“If empire and its thievery are wrong, if slavery is wrong, if the heinous acts committed against Native American peoples, the thefts of territory, were wrong, why has there been no move toward justice?” asks scholar-activist Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem in Objects and Intertexts in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
It’s an important—and urgent—question, and as the book title indicates, Fadem references Morrison’s searing indictment of U.S. slavery in her 1987 novel Beloved to argue for reparations for people of African descent. She also outlines a multi-pronged strategy to end white supremacy and win racial equity for all.
I recently interviewed Fadem on Zoom about the ongoing legacy of slavery, the reparations movement, and the role white anti-racist activists can play in supporting this effort.
Q: Let’s start by talking about what it means to be a scholar-activist.
Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem: I want this book to be part of the struggle, a form of activism, a literal part of the work of winning social justice. For me, this book is personal in a way that’s different from everything else I’ve published. It’s about the United States, about our history as a nation.
I grew up in St. Louis, Missouri, a typical Midwestern city, which means that it was very segregated. Neighborhoods had ethnicities. We were middle class, but I grew up surrounded by white privilege, although my community was also segregated by religion. Everyone was Protestant except us and one other family, so I grew up feeling “other” as a Catholic.
Q: How do you think this influenced your political development?
Fadem: I went to a private, all girl’s Catholic high school, Nerinx Hall, beginning in 1975. Right before I enrolled, there was a drop in enrollment. This happened after the nuns who ran the school began attending feminist marches and many of the area’s conservative families stopped sending their daughters there.
At the same time, another Catholic girl’s school, this one located in Ferguson—yes, the same Ferguson where Michael Brown was murdered—was also facing falling enrollment, so the nuns decided to unite the two schools. This brought students from Nerinx, which was almost entirely white, together with girls from Ferguson, who were almost entirely Black. It was my first experience in a multi-racial, multicultural community and it changed everything for me. I heard overt racism expressed. Nonetheless, I was unaware of the many problems surrounding integration, among them, that the Black kids had to come to us, rather than sending us into their neighborhood.
A few years later, in 1977, I watched Roots. I never forgot it. What it depicted was a revelation. As I took in this shocking story, I started to wonder why I had never learned what I was seeing on this TV program in school. I had so many questions. I realized for the first time that I’d been living in a protected bubble.
Maureen E. Ruprecht Fadem
Q: Art—novels, movies, paintings, drawings, music, photos, poems—often impacts us in ways political speech does not. Beloved obviously touched you deeply. Can you speak to this and expand on how the book can be used as a catalyst for activism?
Fadem: One of the things about a work of art like Beloved, or the poetry of Langston Hughes, for example, is that it deals with political subject matter on a gut level, so we’re less in our heads and more in our bodies when we’re exposed to it. The first time most people read Beloved, they don’t understand it. But they feel it. In addition, when we’re moved by a book or other art form, it can connect us to action, forcing us to consider what we’re going to do about the indignities that have been presented. In Beloved, it’s the 400-plus-year unfinished business of slavery.
After all, if Beloved as a character is left in the world as a ghost, her specter will continue to haunt us. Morrison wanted that, wanted the reader to live the emotional experience of slavery through her characters; she wanted to scare us.
Had Reconstruction lasted it might have been different, but it was in place for just twelve years, from 1865 until 1877. Still, for a brief moment, it represented an attempt at reckoning with race and racism in this country. Unfortunately, that reckoning was short-lived. There was never any coming to terms with slavery or race hatred.
Almost a century later, the Civil Rights movement succeeded in winning legislation, granting voting and other rights to the majority of Black people, but it was followed almost immediately by new, brutal forms of policing and mass incarceration. In the space of a few decades, the U.S. prison population skyrocketed from 350,000 to 2.3 million.
Q: What do you see as the best way to organize to both deal with this and push for reparations?
Fadem: I see a few things as crucial. First, reparations mean money for families whose genealogies go back to slavery. Money, however, does not necessarily build a better future. We also need a truth-and-reconciliation mechanism for community building. We need to be able to talk to each other across the color line and deal with grievances and misunderstandings. This is the only way we, as a nation, can become a stronger, more loving, people.
Then there’s education. Watching Roots as a high school student showed me the importance of education, the necessity of learning our history.
Memorialization is also essential. Bryan Stevenson’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice and The Legacy Museum, projects of the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Alabama, are a great start but we need a national memorial to acknowledge the painful legacy of slavery.
Lastly, we need to work on abolishing mass incarceration, to undo the system that was created as a backlash to civil rights, because that system has served to re-enslave millions and millions of mostly Black and brown people.
Q: How can white activists play a meaningful role in this?
Fadem: First, as Michelle Alexander argues in The New Jim Crow, we need a broad-based, multi-racial social movement around police violence that recognizes the value and centrality of today’s anti-racist and reparations movements. But we also have to remember that neither Black nor white populations are homogeneous. A lot of poor white people are descended from indentured servants, and like low-income people of color, including those in Indigenous communities, they suffer from high rates of alcoholism, drug use, anxiety, depression, housing instability, and underemployment.
We need to recognize that poverty impacts people of many backgrounds and we need to listen to, and really hear, each other’s stories. How else can we develop empathy and unity other than by building the diverse poor people’s campaign that the Reverend Martin Luther King died trying to create?
Q: You teach English at a public university, Kingsborough Community College of the City University of New York. Have you seen empathy and consciousness raising develop in your classes?
Fadem: Yes, I have. As we chisel away at what divides us and causes animosity to fester, I’ve seen students begin to think critically about their lives and the lives of others. When this happens, it’s the first step toward civic agency.