As a part of Hofstra’s celebration of Black History Month, post doctoral fellow Tasseli McKay presented: “The Time is (Never) Right for Reparations.” // Photo courtesy of Hofstra University.

In honor of Hofstra University’s Civil Rights Day and Black History Month, The Center for “Race,” Culture and Social Justice hosted its annual colloquia series on Wednesday, Feb. 22. The Center worked in partnership with Hofstra’s Criminology Program and Department of Sociology to feature Tasseli McKay, a National Science Foundation postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Sociology at Duke University.

Due to the vast and complex history of racial cruelty, researchers have always struggled with the ability to comprehend the harm it has caused to Black communities. Yet, alarmingly, this very certitude strains the extent to which repair can be performed to account for such harm.

In recent years, there has been an increase in the participation of researchers in the social science field. A recent study evaluating the publishing activity of social science faculty members of institutions in the U.S. found that between 2011-2019, the publication of journal articles per scholar increased between 3% and 64%. In addition to the overall increase in social science research, there has been a reinstated drive to research social issues plaguing minority communities and those impacted by a history of racial injustice.

While the increase in research presents the opportunity to enrich our knowledge of the social issues in these communities, McKay suggests that this moment presents social scientists with the unique opportunity to “challenge the status quo of racial harm and contribute to its undoing.”

During her interdisciplinary workshop, McKay questioned, “What is the role of scholars and social scientists in grappling with racial harm and envisioning possibilities for repair?” She examined the motivation for reparative scholarship and explained how researchers could develop reparative methodologies.

According to the Society of American Archivists, reparative research is the “remediation of practices or data that exclude, silence, harm, or mischaracterize marginalized people.”

McKay urged attendees to “consider what a non-neutral actively reparative paradigm might look like.” In other words, when conducting research on minority groups, “don’t just send a message about who belongs and who doesn’t – which are the kinds of questions [social scientists] tend to focus on.” Instead, focus on clarifying present misunderstandings.

For instance, McKay provided a personal account of an example of the “decades of systematic exclusion about LGBTQ+ perspectives” on family dynamics and couple relationships.

“It’s distorted our whole understanding of what family life is … current efforts to make sure that LGBTQ+ scholars feel comfortable in the academy is nice,” she said. “But that in itself doesn’t do anything to counter the knowledge that has been produced out of systematic exclusion.”

She stated that researchers need to rethink their research questions and the agenda they serve.

“Very little [has been done] to correct the damage that those distorted understandings have been done in public policy and in the social fabric,” McKay said. She insisted that scholars must be clear if their research focuses on reparation and abolition.

Moreover, she recommended that researchers rethink sampling strategies and who they represent.

“We need to rewrite our measures so that they capture the nuances of people’s lived experiences rather than trying to collapse it into the categories that matter to the group in power at the moment,” McKay said. The objective is to rewrite analytical approaches to bring to the surface “the kinds of truths that have been systematically obscured.”

Reparative scholarship focuses on intervening in “policies or practices of racial harm and on actively correcting their [minority groups] legacies,” McKay said.

In a similar light, McKay also critiqued the current trend of community-based participatory research. She stated that as the social science field has seen an increase in community-based research, it is often neglected that performing such research requires a relationship-building process that occurs between the researcher and the participant community.

To perform reparative work, she stated that researchers must rectify the historical harm of “grossly misaligning the distribution of burdens and benefits of research,” McKay said. “The tradition is that members of marginalized communities are overwhelmingly burdened by the research process, often to the point of gross exploitation, and benefit very little.”

One way to account for this is to utilize “secondary data to answer questions that are of direct interest to members of directly affected communities,” McKay stated.

For instance, when performing research on mass incarceration, McKay speaks of the continued legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and the use of secondary sources to provide quantitative measures of harm.

“Guess what? We’re still doing it, and our government is keeping beautiful records of who it’s being done to,” McKay said. “Our whole body of scientific work, much of which was not collected with the effort of informing reparations or abolition, can be repurposed to the task of putting an economic estimate to these harms.”

According to McKay’s research, the estimated economic impact of carceral harm is $7.16 trillion. She explains that this equates to 86% of the wealth gap between Black and white family households.

When researching the impacts of historical events on modern communities, it is crucial to consider the effect of generational trauma, said Monique Griffith, assistant professor of psychology.

“If you’re not attending to the hurt that’s existing now and even trying to question why individuals even now have such a reaction to events today, you discount the fact that that trauma has been passed on,” Griffith said. The perception of researchers is critical due to the minimization of the origins of the reactions of minority communities.

McKay’s stance on reparative scholarship “forces us to think about how perspective affects what is seen as right and wrong,” said sophomore undecided major Maximillien Raymond. “Regarding how we can take steps in the right direction, it can be as simple as doing our research and educating others on the wrongs that Blacks have faced. This isn’t to say it is easy considering that ignorance on its own can make these goals difficult to accomplish; it is to say that it isn’t impossible to do the right thing.”