Unable to See the Forest for the Trees: Transitional Justice and the United States of America

This chapter analyses transitional justice as social justice in the United States, taking the field’s ‘four pillars’ as an organising structure for an empirical overview from local to federal levels. It demonstrates that there have recently been several justice processes taking the form of truth-telling, reparations schemes and guarantees of non-recurrence, although these are rarely perceived and articulated as transitional justice. These initiatives have occurred mainly at the level of the community, university, city, or state, although a few have been initiated and implemented at the federal level. They seek to address a range of violence and wrongs historically and in the recent past, such as lynchings of Black people, violence against labour organisers, the internment of Japanese Americans during WWII, racialised education and housing policies, discrimination against Native and Black Americans, and police violence. The first pillar, criminal accountability, is most wanting.