Dignity restoration
Dignity restoration is a form of reparations that provides material compensation to dispossessed individuals and communities through processes that affirm their humanity and reinforce their agency. Dignity restoration is most commonly understood as a remedy for a related concept, dignity taking – when a state directly or indirectly destroys or confiscates property rights from owners or occupiers and the intentional or unintentional outcome is dehumanization or infantilization.
Background
The dignity takings/dignity restoration framework was first created by Professor Bernadette Atuahene following her empirical exploration of South Africa’s land dispossession and restitution in her book, . Atuahene viewed dignity taking as when a state directly or indirectly destroys or confiscates property rights from people, resulting in dehumanization or infantilization. Atauhene viewed restitution for this as not limited to reparations, but also dignity restoration, or providing dispossessed individuals and communities with material compensation that affirms their humanity and reinforces their agency. Dignity restoration gives the dispossessed individuals or communities a significant degree of autonomy in deciding how they are made whole. The concept of dignity restoration “provides a language and space to discuss how to best remedy a dignity taking, while reimagining the purpose and potential of redress.” Since Atuahene's article, numerous scholars across disciplines have since applied these socio-legal concepts to an array of case studies in various time periods and geographic locations.Characteristics of dignity restoration
Importance of autonomy
Dignity restoration emphasizes the importance of autonomy in addition to material reparations. For example, sociologist and legal scholar Cesar Rosado conducted ethnographic work in a Chicago worker center called Arise, which services undocumented workers as well as other vulnerable laborers. He concluded that claims of unpaid wages are often deprivations of property that constitute a dignity taking, and that laws protecting workers’ right to organize are an essential backdrop for dignity restoration because they allow workers to more effectively fight for redress. In another example, legal scholar Eva Pils described how China’s forced evictions of rural homeowners to create space for its rapidly expanding cities qualified as a dignity taking. According to Pils, the Chinese government’s monetary compensation and resettlement schemes did not meet the dignity restoration threshold. Although dangerous, Pils described how extrajudicial resistance to forced property seizures may ultimately contribute to dignity restoration.Separation vs. reintegration
Dignity restoration does not, as a rule, need to include the reintegration of a dispossessed population, as scholars have argued that embracing this population’s autonomy can result in greater sovereignty and long-term restitution for them. Anthropologist Justin Richland is credited with updating the definition of a dignity restoration to: a remedy that seeks to provide dispossessed individuals and communities with material compensation through processes that affirm their humanity and reinforce their agency, whereas the original definition included the purpose of dignity restoration as to “rehabilitate dispossessed populations and reintegrate them into the fabric of society through an emphasis on process.” Richland viewed the separation of Hopi people from their tribal lands centuries ago, and the continued degradation of these lands by the U.S. Forest Service, as an instance where dignity restoration can embrace more separation and autonomy as opposed to reintegration.Iterative process
Multiple rounds of dignity restoration are often necessary because circumstances may not allow for an immediate and comprehensive remedy. Dutch legal scholar Wouter Veraart viewed the multiple rounds of compensation offered to Jews in France and the Netherlands following the Holocaust as an example of this. The first round focused on restoring legal equality to people who had just been thoroughly dehumanized. The second round shifted the focus from solely monetary remedies for individual harms to monetary and moral remedies for group harms.The iterative nature of dignity restoration is also illustrated by legal scholar Alfred Brophy in his case study of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, which involved the looting, burning, and destruction of African American property in Greenwood District, Tulsa, Oklahoma following the community’s resistance to an extrajudicial lynching. The first round of dignity restoration occurred throughout the course of the twentieth century with America’s gradual establishment of African Americans as rights bearing citizens. The second round began 75 years after the Riot when the Oklahoma Legislature passed the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot Reconciliation Act of 2001, which created a memorial, provided college scholarships for descendants of those affected, and allocated funds for economic development in Greenwood. In this case, dignity restoration began with the restoration of dignity, and the victims and their descendants achieved property restoration three quarters of a century later.
Similarly, in the context of police misconduct in the United States, legal historian John Acevedo emphasized the value of robust remedies like community reparations and the need to use monetary awards to victims and their families or a formal investigation by a state entity—the two most common responses to extralegal police violence--as merely the first step to achieving full dignity restoration.
Examples of full or partial dignity restoration
The American Revolutionary War and Loyalists
During the American Revolutionary War, the nascent government subjected Loyalists to a dignity taking by expropriating their properties, revoking their professional licenses, annulling their civil and political rights, and detaining and banishing them--a form of “civil death.” Even after renouncing their allegiances, most Loyalists either did not receive their property, had to repurchase it, or had to pay fines. This case study illustrates that sometimes there is only partial dignity restoration: a restoration of dignity without a restoration of property.American slavery and the Freedmen’s Bureau
Legal scholar Taja-Nia Henderson concluded that the Freedmen’s Bureau both restored and deprived formerly enslaved Americans of their dignity. Unpaid wages in the context of American slavery is a clear example of a dignity taking. Slaveholders stole labor and its accompanying wage from African Americans during chattel slavery. At face, the Freedmen’s Bureau spurred dignity restoration during Reconstruction because it was the federal agency charged with assisting African Americans as they transitioned from being slaves to free people. It was among the first state institutions created to defend the rights of African Americans. In reality, however, the Bureau was at once a dignity giving and dignity depriving institution--it sometimes defended the rights of former slaves and other times it helped plantation owners bolster the status quo by ensuring African Americans remained a pliant agricultural workforce.Los Angeles King-Drew Hospital
University of Pennsylvania legal scholar Shaun Ossei-Owusu wrote that federal regulators shut down Los Angeles’ King-Drew Hospital in 2007 and contributed to the ongoing trend of urban hospital closings in low-income communities. Per Ossei-Uwusu's article, by failing to replace or improve King-Drew Hospital, the government left the community without a medical center that served everyone regardless of insurance and this involuntary loss of community property constituted a dignity taking. In 2015, the hospital reopened on a smaller scale—but without its renowned trauma center, still leaving the community void of a critical service. The hospital’s partial re-opening was seen as a small step towards full dignity restoration.