Imagining California Panel Discussion: Reparations in California

Join us for a discussion on reparations in California with panelists Daina Ramey Berry (UCSB), Tiffany Caesar (San Francisco State University), and Jovan Scott Lewis (UC Berkeley), moderated by Giuliana Perrone (UCSB). Panelists will consider the history of reparations in the United States, explain why they are being considered in California, and assess the current status of plans for reparations in San Francisco as well as the state as a whole. Audience Q&A and a reception will follow.

Daina Ramey Berry is the Michael Douglas Dean of Humanities and Fine Arts at UCSB. She is an internationally recognized scholar of the enslaved and a specialist on gender and slavery and Black women’s history in the United States. She is the award-winning author and editor of six books and numerous scholarly articles. Her most recent book, A Black Women’s History of the United States, won the 2021 Susan Koppelman Award for the Best Book in Feminist Studies, was a 2021 NAACP Finalist for Literary Non-Fiction, and received honorable mention for the 2021 Darlene Clark Hine Book Award sponsored by the Organization of American Historians.

Tiffany Caesar is an Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at San Francisco State University. Her research focuses on the preservation of transnational black women leaders and engagement with public history. She has participated in cultural heritage preservation initiatives in the United States and South Africa focusing on gender issues, cross-cultural youth dialogue, and social justice issues, and she is a cultural heritage ambassador for the Nelson Mandela Museum in Mthatha, South Africa. Among her recent publications is a co-authored piece entitled “Mothering Dead Bodies: Black Maternal Necropolitics” in the journal Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism. Dr. Caesar is the current commemoration chair of the SFSU 1968 Black Student Union/Third World Liberation Front Student Strike and journal chair of the 50th Anniversary of the 1973 Phillis Wheatley Poetry Festival. With the Iberia African American Historical Society, she led the recent initiatives to create a historic marker for Queen Mother Moore – a founder of the modern-day reparations movement – in New Iberia, Louisiana. Dr. Caesar has also organized several public dialogues on reparations in the Bay Area.

Jovan Scott Lewis is Professor and Chair of the Department of Geography at UC Berkeley. His research is concerned with the questions of racial capitalism, underdevelopment, and radical terms of repair in the Caribbean and United States. He is the author of Scammer’s Yard: The Crime of Black Repair in Jamaica and Violent Utopia: Dispossession and Black Restoration in Tulsa. In 2021, he was appointed by California Governor Gavin Newsom to serve on the state’s Reparations Taskforce.

Giuliana Perrone is Associate Professor of History at UCSB and the author of Nothing More than Freedom: The Failure of Abolition in American Law.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Imagining California series and the Sara Miller McCune and George D. McCune Endowment