Cleavages in the Movement for Reparations for African Americans: Evidence from Evanston, IL

In order to gain a more complete picture of the discourse surrounding the Restorative Housing Program, I conducted nearly 40 hours of open-ended interviews with journalists, scholars, activists, and residents in Evanston. My approach to this work is interpretivist, rather than positivist. I do not attempt to make broad causal claims or predictions about how reparations programs function or how the public will react to them in other cases. Rather, this work describes a particular program at a particular time in a particular place in a high degree of specificity and richness. This does not mean that the observations here will not guide future research into discourse surrounding the movement for reparations in the United States—in conjunction with future studies about additional programs and continuing dialogues, interpretivist work such as this begins to tell an important story in and of itself, by observing and listening rather than generalizing. In providing a rich description of what I view as a pivotal time and place in the movement for reparations, I hope that this work will open researchers' eyes to potential phenomena in future work on discourse within the movement for reparations without imposing requirements on research about other people, places, and times.