Ok??? You now capitalists love to pay out settlement and keep doing crime! No more. We gotta change the whole thing -- soup to nuts, rooter to tooter, lock, stock, and barrel lol
Because after the pay out, then what? We absolutely need solutions. My friend and I were just talking about the various needs of our community - reparations yes but maybe another solution, in addition to reparations is establishing more think tanks - centers of research, and incubators of new ideas. One that consists of researchers, scholars, and everyday people to identify issues impacting long-term economic development, designing alternative policy frameworks to address the underlying issues. We see the symptoms, the think tanks help with recommending and implementing real solutions.
You are speaking my language! I love progressive think tanks. I feel like we could do with some radical think tanks as well. I actually kind of wanna write a piece on this. Sometimes I feel like on the left we have a lot of really good radical ideas, but not necessarily the public policy to flesh it out. So I think it would be so dope if we really got into the nitty-gritty of what radical changed look like. I think having a really well articulated vision can help bring people along with us too who maybe aren’t already convinced by the idea alone. I want all of the binders, the white papers, the conferences, the charts, the graphs lol.
Exactly! Especially to your point in the essay about predatory lending via check cashing / pay day loans. Financial institutions like banks, purposely redlined a lot of cities that are heavily populated by Black people, which then opened the door for these predatory institutions to serve the underbanked population. These are people who do not have access to a bank for many reasons, either there accounts were closed due to overdraft payments, some people do not live in close proximity of banks, others do not have a permanent residence which are required to open checking accounts, along with a host of other reasons why people do not have bank accounts. This is clearly a policy issue, but there are alternative solutions for addressing this issue by offering communities access to banks. Some people may suggest financial technology companies due to the convenience of easily banking on an app, however, not everyone is tech savvy, some people do not have cellphones, others prefer an institution they can actually walk in to the building because its accessible, lastly folks want to build relationships with their bankers. This opens up a larger conversation on what institutions are willing to come to the communities to serve the underbanked. That's where the think tank comes in at - connecting people, institutions, and policy to alternative solutions.
It seems like the case here is primarily about the moral abomination of chattel slavery and subsequent racist oppressions. If that's the case, then are you also advocating for reparations for every other major moral travesty perpetuated by the US? We never paid reparations to Native Americans for a policy of genocide. We never paid Vietnam, Iraq, or North Korea for absolutely obliterating their countries through wars of aggression. We're currently doing the same thing again to Iran. We owe Cuba reparations for 66 years of blockade, and Chile for backing a nightmarish military dictatorship, Angola for prolonging their disastrous civil war by decades, Cambodia for propping up the Khmer Rouge, and Indonesia for backing a coup and political genocide that killed half a million. I could go on. The point is not what-aboutism. The point is that reparations to the descendants of slaves will not morally rectify America. True moral absolution would mean redistributing almost all of the accumulated wealth of this country, not only to those wronged here, but across the world as well.
No disagreement for me lol! I think that there are plural cases for reparations. I think empires know that too, which is why they are so hesitant to apologize for historic crimes because they feel like it opens the floodgates. And because economies are more dynamic than static, I don’t even know if it would require the dissipation of wealth per se, but perhaps the restructuring of it.
Looks like we’re on the same page with that! The next question to me is how though? I worry that advancing one targeted reparations effort often becomes a justification for all of the other abuses of the empire, past, present and future. We get to feel great about ourselves because we’re so enlightened about antiracism, while we continue to terrorize, exploit, and spoil any number of other people or places. Like when every major US corporation posted a black square, a DEI statement, and sent a million dollars to the BLM Global Network Foundation in 2020. The same Democrats kneeling in kente clothes for George Floyd lined up behind Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Your points about reshaping our economic and political order are the ones that I resonate with most. Frankly, I'd prioritize those strategically because it seems like a more auspicious way to unite mass politics around creating a better society. As I've gestured towards, my problems with trying to morally redistribute the spoils of imperial capitalism is that it's a system built on violent expropriation and worker exploitation. Every time you address one historic harm it risks embittered backlash from many other groups that were also f-ed over but get excluded from reparations because of the structure of each ask. There's a chance that everyone can wait patiently in line, but why not focus on a universalist platform as a way of uniting them for maximum leverage?
At root, I think the history is so messy that I don't think we can rectify it through a staged reparations process. The better bet, and majority political coalition, seems to be fighting for a society in which we create a true equality of opportunity and baseline of dignity. As in, the past is full of abuses that we can't ever fully reconcile, but we can create a much better future founded on worker's rights and universal provision of the things that make it possible to thrive, like high quality education, healthcare, housing, clean air, water, etc. You know, socialism.
Universal programs are awesome & socialism is great! I just don’t think that socialism is mutually exclusive with reparations. I don’t know how much you’ve read on reparations, but a lot of the crimes that it is seeking to repair are a lot more recent than you might think. For example, I went to a small Black state college in Georgia that was robbed, from 1980s through the 2020s, of hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding, depriving Black students, scholarships, communities, etc. The Biden Administration found that for Black colleges nationwide, southern states had robbed them of billions and billions in funding over the last three decades. You can read about it in the AP. So many of these crimes arent “historic”. They are ongoing.
There are many racialized crimes like this within the last 50 years—disparate payments in life insurance that have been denied to Black workers, stolen wages, stolen pensions, etc. Perhaps it’s just the word “reparations” that makes people uncomfortable, but functionally, what you’re gonna tell a lot of living people—people, some of whom are as young as in their 30s or as old as in their 90s—that they have been the victims of financial crimes, white-collar crimes, whether it’s denied benefits, stolen homes, stolen rent, stolen scholarships and that they won’t be repaid for it. It’s a difficult thing to do, to tell people who have been the victims of racially targeted fraud—fraud that is within the statute of limitations—that they should not be made whole because it makes other people uncomfortable and is bad politics.
Now, that’s a position someone can have, but I don’t think that is a moral one. I think it’s an illegal one, but it may be a politically expedient one. I think smart politics can find a way to tell that story in a way that doesn’t alienate people—maybe it’s about zeroing in on the specificities of crimes—but I don’t think justice has to be abandoned to do good politics. I don't think repair is incompatible with socialism, a democratic economy, worker ownership, public goods, and socialized medicine.
You know, I don't think of reparations projects as mutually exclusive, I think you can run them concurrently. There is nothing about paying a 85 Black sanitation worker from Memphis who was robbed of his pension that prevents you from also compensating a family who was bombed in Gaza. I think justice can be broad, dynamic, and simultaneous.
I also think a key component of repair is redistributing power moving forward. It is something Leroy talks about in his book, the Lowest Freedom. The enslaved wanted remuneration, but they also insisted on structural transformation of the economy as well. For me thats, where things get really exciting, because it makes the project of repair one where the formerly disempowered have the opportunity to reshape the world to make the exploitation they suffered obsolete.
I think that project –empowering, consulting, and co-governing with the harmed on how to reimagine a just society– is one that can be advanced across multiple areas at once.
Regarding the Dems - yeah they are hypocrites. And corporations are lol. A lot of them are just performative. I personally don't think of anything that happened in 2020 as reparation. More PR really. Just promo from corporations that have redlined, private prisoned, priced gouged, food deserted, food swamped, and stolen wages in Black neighborhoods for decades.
I write about Black folks specifically in this article, because that is my area of journalistic expertise. (The Memphis story is a real example from a 2018 story I worked on where the the sanitation workers who marched with Dr. King in 68 had been deprived of their city pensions.) But I think a lot of folks can get free, and get justice at the same time.
Reparations, yes, but the whole system needs to change for the reparations to be effective. Thanks for this thoughtful article!
Ok??? You now capitalists love to pay out settlement and keep doing crime! No more. We gotta change the whole thing -- soup to nuts, rooter to tooter, lock, stock, and barrel lol
Brilliant!!!!
❤️❤️❤️
Because after the pay out, then what? We absolutely need solutions. My friend and I were just talking about the various needs of our community - reparations yes but maybe another solution, in addition to reparations is establishing more think tanks - centers of research, and incubators of new ideas. One that consists of researchers, scholars, and everyday people to identify issues impacting long-term economic development, designing alternative policy frameworks to address the underlying issues. We see the symptoms, the think tanks help with recommending and implementing real solutions.
You are speaking my language! I love progressive think tanks. I feel like we could do with some radical think tanks as well. I actually kind of wanna write a piece on this. Sometimes I feel like on the left we have a lot of really good radical ideas, but not necessarily the public policy to flesh it out. So I think it would be so dope if we really got into the nitty-gritty of what radical changed look like. I think having a really well articulated vision can help bring people along with us too who maybe aren’t already convinced by the idea alone. I want all of the binders, the white papers, the conferences, the charts, the graphs lol.
Exactly! Especially to your point in the essay about predatory lending via check cashing / pay day loans. Financial institutions like banks, purposely redlined a lot of cities that are heavily populated by Black people, which then opened the door for these predatory institutions to serve the underbanked population. These are people who do not have access to a bank for many reasons, either there accounts were closed due to overdraft payments, some people do not live in close proximity of banks, others do not have a permanent residence which are required to open checking accounts, along with a host of other reasons why people do not have bank accounts. This is clearly a policy issue, but there are alternative solutions for addressing this issue by offering communities access to banks. Some people may suggest financial technology companies due to the convenience of easily banking on an app, however, not everyone is tech savvy, some people do not have cellphones, others prefer an institution they can actually walk in to the building because its accessible, lastly folks want to build relationships with their bankers. This opens up a larger conversation on what institutions are willing to come to the communities to serve the underbanked. That's where the think tank comes in at - connecting people, institutions, and policy to alternative solutions.
And cuz they have been getting the short end of the stick for 250 years in America
It seems like the case here is primarily about the moral abomination of chattel slavery and subsequent racist oppressions. If that's the case, then are you also advocating for reparations for every other major moral travesty perpetuated by the US? We never paid reparations to Native Americans for a policy of genocide. We never paid Vietnam, Iraq, or North Korea for absolutely obliterating their countries through wars of aggression. We're currently doing the same thing again to Iran. We owe Cuba reparations for 66 years of blockade, and Chile for backing a nightmarish military dictatorship, Angola for prolonging their disastrous civil war by decades, Cambodia for propping up the Khmer Rouge, and Indonesia for backing a coup and political genocide that killed half a million. I could go on. The point is not what-aboutism. The point is that reparations to the descendants of slaves will not morally rectify America. True moral absolution would mean redistributing almost all of the accumulated wealth of this country, not only to those wronged here, but across the world as well.
No disagreement for me lol! I think that there are plural cases for reparations. I think empires know that too, which is why they are so hesitant to apologize for historic crimes because they feel like it opens the floodgates. And because economies are more dynamic than static, I don’t even know if it would require the dissipation of wealth per se, but perhaps the restructuring of it.
Looks like we’re on the same page with that! The next question to me is how though? I worry that advancing one targeted reparations effort often becomes a justification for all of the other abuses of the empire, past, present and future. We get to feel great about ourselves because we’re so enlightened about antiracism, while we continue to terrorize, exploit, and spoil any number of other people or places. Like when every major US corporation posted a black square, a DEI statement, and sent a million dollars to the BLM Global Network Foundation in 2020. The same Democrats kneeling in kente clothes for George Floyd lined up behind Israel’s genocide in Gaza.
Your points about reshaping our economic and political order are the ones that I resonate with most. Frankly, I'd prioritize those strategically because it seems like a more auspicious way to unite mass politics around creating a better society. As I've gestured towards, my problems with trying to morally redistribute the spoils of imperial capitalism is that it's a system built on violent expropriation and worker exploitation. Every time you address one historic harm it risks embittered backlash from many other groups that were also f-ed over but get excluded from reparations because of the structure of each ask. There's a chance that everyone can wait patiently in line, but why not focus on a universalist platform as a way of uniting them for maximum leverage?
At root, I think the history is so messy that I don't think we can rectify it through a staged reparations process. The better bet, and majority political coalition, seems to be fighting for a society in which we create a true equality of opportunity and baseline of dignity. As in, the past is full of abuses that we can't ever fully reconcile, but we can create a much better future founded on worker's rights and universal provision of the things that make it possible to thrive, like high quality education, healthcare, housing, clean air, water, etc. You know, socialism.
Universal programs are awesome & socialism is great! I just don’t think that socialism is mutually exclusive with reparations. I don’t know how much you’ve read on reparations, but a lot of the crimes that it is seeking to repair are a lot more recent than you might think. For example, I went to a small Black state college in Georgia that was robbed, from 1980s through the 2020s, of hundreds of millions of dollars in state funding, depriving Black students, scholarships, communities, etc. The Biden Administration found that for Black colleges nationwide, southern states had robbed them of billions and billions in funding over the last three decades. You can read about it in the AP. So many of these crimes arent “historic”. They are ongoing.
There are many racialized crimes like this within the last 50 years—disparate payments in life insurance that have been denied to Black workers, stolen wages, stolen pensions, etc. Perhaps it’s just the word “reparations” that makes people uncomfortable, but functionally, what you’re gonna tell a lot of living people—people, some of whom are as young as in their 30s or as old as in their 90s—that they have been the victims of financial crimes, white-collar crimes, whether it’s denied benefits, stolen homes, stolen rent, stolen scholarships and that they won’t be repaid for it. It’s a difficult thing to do, to tell people who have been the victims of racially targeted fraud—fraud that is within the statute of limitations—that they should not be made whole because it makes other people uncomfortable and is bad politics.
Now, that’s a position someone can have, but I don’t think that is a moral one. I think it’s an illegal one, but it may be a politically expedient one. I think smart politics can find a way to tell that story in a way that doesn’t alienate people—maybe it’s about zeroing in on the specificities of crimes—but I don’t think justice has to be abandoned to do good politics. I don't think repair is incompatible with socialism, a democratic economy, worker ownership, public goods, and socialized medicine.
https://apnews.com/article/black-landgrant-universities-tennessee-state-95d9000d51c281f51aecd35932c88b79
You know, I don't think of reparations projects as mutually exclusive, I think you can run them concurrently. There is nothing about paying a 85 Black sanitation worker from Memphis who was robbed of his pension that prevents you from also compensating a family who was bombed in Gaza. I think justice can be broad, dynamic, and simultaneous.
I also think a key component of repair is redistributing power moving forward. It is something Leroy talks about in his book, the Lowest Freedom. The enslaved wanted remuneration, but they also insisted on structural transformation of the economy as well. For me thats, where things get really exciting, because it makes the project of repair one where the formerly disempowered have the opportunity to reshape the world to make the exploitation they suffered obsolete.
I think that project –empowering, consulting, and co-governing with the harmed on how to reimagine a just society– is one that can be advanced across multiple areas at once.
Regarding the Dems - yeah they are hypocrites. And corporations are lol. A lot of them are just performative. I personally don't think of anything that happened in 2020 as reparation. More PR really. Just promo from corporations that have redlined, private prisoned, priced gouged, food deserted, food swamped, and stolen wages in Black neighborhoods for decades.
I write about Black folks specifically in this article, because that is my area of journalistic expertise. (The Memphis story is a real example from a 2018 story I worked on where the the sanitation workers who marched with Dr. King in 68 had been deprived of their city pensions.) But I think a lot of folks can get free, and get justice at the same time.