Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 38
Some Personal News: I'm Building a Reparations Narrative Lab!
Happy Wednesday!
I hope your week is going well! Today’s Hot Takes section is a special one for me because it’s a Q&A with myself!
Earlier this week, I started as the Director of Narrative Change at Liberation Ventures (more about that in the Hot Takes section). I will be building what we are calling the Reparations Narrative Lab (also more about that in the Hot Takes section).
I’m definitely sad to have left Surdna but really excited to take this next journey in my life and work on an issue that I obviously care so much about. If you’re interested in learning more about LV, the Reparations Narrative Lab, collaborating on a project, or just have any general thoughts around narrative and culture change, please hit my new work email (trevor@liberationventures.org)!
Now, what most of you are really here for; news about reparations. I recommend you check out the following:
Liberated Capital, the donor community and funding vehicle of the Decolonizing Wealth Project’s for organizations working to support Black, Indigenous, and other communities of color, announced its inaugural cohort of grantee-partners doing work to advance reparations in the United States. It’s a great announcement for the field, and I’m personally excited to dig into some of the work of the organizations that received funding, particularly those that I haven’t heard of before; I hope you can too.
I’ve been thinking more and more about climate reparations in the wake of Hurricane Ida. This MSNBC piece doesn’t dig super deep into the topic, but it’s a good piece to start with, and it links to a piece in The Bulletin that does go deeper.
I hope you’re following the student loan forgiveness conversation — if you’re not, this Forbes article that covers a new report from the Sociology of Race and Ethnicity journal gives a great rundown.
I haven’t listened to this radio piece from WNYC, but I will since it features one of my favorite experts on this topic, Anne Price from the Insight Center for Community Economic Development. It’s about the massive real estate boom in the U.S. right now and how unsurprisingly, Black Americans have not benefited.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
Decolonizing Wealth: Decolonizing Wealth Project’s Liberated Capital Announces Recipients of Multi-Million Dollar Initiative for Reparations Advancement
MSNBC: The reparations discussion doesn't end with slavery. Climate reparations now.
WNYC: Black Homebuyers Are Being Left Out of Pandemic Housing Boom
Politico: It’s Time to Dismantle America’s Residential Caste System
CNN: White supremacy, with a tan
Forbes: Biden Wiping Out $10 Billion In Student Loan Debt, Positively Impacts Racial Wealth Gap
Yale News: Numbers, not narratives, remedy misperceptions of the racial wealth gap
Salon: Biden's racial justice agenda must be central to post-Ida disaster recovery
Fortune: The real reason people fear critical race theory
MSNBC: Who is behind critical theory protests?
The Guardian: ‘These are the facts’: Black educators silenced from teaching America’s racist past
Bloomberg: From Aunt Jemima to AI, How Racism Creeps Into Design
Regional News
Courier-Tribune: High Point officials might create NAACP-requested reparations commission
WLOS: Asheville City Council approves American Rescue Plan, reparations funding
Fox 2 Detroit: A discovery at Michigan Central Station, reparations back on the ballot, what the FBI collected in their raid
Citizen-Times: Asheville to vote on $26M COVID-19 aid areas, $366,000 reparations manager contract
NJ.gov: Governor Murphy Establishes Wealth Disparity Task Force
International News
Slate: The U.S. Stole Billions From Haiti. It’s Time to Give It Back.
NY Daily News: 249 Germans convicted under Nazi-era anti-gay law have received reparations
Hot Takes
We’ve all seen these announcements on one social media platform or another. They usually start with “happy to announce” or “some personal news,” followed by either the person announcing a new job or a promotion at their current organization.
I really wanted to find a cooler way to communicate this announcement, but I came up with nothing, so I’m happy to announce that earlier this week, I started as the Director of Narrative Change at Liberation Ventures, where I will be building what we are calling a Reparations Narrative Lab. The Lab, I believe, is one of the first modern intentional spaces designed to test, experiment, and scale narrative and culture strategies to build power around reparations for Black Americans.
I hope to share my learning, stumbling blocks, and successes of the Reparations Narrative Lab with you all in this space as we start to build it out.
Below are a few questions that a few friends and colleagues have asked me. If you personally have any questions or thoughts about this, you know how to reach me!
Q: What is Liberation Ventures?
A: Liberation Ventures is a one-and-a-half-year-old field-builder fueling America’s Black-led racial repair movement by supporting the ecosystem of organizations working to advance truth, reconciliation, and reparations to build public will for a comprehensive federal, financial, and non-financial reparations programs.
You can dig further into LV as an org through its incredible (and evolving) strategy deck, which includes our racial repair framework. I hope to interview two of the co-founders, Aria Florant and Allen Kwabena-Frimpong, for Reparations Daily (ish) sometime this Fall.
I’m super excited to be joining them!
Q: What is it exactly you’ll be doing?
A: As I noted earlier, I’ll be the Director of Narrative Change, which to many of my corporate friends makes no sense, but to my friends in philanthropy and the nonprofit world, I think it’s a little bit more clear. LV is still a small start-up, and as start-up’s go, I’ll be doing a bunch of different things to help the organization grow, but specifically around narrative change, some of the things that I’ll be doing will include;
Helping develop a narrative and culture change grantmaking strategy in collaboration with my colleagues at LV, the ecosystem of reparations practitioners, and other partners.
Standing up a Reparations Narrative Lab, which will build the capacity of the ecosystem of practitioners to design, test, and scale narrative and culture strategies that advance the movement for racial repair nationwide.
Researching, mapping, and naming the current dominant narratives that either weaken or strengthen the narrative power behind
Segmenting audiences to help the field better understand what subgroups sit within the larger audiences we are trying to reach
At the end of the day, I hope creating a narrative infrastructure for this will involve connecting organizations, grounding ourselves in the theory of narrative and culture change, understanding our audiences, to ultimately co-create narrative strategies alongside each other that will bolster our base of supporters and active them to both discuss reparations with the appropriate frames and take action aimed at legislators to push federal reparations across the finish line.
This is just a highlight of some of the things I’ll be doing at LV. What I want to do in the immediate is go on a listening tour and just hear from as many people as possible in this intersectional space of narrative change and racial justice.
I’ll also continue writing and publishing my thoughts on reparations both here and in other outlets.
Q: Why is something like this needed?
A: This work was inspired by Rashad Robinson at the Color of Change, after reading (and re-reading and re-reading) his words in the report, ‘Changing Our Narrative About Narrative,’ where he talks about the infrastructure needed for building narrative power. In it, he says we need a larger infrastructure for storytelling for our storytelling to matter and that making videos and having them see by millions of people is simply not enough because “we need to build the infrastructure that will make those videos known and loved and referenced by millions more people, in a way that influences their lives.”
He defines narrative infrastructure as the ability to learn, create, broadcast, and immerse in the practice of narrative change to reframe how people think about an issue.
To me, the reparations ecosystem clearly needs to have a Narrative Lab to not only create clarity on what we mean by reparations, reparative justice, and truth and reconciliation as a field but also to create the infrastructure needed to so that we can collectively push back against the dominant anti-Black narratives we currently face which have created an atmosphere where reparations for Black Americas are deemed unrealistic.
Q: You’ve been saying narratives a lot; what are you talking about? Also, what’s an example of a narrative change project?
I define narratives as a way of organizing, giving meaning to, and creating an understanding of our experiences, both past, and present. They are the root of our mental models and social practices that guide our decision-making. The stories we tell each other determine what we perceive as “possible.”
I think about narrative change as the process of shifting shared interpretations, dominant mental models and definitions, and dominant mental models that guide our values and perceptions around a specific topic.
A mental model is how the brain understands how something works; it’s similar to a framework or worldview. For example, supply and demand is a mental model that helps us understand how the economy works. We can shift mental models with the stories we tell each other, which again determine what is seen as “possible.”
A recent narrative change project that I’ve really enjoyed watching unfold is the project between Roxanne Gay and Mayors for Guaranteed Income, which they called ‘Essays for a Guaranteed Income.’ They essentially used Gay’s platform to commission 5 essays or stories on a loose prompt of guaranteed income. Each selected author received $2,000 and had their story published in her newsletter this fall. She’s started to publish some of the stories this week. I think it was just a brilliant way of urging people to think and write creatively about a world where guaranteed income could exist and push some excellent writers to engage in a topic they might not have otherwise engaged in. That is just one. There are so many folks doing great work around narrative change, and I hope I can feature some of them in Reparations Daily (ish)
Q: Why did you leave Surdna? It seemed like a dope gig.
A: It was a dope gig, and I learned so much about myself, trust-based philanthropy, racial equity, and so many other topics. I couldn’t think of a better place to have started a career in philanthropy and have nothing but good things to say about it as an organization. While Surdna does racial justice work (on the grantmaking side), what I’ll be doing at LV is more on the practitioner side, which is very exciting, and it’s more specifically focused on my favorite topic; reparations!
Q: Are you excited?
A: I am so excited. I remember reading The Case for Reparations my junior year of undergrad and just wishing that there was a job that would allow me to work on this issue full-time, and now I’m here. I couldn’t be luckier.