The Future of “Race-Conscious” Memorialization in Twenty-First-Century America

Abstract

In this concluding chapter, the authors take up the question of how American communities are going to react to the EJI’s “race conscious” efforts. It is one thing to visit the memorial, dig up soil samples from lynching sites and send them to the Lynching Memorial but quite another to be arguing for massive overhauls in the ways we think about incarceration of African Americans or the need for reparations. Here, the authors argue that their critical genealogical analyses have shown why U.S. communities may be willing to acknowledge the problematics of antebellum, Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, or even 1950s segregationist practices, but they are possibly unwilling to see the lingering influence, in the twenty-first century, of entrenched racial categorizations or carceral practices that can be traced back to post-Civil War years.