ABSTRACT
Property apology movements, like land reform and reparations, are built on the need to reconcile property exclusions and their economic impacts built on discriminatory purposes. Critics to both movements often raise three principle objections that seek to reposition property (and property owners) as either blameless actors that should not be punished by the changing social inclusionary demands of society; that seek to position property as a necessary component to an orderly deployment of social values; or that seek to redirect the actions of land reform away from land and towards other types of support. These approaches implicitly remap onto the social landscape the ideologies that promoted discriminatory ends in the first place.
This paper argues that these land claims draw on memory as a form of resilience for property owners. Applying a resilient property theory method, the paper argues that memory and ideologies become scaled in property conflicts around land reform and reparations, leading to a stale-mate that courts are reluctant to wade into. The paper draws on examples from South African Apartheid, and US land use patterns emerging during Jim Crow era segregation patterns to argue that land problems arising from discrimination require understanding how the land resource impacts individual resilience on the ground, rather than rights in the air. This realist account of property and of reparations reveals that private property facilitates and continues resiliency gaps that exist between prior owners and recipients of rights under reparations or land reform.
Roark, Marc L, On Proper[ty] Apologies and Resilience Gaps, 11 Journal of Race, Gender, and Ethnicity 135, 2022.
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