Recognition and Reparations

• Autor(a) principal: Saillant, Francine
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Interfaces Brasil/Canadá (Online)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.ufpel.edu.br/index.php/interfaces/article/view/7508
• topic: Recongition; Reparation; Indigenous People; Blacks; Minorities; Human Rights; Public Policy; Brazil; Canada

The recognition of minority and minoritized groups is a central issue for contemporary societies. From the moment societies think of themselves as being composed of multiple groups, and understand themselves as being heterogenous, they must also think about the relative inclusion of these groups within their whole. The issue of recognition is at the heart of rule of law-based and openly pluralistic societies. Thinking about recognition involves not just thinking about various identities within a plural whole, but also thinking about recognition of the injuries suffered by minority or minoritized groups. Recognizing groups such as indigenous peoples or African descendants in the Americas, for example, entails grappling with a past of colonization and slavery—two situations par excellence of historical wrongs and, of course, their consequences. Hence, recognition inevitably encompasses links between identity, the experience of minoritization, the historical wrong in question, and reparations for this wrong. These links are precisely the subject of this text, and are examined in three stages: a study of conceptual approaches to recognition and reparations; a look at the narrative of a particular wrong and the demands for reparations made by a specific group, namely the black movement in Brazil, which raises the issue of slavery and its consequences; and finally an examination of the responses to such demands, in the form of laws, policies, and various types of civil society actions. The conclusion will be an opportunity to revisit the conceptual links between recognition and reparations.