Racial justice as transitional justice

In the United States today, there remain many unresolved issues related to race, in particular issues that are legacies of past injustices toward African Americans. This article argues that, in addressing these issues, we have much to learn from other societies that have undergone political transformations from regimes that systematically abuse human rights to regimes that respect, or at least purport to respect, human rights. These transitions have given rise to the idea of transitional justice, and to well-developed debates about what justice requires during such periods of transition. I argue (in the first section) that transitional justice usually requires the backward-looking measures of prosecution, reparation, and acknowledgement, and I further argue (in the following section) that by this standard the transformation that took place during the civil rights era in the United States was unjust, or, at least, remains incomplete. In the final section of the article I discuss measures that should be considered as ways of completing our transition to a racially just society.