Abstract
Jovan Scott Lewis is an associate professor and chair of the Department of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley. He studies Black people’s lived experience of racial capitalism and underdevelopment in Jamaica and Tulsa, Oklahoma, through analyses of injury, violence, repair, debt, and reparations. He is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press, 2022). In 2021, he was appointed by Governor Gavin Newsom to California’s Reparations Task Force, the first state-level reparations commission in the country.
How do we understand contemporary discourses around reparations? What might architectural historians, theorists, and practitioners learn from scholars in the discipline of geography who study reparations? These questions led Desirée Valadares, an assistant professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, to conduct this interview with Jovan Scott Lewis, an associate professor and chair of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley, and an appointed member of AB 3121 California’s Reparations Task Force.
In 2016, Valadares, then a doctoral student in Architecture, and Lewis, then a newly appointed assistant professor in Geography and African American Studies, met at UC Berkeley’s Center for Race and Gender. At the time, Lewis led a graduate seminar, Black Geographies, which focused on debt, repair, and theft in Black America and beyond. Valadares enrolled in the seminar to expand her own understanding of critical perspectives related to redress, truth and reconciliation, and reparations. This interview with Lewis represents a broader and longstanding theoretical commitment to reconsider reparative justice as it operates within and beyond the state.
Before we proceed, a bit about us and our individual projects: Desirée Valadares’ current research theorizes repair in the context of landscape preservation. She studies the aftermath of transpacific Japanese North American and Unangax̂ redress movements which coalesce around the preservation and stewardship of Second World War confinement landscapes in Hawai’i, Alaska, and British Columbia. She works alongside community organizations, cultural heritage professionals, and policymakers and draws insights from archival research and place-based methods including architectural drawing, photography, and participant-action research. Broadly, her research contributes to ongoing debates on war reparations, Asian-Indigenous relations, land tenure in settler colonial contexts, and infrastructural and environmental histories of Second World War prison camps in former US territories and in western Canada.
Jovan Scott Lewis’s research is concerned with the articulations of racialized poverty, which he examines through questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair. He has conducted research in Jamaica on these topics, which culminated in his monograph, Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica (University of Minnesota Press, 2021). In this book, Lewis studies “lotto scammers” in Jamaica who use Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) telephony to con American citizens into sending money to Jamaica, which he positions as a form of reparations for the long histories of colonial and postcolonial inequality. Rather than focusing on reparations as a quantification of redress, he fundamentally reconsiders the concept of reparations in the Caribbean. Rather than simply a means of recompense withheld by one party and expected by the other, Lewis shows how transgression and transaction associated with scamming proffer novel forms of dialogic reciprocity.
His second monograph examines the relationship between repair and sovereignty. Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa (Duke University Press, 2022) traces the consequences of the 1921 race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He shows how, in the century following the Tulsa Race Massacre, the exceptional violence of this event has been reproduced through more mundane forms of dispossession like urban renewal and the reduction of critical services by the state. But the most significant act of dispossession that the book analyzes is the undermining of self-determination that Black Americans first developed in Indian Territory before Oklahoma statehood. The story of Greenwood, a historic freedom colony in Tulsa, that he tells is critical for both public and academic discourse around reparations because it represents a claim for reparations that goes beyond the typical narrative of slavery and Black abjection.
Desirée Valadares: First, what are reparations? What is the critical discourse around reparations? And how do you come to the study of reparations?
Jovan Scott Lewis: I’ve found communicating the definition of reparations to be a challenge. The straightforward definition is that it is a compensatory framework for responding to a claim of injury and harm. However, navigating the ethical landscape of how we define, justify, and exercise the key terms that make up that definition gets complicated quickly. Compensation, injury, and claim-making vary widely depending on the type of reparative context we are considering. For instance, when dealing with reparations for the enslavement of Africans and for their descendants’ continued discrimination in the Americas, we are forced to reconcile the notions of temporality and responsibility. How do we qualify the experience of racial harm, quantify those harms and their lingering impacts, and determine who is eligible? Ultimately, reparations are about the politics of claim-making and the underlying frameworks of legitimacy in claim-making.
In my research, I study the implications of racial capitalism and underdevelopment for Black communities in the Caribbean and the US. In that work, I have determined that the centuries of dispossession and discrimination meted out against these communities have shown up in the forms of everyday poverty and the structural denial of opportunity, each of which has eroded the freedoms gained through emancipation and independence. Thus, reparations are the necessary response to that history and the circumstances endured today. I approach the question of reparations from the standpoint of lived experience. In that experience, I pay attention to these Black communities’ articulations and the structural histories that inform how they identify their circumstances and what has produced them. This approach began with my work on postcolonial and post-structural-adjustment poverty in Jamaica and how poor urban Black youth were developing strategies for countering their impoverishment through international scamming.
Valadares: Can you discuss the concept of Black repair in your book, Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica, which is an ethnography of three Jamaican lotto-phone scammers who strive to make a living in Montego Bay.
Lewis: What I learned from the scammers in Jamaica, which I analyzed in my book, is that reparations can be understood as something more pliable, innovative, and constructive than the typical transactional principles that the term usually engenders. Empirically, these young Black Jamaicans were targeting white, and often elderly, North Americans using various advanced fee fraud schemes. They justified victimizing their targets by using “reparations” as a rationale. By refusing to dismiss that claim, I learned about the capacity of reparations to articulate how historical injuries are reformulated to produce ongoing structural harm. Ultimately, I realized that there is a distinction between reparation and repair. If reparation is the transaction of redress, then repair represents the full terms of satisfaction. Repair privileges and recognizes the capacity of the injured party to both identify the harms they’ve experienced and the mechanisms and value of the modes of redress. This approach is a significant departure from conventional reparative frameworks, which often start with the feasibility of a particular compensatory model and work backward to determine the qualification of the claim of harm. Thus, what is presented is an ethical reworking of the modality of redress and how we assess guilt and compensation. I determined that if a reparative model prioritizes this notion of repair, something much more significant than redress is gained. Instead, the injured party has been able to exercise a sovereign sense of self-determination because, in advancing a claim based on repair, that group must first determine who they are and what they want to become post-repair.
Valadares: What is your role on the California Reparations Task Force, a state-led body that was created by Governor Newsom in 2020?
Lewis: The continuous dispossession is what we on the California Reparations Task Force aim to address. Assembly Bill (AB) 3121 established the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans, with a Special Consideration for African Americans Who are Descendants of Persons Enslaved in the United States. The purpose of the Task Force is: (1) to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans; (2) to recommend appropriate ways to educate the California public about the task force’s findings; and (3) to recommend appropriate remedies in consideration of the Task Force’s findings. Governor Newsom appointed me as one of nine members. One of the primary charges of AB 3121 is for the Task Force to study the institution of slavery and its lingering adverse effects on living African Americans. The idea of lingering effects is at the heart of my work on reparations and what I make sure we keep central to our deliberations. As a result, the Task Force issued its preliminary report in which we trace the effects of slavery across nearly a dozen injury areas, including political disenfranchisement, educational and housing segregation, the wealth gap, and racism in the environment through infrastructure, among several others. We provided a set of preliminary recommendations as to how the state could remedy the continuation of these harms ahead of our full and final report for reparations, which will include a compensation recommendation.
From my work on the Task Force and especially from my research, what I have determined is owed to Black America is recognition, recompense, and nonrepetition of injury. Black Americans’ ancestors’ centuries-long forced labor facilitated the United States’ economic development, which later arriving groups were able to partake in, however unevenly. From emancipation until today, that community has been treated as a resource that continues to be exploited in various ways—from Jim Crow to mass incarceration and gentrification. For that history of dispossession, extractivism, and violence, Black Americans are owed a debt to be paid through direct compensation. Moreover, as citizens whose rights were enshrined through constitutional amendment, Black Americans are owed the fulfillment of that promise of citizenship, which requires the ceasing of further harmful policies and practices.
Valadares: How do we teach about reparation and reparative justice reparations (critically and creatively) as geographers, architects, landscape architects, and historians of the built environment?
Lewis: What those of us who work in the spatial disciplines know is that place/land/territory does not simply serve as the backdrop or the ground upon which human activity occurs. They are constitutional to our very being of humanity. Over time, the relations with the Earth became driven by notions of resource, property, and commodity, leading to the very injurious making of the Western world (though, to be clear, the West does not hold the monopoly on historical imperial territorialization). Thus, if spatial analysis is key to understanding inequality, it is critical to assess its remedying. Reparations must be a central interest, if not concern, for those committed to understanding urban design, public access, and the relations communities have to their natural and built environments. Those who study such things know how those processes have, in the past, been driven by the intentional desire to discriminate, exclude, and segregate. And so, as we teach those histories and work to decolonize their methods, models, and principles, we must consider and encourage consideration of their remedies, even if speculatively. Reparations, again, must be seen beyond the transaction. Reparations, if done right, are a process of world-making or remaking for those injured claimants.