From Historical to Enduring Injustice

• Date: 01 October 2007
• DOI: 10.1177/0090591707304585
• Published date: 01 October 2007
• Author: Jeff Spinner-Halev
• Subject Matter: Articles

Political Theory
Volume 35 Number 5
October 2007 574-597
© 2007 Sage Publications
10.1177/0090591707304585
From Historical to
http://ptx.sagepub.com
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Enduring Injustice
http://online.sagepub.com
Jeff Spinner-Halev
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Advocates of remedying historical injustices urge political communities to
take responsibility for their past, but their arguments are ambiguous about
whether all past injustices need remedy, or just those regarding groups that
suffer from current injustice. This ambiguity leaves unanswered the challenge
of critics who argue that contemporary injustices matter, not those in the past.
I argue instead for a focus on injustices that have roots in the past, and
continue to the present day, what I call enduring injustice. Instead of focusing
on finding the party responsible for the injustice, I argue that we use history
to help us understand why some injustices endure, which I suggest is partly
due to the limitations of liberal justice. I conclude with a conception of
responsibility for repairing enduring injustice that deemphasizes searching
for the causal agent, and instead focuses on how to repair the injustice, which
I explain through an expansive conception of shared space.
Keywords:
historical injustice; past injustice; collective memory; responsibility
Many Armenians are maddened by the Turkish government’s refusal to
acknowledge the Armenian genocide of 1915, which was committed
by the Ottoman Empire. Many Crimean Tatars want to return to their his-
toric homeland in the Ukraine, though when Josef Stalin kicked them out
the Ukraine did not exist as an independent country. Starting in the 1870s
Chinese immigrants to the United States and their progeny faced a wave of
official and unofficial harassment (while immigration from China was out-
lawed). According to John Higham, the historian of American immigration,
Author’s Note: Thanks to audiences at a Conference for the Study of Political Thought (CSPT)
meeting in Toronto; the political theory workshop at Washington University in St. Louis; the
Department of Political Science at the University of California, San Diego; the Duke University
of North Carolina political theory group; the political theory workshop at the University of
Virginia; the Law and Pluralism group at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hebrew
University in Jerusalem; and Jonathan Allen, Susan Bickford, Jean Cahan, Mary Dietz, Avigail
Eisenberg, Will Kymlicka, Duncan Ivison, Margaret Moore, Sarah Song, Bernard Yack, and two
anonymous reviewers for helpful comments or discussions on this essay.
574

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575
“No variety of anti-European sentiment has ever approached the violent
extremes to which anti-Chinese agitation went in the 1870s and 1880s.
Lynching, boycotts, and mass expulsions . . . harassed the Chinese.”1
Genocide, expulsion, past official discrimination: these are all cases of
what may be called historical injustice, yet the current arguments about his-
torical injustice do not provide the conceptual framework with which to dis-
cuss these injustices. The advocates of rectifying historical injustice argue
that the shape of the history of injustice matters, and that governments have
a responsibility to rectify injustices done in their name in the past. (I pre-
sume historical injustice to have occurred in the past, and where none of the
parties to the injustice are still alive.)2 This model of historical injustice,
however, says little to the three historical injustices mentioned above. The
Armenians do not want compensation but acknowledgement; the oppressors
of the Tatars no longer exist; and it is unclear if and why Chinese Americans
deserve compensation for the injustices their ancestors suffered, since
Chinese Americans generally no longer suffer from these injustices. The
issue of current suffering is exactly what is taken up by the critics of those
who want to rectify historical injustices. These critics argue that the power
of the claims for restitution or compensation fades over time. Those skepti-
cal about rectifying or compensating for historical injustice argue that what
liberal states should concentrate on now is correcting current injustices.
They argue that if victims of historical injustice are still oppressed, then
there is a strong case to be made to try to undo this oppression; but the force
of the commitment to change is fueled because the injustice is current, not
because of the past. They also maintain that there are simply too many his-
torical injustices for people today to worry about. Furthermore, they suggest,
injustice today is more important to solve than worrying about the past.
The advocates focus on two powerful cases of historical injustice—those
of Native Americans and African Americans—but these two cases do little
to answer the objections of the skeptics, since members of these two groups
are still victims of injustice.3 My argument is meant to help the advocates
of repairing historical injustice respond to the criticisms of the skeptics by
reframing the issue at hand and by refocusing the issue of responsibility.
Instead of looking at historical injustice, I argue for a focus on enduring
injustice. Enduring injustice has roots in the past, and continues to the pre-
sent day; an enduring injustice endures over time and often over space as
well. What makes an enduring injustice particularly perplexing is how dif-
ficult it is to repair. This difficulty is rooted in the solutions offered to injus-
tice by most versions of liberal justice, which typically focus on individual
rights and modest redistribution of resources. Cases of enduring injustice,

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Political Theory
however, often encompass matters of exile, mistrust, sacred land, and
acknowledgement of the past, all of which lie outside the bounds of liberal
justice. Ending an enduring injustice typically means devising solutions
that take the past into account, which is why a solely contemporary focus
is insufficient.
Some historical injustices no longer persist as an injustice but as an
enduring harm. I mean by this that the past scars some groups, but not nec-
essarily because group members live under unjust circumstances. Some
groups want the cruel events in the past acknowledged, not because doing
so will enable them to live just lives, but because they find the denial of
these terrible events an affront today. My focus here will be on enduring
injustice, which my language will reflect, but I will also discuss acknowl-
edgment and harm.
The advocates of repairing historical injustice assume that the political
community in which the injustice persists through time, and the descendants
of the victims and perpetrators, can be roughly identified, with the latter
responsible to repair the injustice. They often link history to responsibility
to repair the injustice, but this leaves many enduring injustices beyond
repair. Instead of looking at history as a way of assigning responsibility, I
argue that history should be used to see why the injustice persists. This
means, in part, looking at why the history of the injustice matters from the
point of view of the victims’ descendants. Doing so leads very quickly to
issues of collective narrative and collective memory, which play an impor-
tant role in issues of governmental trust, ancestral connections to land, and
dignity. Collective memories tie the past to the present, which the skeptics
too readily overlook. Only by taking the history of an enduring injustice into
account can the liberal state understand how to repair the injustice.
The Problem with Repairing Historical Injustice
The list of victims of injustice throughout history runs long: workers,
immigrants, people of the “wrong” religion, indigenous peoples, and on
and on. Which historical injustices are the ones that now deserve compen-
sation? The advocates for compensating for historical injustice usually
agree that the best candidates for compensation are intergenerational
groups, not individuals, and I follow their lead here.4 What needs to be
determined is which groups are eligible for compensation or restitution.
Many advocates focus on indigenous peoples or African Americans, but do
not say if only these groups are eligible for compensation or repair for

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Spinner-Halev / From Historical to Enduring Injustice
577
historical injustices or whether other groups might be as well.5 If Canada
restored rights to aboriginal peoples, former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau
maintained in an argument echoed by some skeptics, then Canada would
have to grant rights to French Canadians, the Acadians, and Japanese
Canadians, all of whom were treated badly at some point in Canadian
history.6 Those in the United States could add many more groups: not only
Blacks and Native Americans, but also Jews, Irish Americans, Italian
Americans, Catholics, Asian Americans, and others.7 Skeptics can argue
that there are too many groups that have suffered from historical injustices
to repair or compensate for them all, and so liberal states should forget
about the past and concentrate on the present.
The arguments of the advocates suggest there are no limiting conditions to
the category of historical injustice; their examples, however, are quite limited,
and if we look only at the two cases that advocates of redressing historical
injustice typically use, it becomes unclear why the historical aspect of the
injustice matters. The advocates use history to emphasize the responsibility
of the political community...