Thinking about Moral Injury and the Making of Reparations; Comments on Connolly and Nichols

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.” Thus wrote Martin Luther King in his Letter from Birmingham jail, in which he countered the liberal voices who urged patience and, in effect, submission to the order of racial oppression and continued exploitation.

“You cannot build a country on a crime against humanity and act as if it doesn't matter. Dissociation may protect the psyche, but it kills the soul.” (Connolly, this issue).

I feel fortunate to be able to discuss the work of Medria Connolly and Bryan Nichols. They not only argue the case for why reparations are deserved, but more specifically illuminate how the concept of moral injury helps psychologically to move all of us from our subjection to the past in its many frightening aspects. Speaking to how reparations help us to overcome moral injury they have written:

Awareness of moral injury challenges our self-conceptions…often accompanied by a fragility that may include feelings of shame, unworthiness, or despair (DiAngelo, 2011). The alternative requires us to stop thinking, numb feelings and indulge in fantasies of omnipotence, which …[fosters the use of] hatred and revenge as motivating principles.

To facilitate individuals and groups moving beyond a position of omnipotence or fragility requires, in my estimation, not the usual moral injunctions (as reassuring as they may be when one is delivering them) but the notion of an alternative vision. Bryan and Medria's visionary perspective highlights the possibility of reparations as a potential healing through acknowledgment together with accepting the charge of materially redressing the wrong that has been done and its continuing consequences. Their understanding of White people's moral injury makes it