
Darryl Heller 25:08
Yeah, no, we hear that all the time. We hear that all over the place. There are a couple of ways I understand it. One is, it's not personal. It's not personal to each individual. Certainly, on a structural level. Nobody, maybe some people do, but very few people wake up and say, "I'm going to be a white supremacist" or "I'm going to be a misogynist." But the way our country and society is structured, is the fact that white skin gives privilege. Even though white people haven't asked for it, and certainly the most well-meaning white people would love to get rid of whatever privilege that they have, they can't by themselves because it's structural.
So, the fact that I personally didn't harm any Black person doesn't negate the fact that as a white person, you actually benefit from being white in ways that Black people are actually penalized for being Black. So that's one thing.
The argument that this is in the past is just a fallacious argument as well because, you know, we know from the stories that we hear and have heard and have been told around the country that this is the living memory of people. I mean, there are people alive today whose wealth has been stolen, has been taken away because they couldn't get a mortgage. There's actually a really important story here in South Bend is called Better Homes. South Bend itself is an industrial city. Black people came to South Bend in part, through the Great Migration, looking for better economic opportunities than they could have in the South, as well as fleeing the violence that was operative and the kind of limitations and opportunities. Black people, though, were relegated, were not hired in all industries, and with the industries that have hired them, the largest being Studebaker, the car manufacturer. Blacks were hired only in the most dangerous and dirtiest positions in the foundry and so on. But this was better than the opportunities they had in the South.
Like other Americans, Black people want better conditions for their children, but they couldn't move outside of the residentially segregated area. So, in order to buy property outside of the Black Belt, they had to hire a white lawyer to operate as a front person for them. It was through a very complex and laborious process that had to be kept secret that just through this mechanism of buying property outside of the residentially designated area for Blacks, they were able to establish a little toehold. But the property now, the value of the houses that people have in that neighborhood versus exactly similar houses that white people have in a different neighborhood, the price value is radically different. The value of Black-owned houses is depressed, whereas the value of white owned-homes of this exact same nature and structure is inflated relative to that.
So, that's very present. That's true today. So, the argument that those harms happened in the past and that I'm not personally responsible in one sense is true. You're not personally responsible. But collectively, we have to reckon with this and unless we collectively reckon with it, then we're not going to be able to resolve it.
-Impact of Current Climate
Ame Sanders 29:03
So, a lot of communities today are pulling back from their work around truth-telling or equity and inclusion, or they're hesitant to begin work that they want to start. It sounds like you guys are still moving ahead and that you're not letting the climate of today impact or limit the work that you're doing. But is it affecting what you guys are doing, and how do you feel about that? How are you guys facing that today?
Darryl Heller 29:34
Yeah, the backlash against DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) or talking about race that kind of came to a big head around the pushback and backlash against critical race theory. That really hit the national discourse with the publication of the 1619 Project. Within South Bend--and South Bend is a somewhat of a lot of blue bubbles within a very red state. The red state of Indiana that has a Republican supermajority in our state legislature--we haven't been as affected yet. Though, I suspect that as we put out our preliminary report for our reparations recommendations, we're gonna get a lot of pushback, and we're gonna get a lot of blowback along exactly those same lines and with similar kinds of responses that you're suggesting that had been mouthed in other parts of the country and with the other reparations commissions or committees. So, we're prepared for that, but we're moving ahead.
Even though we are really operating locally and really trying to assess the local situations, we're very aware that our local situation didn't operate or materialize abstractly and in isolation. It was very much affected by the state and very much affected by the nation. So, the bigger history will be embedded within our report as well, out of necessity. We can't isolate what happened here outside or what happened. Because here in Indiana, there's no such thing as homerule. So, whatever the state mandates, every municipality has to follow. So, some of the structures and institutions and systems that were operative here in South Bend, were mandated by state legislators. So, we have to both parse that out but also make sure that we're not ignoring that thread.
As well there are some things that are either perpetrated or condoned by the municipality, the public entity, but much of the harm was perpetrated through private entities like real estate companies and, mortgage companies, insurance companies. We can't force private entities to do the kinds of changes and transformations that we perhaps may have some influence with our public entities, like our city government or legislators. So, we will work to have accountability across the board, recognizing that there's some limitations in what the outcomes may be. But minimally, and this goes to your question, I think it's important that part of what comes out of this is that we have a community, citywide, statewide, national conversation. That we're really grappling with this collectively.
Ame Sanders 32:46
Yeah, I love the way that you describe the different layers because I think that's important for anyone who's working on this to think about how layered these harms have been. How interrelated but yet also how layered and how many different actors have perpetrated harms in this way. It adds to the complexity of talking about it, holding people accountable, and also having that last piece that you talked about, about making sure that it doesn't either continue to happen or somehow resurge back into happening again. I really appreciate the way you describe that and make that so clear. I'm sure my listeners--I have listeners out there who are considering this and are thinking about this in their community--are trying to figure it out, so how do they even start? So, how would you how would you recommend they get started?
-Where Can Communities Start?
Darryl Heller 33:41
I think that one of the most important places, and this is true for every local jurisdiction, I believe, which is that folks really need to learn their local history, particularly the local history as it applies to the founding of their local community. Who were the Indigenous people that occupied that land before it became your community? What was the racial history in that community? What role did women play in shaping the community? I think learning that history is a fundamentally important place to start, because then you can begin to identify what harms have happened. If you look at the history and the current present, there's genuinely some real disparities there. If we examine closely the narrative, which is generally a really passive and triumphant narrative of founding and progress and so on and so forth, if we look underneath that, the question we should be asking ourselves is, who got left out of that? Who wasn't included? Whose voices were silenced?
Typically, you'll find that most of the voices that were most heard were white voices and generally men's voices, white men's voices. Beginning with the history and then doing some research in what are some of the disparities that exist? It's really straightforward in some cases, like South Bend, where there is a racial wealth gap that's been documented. There is significant health disparities. Nationally, Black women are three times more likely to die in childbirth or to have complications around maternal health. That's very true here in South Bend, as well. Those statistics hold up, both locally and nationally.
So, for local communities to really do that kind of work, I think it is a good place to start. Then, begin a conversation of what do we do about it? How do we address it? Can we acknowledge this harm? Can we repair it? Can we take the steps necessary to make sure that it stops and is not repeated into the future? But one thing I just wanted to make sure we talked a little bit about was even how we think about justice and how repairing when someone gets harmed. How do we repair it? Generally, our sense of justice is retributive and punitive, and that's just very counter to the capacity to heal anything.
-A Deliberate Process and Looking Long-Term
Ame Sanders 36:27
I think that your comment about punishment versus restorative justice is an important point. I'm glad you brought that up because, first, many of the harms that were inflicted weren't illegal at the time. But now we recognize them as wrong, immoral, or harms that have been perpetrated on people, even though the legal infrastructure not just condoned them but also supported them. So, the way that you think about this has to, by that very nature, be bigger and more inclusive. Your comment about punishment doesn't necessarily help in healing. So, I think the healing is also a big part. I think your advice there about learning a community's history as a place to start is so important for us to consider. The understanding and recognition of our history and inclusive truth-telling about our history that’s so, so important. It also sounds like from listening to you that this is a very deliberate and maybe somewhat slow process.
Darryl Heller 37:43
One of the things that I think we really have to come to terms with is that our culture and society is always looking for immediate results. You know, quick fixes and immediate gratification. We really do have to look long-term. The harms that we're still living with today were produced over generations and hundreds of years. Hopefully, it's not going to take generations and hundreds of years to repair them, but it's going to take more than tomorrow. We really have to be deliberate. We really have to be intentional. We really have to look at the long term ahead to think about solutions. Because what's gonna be required is really transforming structures and systems that are complex, as you say, and that's very real. They're also deeply entrenched, meaning that they're not going to change overnight, but we have to be deliberate and consistently pursuing that if we have any hope of them changing into the future. We have to not just be patient, but we have to understand both how they were produced so that we can actually understand how to transform them.
-Justice as Relational, Not Punitive
Restorative justice has a different take on justice than our traditional view and certainly the ways developed in our criminal legal system, where if a harm happens and we can relate to this, if it's between individuals, then the way you fix that harm is by punishing the person who did the harm. Punishment is really kind of our sense of justice. You do something wrong, it's almost a tit for tat. If you harm someone, then you get harmed in equal proportion to the harm that you caused. That's really the premise of our carceral system. We have different incarceration lengths of time for different crimes. And in the way that this system of justice is structured in this punitive way, what it often does is totally leave out the person who was harmed. The real focus of the criminal legal system is on the person who perpetrated the harm. They're the ones who are punished.
But as Danielle Sered said in her book "Until We Reckon," punishment is easy in one sense because the person who perpetrated it doesn't have to do anything except submit to the punishment. They don't have to take accountability for the harm they've done. There's no repair that's done to the person who has been harmed. There is no reckoning within the larger community of how this happened and the collective responsibility everyone has when someone is harmed.
So, restorative justice has a very different framework. It views justice not as punitive but as relational. That when justice occurs, it is within the relationship between people. When injustice happens, it is also within relations between people. Repairing the harm and healing is about bringing balance to the justice that each individual, and ultimately, I think groups and systems, have with one another. So, if we think of the relationship that we have with one another--and this was something that I had to wrap my head around for a minute. If you are attacked by a stranger or assaulted in whatever way that might look, you are now in a relationship with that stranger whether you like it or not. That relationship exists forever. That's exactly right.
So, we have to acknowledge that relationship and that in order for justice really to be so, that relationship has to be healed and repaired. That requires both parties, and that requires the person who perpetrated the harm to acknowledge it, ideally. But mentally, for the person who has been harmed to have what they need to repair themselves in the conditions as much as possible to what they were before the harm happened. That's not always possible for everyone to get that back on equal standing. But this is much the process that's healing as whatever the outcome is. In the process of our traditional justice system, really just this focuses on the perpetrator and about punishing them for whatever they've done, versus really looking at this relationally and as a community in the question of what do we need to do? That "we" being driven largely by the person who has been harmed and suffered.
-Importance of Truth-Telling
Ame Sanders 42:40
So Darryl, is there anything that we haven't talked about that you'd like for us to talk about?
Darryl Heller 42:45
You know, you said one thing that I think in my head, this word probably floated, but you said it out loud—truth-telling. I just think that that's so important. That we tell the truth. That we don't whitewash it. That we don't hide from it. That we don't try to obscure the messiness and ugliness of the world that's been produced that we now live in. Because if we don't really tell it honestly and openly and completely, we can't ever get outside of it. We can never really do anything different than continue to repeat the stories we tell ourselves. So, we have to tell ourselves different stories that are more truthful, more honest, and more complete in order for the transformation to take place and create the world that I think we want our children and grandchildren to live in.
Ame Sanders 43:43
So Darryl, I just want to thank you so much for this conversation. I really am grateful for your time this morning. Thank you for joining us.
Darryl Heller 43:51
Oh, you're welcome. And thank you for having me and you know all the best.
-Summary
Ame Sanders 43:58
Darryl shared so much wisdom in this episode. By bringing a restorative justice and transformational justice lens to the work of reparations, it felt like the key I needed to unlock things and begin to see a path forward. To begin to think beyond this notion of reparations as simply a financial payment for past harms. Darryl reminded us to think of reparations in four distinct phases.
First, acknowledgement of harms to include truth telling and an honest accounting of the harm that's been done. Then, apologizing, expressing genuine remorse. Repairing or fixing the harm. Then finally, creating the necessary changes and conditions so harms aren't repeated or perpetuated.
I loved that Darryl reminded us to also clearly locate ourselves in this work and to be very clear about the focus and scope of the work we were doing, to ask ourselves what group? He recommended focusing on one group at a time in order to fully respect that group's truth, their story, and recognize the unique harms that were perpetrated against them. To ask ourselves what scope and layer of harms are we considering?
For example, local communities can't necessarily be fully accountable for or address harms that were committed at the national or state level but can and should ensure accountability and reckoning for harms that were perpetrated locally, especially within local systems and institutions. Darryl also talked about how important it is to listen to and respect those who have been harmed, to understand the truth of their harm, and most importantly, to understand what they feel is needed for them to repair the harm and to heal. Then, he advises to always consider this work of reparations and restorative justice in terms of relationships. Not always individual to individual, but relationships between individuals or groups and the broader community.
Darryl also clearly rebutted, at least what I hear as the most frequent arguments against considering reparations. First, the fallacious argument that these harms were in the past when it is evident, and our research shows that so many harms are still ongoing, and even past harms continue to ripple and adversely impact our neighbors in so many ways. Then, the argument that "I did not create these harms so I should not be responsible." You may not have created the harm, but you likely benefit from the harms that were done. This challenges us to reckon with and acknowledge the many ways that privilege may continue to be accrued based on things like our group identities, our gender, and the color of our skin.
Finally, for those of us trying to find our way into this work, Darryl gave us a clear place to start. He suggested that we first understand our community's history, focusing on our community's origin story and especially asking ourselves whose voice is missing and who is left out of that story. Then, begin the process of honest and inclusive truth-telling about our community's history. Darryl also reminded us that harms were perpetrated across centuries and generations. Consequently, we should be thoughtful and deliberate in whatever process we follow and understand that this work, especially the final transformative justice portion, will take time.
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CONTRIBUTORS
Guest: Darryl Heller
Host: Ame Sanders
Social Media and Marketing Coordinator: Kayla Nelson
Podcast Coordinator: Emma Winiski
Sound: FAROUT Media