Transforming ghosts into ancestors: A call to action

Abstract

The psychological case for reparations offers a framework for understanding the emotional complexity inherent in the centuries-long resistance to granting reparations to African Americans for its three hundred years of chattel slavery and its legacies—Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, extrajudicial killings, and voter suppression. A central component of the resistance is moral injury, which Bryan Nichols and I maintain is the primary reason why the concept of reparations is so emotionally charged. The disavowal of the collective trauma for both the formerly enslaved and former slave owners creates moral wounds which show up as metaphorical ghosts that haunt US culture. Behavioral scientists who understand the complexity of both individual and large group dynamics are called upon to acknowledge and repair the intergenerational moral wounds of chattel slavery and assume leadership in the reparative process—to “transform ghosts into ancestors.”