Racial Injustice and the Limits of Reparative Policies: A Conversation with Carmela Murdocca

Your work focuses on the intersections of racialization and criminalization, especially for Black and Indigenous people in social and legal politics in Canada. What inspired you to choose this difficult but important theme as the focus for your research?

I am interested in debates about the possibilities and limits of redress for historical and ongoing racial injustice and violence. In the last 40 years and more, there has been a global trend towards amending historical injustices through practices of reparative justice which include truth-seeking, redress, restorative justice, reparations, memorialization, and reconciliation. These reparative justice measures have included apologies, public inquiries, monetary compensation, memorial and creative commemoration, and truth and reconciliation commissions. Since the 1990s, reparative justice measures have been increasingly prioritized in criminal justice reforms due in part to the disproportionate incarceration rates of Indigenous and Black people. I became interested in the incorporation of “reparative justice” into the punishment process and how reparative reform works through particular racial logics to reinforce rather than alleviate the racial violence of carcerality. I was inspired to think about how progressive liberal reform sustains racism and reinforces anti-Black and anti-Indigenous state violence. In my research, I have tried to wrestle with these issues through maintaining a focus on twin currencies in Canada—the racialized inhumanity of the carceral punishment system and the politics of redress and reconciliation.

A little more than ten years ago, in your article “From Incarceration to Restoration: National Responsibility, Gender and the Production of Cultural Difference,” and also in your 2013 book, To Right Historical Wrongs, you suggested that the Canadian state pretends to take responsibility for the over-incarceration of Indigenous peoples, but that the process for doing this within the Canadian legal system actually absolves the Canadian state of this responsibility. Has anything changed since then, given that we have had, for instance, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in 2015 and the recent confirmation of graveyards with Indigenous children at the sites of residential schools?

We need to really question what accountability and responsibility can mean in this context. A purported national, governmental, and institutional focus on accountability, responsibility and even reconciliation has done little to alleviate the racism, violence, and dispossession at the root of the racial colonial state. In the last 25 years, the locking up of Black and Indigenous people has worsened despite “reparative” policy and law that purports to address the problem of incarceration. This systemic racism must be viewed as internal to liberalism rather than as a social phenomenon that liberal reform can rectify. Given this, we must ask how the racial governance of violent punishment intersects with the fiction of progressive liberalism. What amount of racial and colonial violence, epitomized by the carceral state and made bare by the unmarked graves of Indigenous children, is enough to fundamentally question the racial, colonial, and violent dispossession that liberalism maintains?