‘Taking Responsibility for the White Collective’: Implicated Subjects and Transformative Justice in the United States

Abstract

ABSTRACT∞ Transitional justice largely ignores that majority of actors who, though not directly responsible for violence, are structurally implicated in systems of injustice that (re)produce violence. Their absence is incompatible with the normative goals of the ‘transformative justice’ agenda, which include targeting the causes of (structural) violence, a project decidedly shaped by the presence of implicated subjects, especially in cases of historical injustice. This article engages a select group of implicated subjects – anti-racist white activists in the United States – to examine what their endeavours and struggles to reckon with their implication in the ongoing histories of racism and white supremacy can tell us about the boundaries of a transformative justice model. Drawing upon nine months of participant observation and 30 in-depth interviews within predominantly white activist spaces in the Greater Boston area, I contend that viewing transitional justice from the lens of implicated subjects serves to trouble the field’s transformative aspirations.