While this section stresses the importance of “symbolic reparations,” it is important to note the mutual constitution of “the symbolic” and “the material”. As some proponents of reparations would argue, all reparations are “symbolic” as nothing can truly undo the harm that was done. What is more, as Mills (2017) notes, the need for material reparation must not eclipse the need for metaphysical recompense. Thus, this section stresses that the economic is always social, and that all economies are thus moral economies. The denial of the urgency of reparations is indicative of how constructions of bottom lines, economic limits, and scarcity are also ideational, emotional, and ontological.
Ansell, Amy E. and James E. Statman. “‘I Never Owned Slaves’: The Euro-American Construction of the Racialized Other.” The Global Color Line: Racial And Ethnic Inequality and Struggle From a Global Perspective (Research in Politics and Society) 6 (1999): 151-173.
In this article, Ansell and Statman study the ways that white racial discourse, meaning the way in which white people talk about race, engages with the racial history of the United States by framing whites as victims and displacing responsibility to slavery and segregation into the past through phrases like “I have never owned slaves.”
Balfour, Lawrie. “Reparations After Identity Politics.” Political Theory 33.6 (2005): 785-811. 
In this article, Lawrie Balfour considers how arguments for reparations can respond to critiques of identity politics. Balfour builds Wendy Brown’s concerns about using “wounded identities” as a basis for political organizing, connecting those concerns to arguments for black reparations.
Brennan, Fernne. Race, Rights, Reparations: Institutional Racism and the Law. Routledge, 2017.
Brooks, Roy L. (ed.). When Sorry Isn’t Enough: The Controversy Over Apologies and Reparations for Human Injustice. New York: NYU Press, 1999.
Carcieri, Martin D. “Rawls and Reparations.” Michigan Journal of Race & Law 15.2 (2010): 267-316.
This article turns to the work of John Rawls and argues that his work can be used to develop forms of legislative reparations for slavery in the United States. The article concludes by considering how a policy of reparations would be enacted.
Harvey, Jennifer. Whiteness and Morality: Pursuing Racial Justice through Reparations and Sovereignty. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017.
Matsuda, Mari. “Looking to the Bottom: Critical Legal Studies and Reparations.” Harvard Civil Rights-Civil Liberties Law Review 22.2 (1987): 323-399.
In this article, Mari Matsuda argues that adopting the perspective of those who have been systematically excluded from the protection of the law could help guide legal studies in its efforts to think about justice. Matsuda uses Native Hawaiian and Japanese-American claims for reparations as a case study for this approach.
Mills, Charles. W. Racial liberalism. PMLA. 123.5 (2008): 1380-1397.
In this article, Mills is challenging the conventional notion that the dissolution of ascriptive hierarchy was central to the Enlightenment. He argues that argues that liberalism should be understood as racial liberalism because it furnished the emergent moral economy of differential moral/ normative status that made continued racial exploitation possible despite the “progressive” ethos of the time. Symbolic reparations, in addition to the material, are required to combat such a moral economy.
Mills, Charles W. “Racial Exploitation” in Black rights/White Wrongs: The critique of racial liberalism. Oxford University Press, 2017.
In this chapter, Mills conceptually differentiates racial exploitation from the more conventionally understood form of Marxian class exploitation. In doing so, he defends the position that demands for racial justice (like reparations) cannot be dismissed in favor of more “universal” class-based forms of justice.
Emerson, Guy Mount. “Can Reparations Save American Politics?” Black Perspectives. (2017).
In this blog, Mount states that “the problem with our current discourse on reparations is not that it is too bold but, rather, that it is not bold enough.” He argues that reparations can be a fundamentally new, “existensional way of being.” In short, reparations can (and should) do much more than redistribute material resources, it can improve politics itself. Instead of dividing us, it can unite us.
Soyinka, Wole. The Burden of Memory, The Muse of Forgiveness. Oxford University Press, 2000.
In this book, Wole Soyinka asks whether reparations is possible–whether there can be any form of apology, redress, or reconciliation for centuries of colonial and imperial violence. Ultimately, Soyinka turns to art and culture as one possible source of reconciliation.
Walker, Margaret Urban. “Restorative Justice and Reparations.” Journal of Social Philosophy 37.3 (2006): 377-395.
In this article, Margaret Walker argues for an approach to reparations that emphasizes restorative, rather than compensatory justice.
Walters, Ronald W. The Price of Racial Reconciliation. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009.
Wolfe, Stephanie. The Politics of Reparations and Apologies. Springer, 2014.