Justice
When thinking about justice in the United States, there is a strong correlation to courts, the law, policing, punishment, and surveillance. If someone commits an injustice, the idea is that they’ll be punished through the court and they’ll either serve time or be given the death penalty, but does this really count as justice?
All these systems have historically been rooted in slavery, capitalism, racial violence, captivity, surveillance, and murder. In such a variety of systems, justice cannot exist without proper reparations that allow people to be sustained materially and psychologically. Justice must be determined by the wronged, and anything given that does not comply with their needs, humanity, or demands for repair cannot be considered justice. In our course, through photography, legal documents, acts of protest, genealogical studies of policing and surveillance, philosophy, religion, and art we’ve been shown that justice is achieved when people are given recognition and reparations as human beings who were wronged. When justice isn’t given in the form of meaningful reparations, communities find ways to produce their own care and healing outside of the legal system.
At the beginning of the semester, we read multiple different philosophers such as Nozick’s Anarchy, State, and Utopia, Kant’s Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, and Rawls’s A Theory of Justice. All three philosophers have different perspectives of how justice should be delivered, but they’re not rooted in the same idea of justice. Where they go wrong, as expressed by Charles W. Mills in “Ideal Theory” as Ideology, is that their theories of justice are not materially justified in the reality of the legal system (170). They are simply, as the title suggests, ideals of what justice could be if racism, misogyny, ableism, and classism didn’t exist (Mills, 170). Kantian philosophy, for example, defines all its terms so being male grants more privilege and Rawls’ theory didn’t mention gender as a trait you wouldn’t know behind the veil (Mills, 179). Dr. Wills, during the September 16th lecture, commented on how justice is given by those who have power. When those who have power within these systems don’t acknowledge the misogyny, how would one give reparations to survivors of misogyny? Or any injustice overall?
In the case, Prigg v. Pennsylvania and M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!, the black enslaved are treated as property and used as a stepping stone to expand capitalism and the industrial revolution. When they advocate for themselves and for their freedom, they are denied their rights as human beings and are given violence in return for their resistance (Philip 4,41, 90). When they flee to find a better life for themselves, they are surveilled and thought of as “fugitives” who must be returned to their “owners” (611 Prigg v. Pennsylvania). Slavery may have been abolished legally, but black families were not given reparations in the form of land ownership, financial gain, support to integrate into society for centuries of violence and murder. Their containment and marginalization continues, even into 2026 with the expansion of criminalization of black bodies in masses (13th). The capitalist system continues to profit off of their incarceration and social control (2/8, The New Jim Crow, Alexander). Dr. O’Geen, on September 30th, highlighted how the Constitution is fundamentally about the state maintaining the human dignity of all American citizens. A capitalist system that refuses to financially support a marginalized community that it has oppressed since before its creation cannot give justice unless it is ready to give back to these communities what it took. Otherwise, the United States continues to deny the humanity of the enslaved during slavery, and denies the humanity of the black community being mass-incarcerated. The systems would need to stop profiting from their oppression entirely and be abolished while restoring the dignity of its citizens. Racial capitalism, as Dr. Weimers explained during the October 16th lecture, “is the process by which individuals or groups derive social and economic value from a system of racial hierarchy.” Along with what Panashe Chigumadzi expressed in With What Are You Apologizing? the institutional systems we know and uphold are historically rooted in slavery and oppression. Reparations alone cannot create justice if institutions continue to profit from their anti-black oppression.
Even if the final end goal is to give back to marginalized communities what has been taken from them, there have been other substitutes of reparations such as memorials, placemaking, archives, and art pieces dedicated to bringing exposure to injustice. Martia Sturken in Cultural Memory in the Wake of Violence pinpointed memorialization as an after effect of the Vietnam war, with several memorials dedicated to remembering the injustices that occurred (64). It is not a significant reparation, but the trend of memorialization made society take “a significant shift” as their eyes opened toward the terrors of oppression and society as a whole (Sturken; Andes Huyssen, 64). In The Civil Contract of Photography, Ariella Azoulay communicates the relationship between the subject photographed, the photographer, and the spectator. Once you’ve been involved in the creation of the photograph, you’re now indebted to treat the subject with seriousness, and therefore have a responsibility to respond with a want to pursue change (What is an image, WJT Mitchell, 11, 17-18). On April 23rd, Dr. Lipsker asked our section to create our own protests against an issue we were passionate about, and in doing so, forced us to think outside the box of what could be considered a protest. Viewing all other protests the other groups came up with, I realized they were all efficient forms of resistance because we were so knowledgeable about issues we wanted to face. While becoming knowledgeable and viewing injustices is powerful, recognition alone is insufficient without structural change and material reparations.
In the end, justice cannot simply be reduced to the punishment the legal system can provide. Incarceration or the death penalty do not always resolve individual psychological issues, financial struggles, community separation, social stigmatization, or the death of loved ones. It is a system that acknowledges individual punishment as opposed to the mechanisms that led to the injustice; it’s difficult to prevent the injustice from happening again. Reparations, as Jacqueline Bhabha, Margareta Matache, and Caroline Elkins in Time for Reparations express, must prevent future injustice by providing support in terms of material or financial gain and bringing back into light the injustices that happened. For real justice to occur, as Robin D. G. Kelley argues in Freedom Dreams, one would need to dream of change and reparations that can bring forgiveness, as opposed to trying to concel injustice out of fear of retaliation (Preface, xi). Simply punishing a murderer with incarceration, or apologizing to a community that suffered a genocide without supporting them back into society is counterproductive and unfair. On February 27th, during Dr. Wills’ section, we discussed what could solve inequality, and many said simply money. But this isn’t true, money doesn’t solve all social problems. Justice needs to be worked on by all communities that inhabit the same spaces in order to have change, and everyone must be willing to accept their faults. Humans are social creatures, and they always will be. The most impactful faculty panel of the semester, on April 28th, made me realize the importance of individual needs being met when injustices occur. It came to mind as Todd Stewart voiced that certain people want their stories to be told in the form of architecture, while others need sustainability. Repairing our world to emphasize equality, humanity, and dignity requires hard work and community support.
