Irami Osei Frimpong - Reparations As Earnest Money

Title: Irami Osei-Frimpong - Reparations as Earnest Money (Talk at Yale Medicine)
Description:
Irami Osei-Frimpong - Reparations as Earnest Money
Biological Sciences Training Program - Reparations Speaker Series (BSTP-RSS, sponsored by the Department of Psychiatry at Yale Medicine)
Date: October 19, 2020
Irami Osei-Frimpong is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at University of Georgia-Athens (UGA).
Irami is introduced by Dr. Richard Dien Winfield (Yale College ’72), distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UGA.
Speaker Abstract:
“In this talk on reparations for racial justice, I argue for why the state needs to demonstrate that the rights extended to the harmed group do not depend on the electorate's caprice.
Since the United States has an attested history of capitulating to anti-Black elements of the population, any reparations plan that does not redress the institutional conditions that abet the persistent capture of state power by the nation’s anti-Black factions is insufficient. This means that reparations are not merely going to concern rebuilding and repairing predominantly Black institutions in line with the contemporary wealth of the nation; rather, reparations are going to inform the way the state enables the conventions of predominantly White political and non-political institutions, e.g., families, churches, and schools.
This institutional restructuring is part of establishing the sociological condition of fraternity recalled in the French national motto ‘liberte, egalite, fraternite’. The relevance of fraternity for politics is often given short shrift because families are not obviously politically relevant, but this talk accounts for why the quality of fraternity-abstracted from the biological family-- needs to be established within the state’s culture as a precondition for liberty and equality to emerge.”