Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 64
Organizing Young People on Reparations: A Conversation with Sydni Scott
Happy Monday!
I’ve long known that Gen Z is special. They’ve grown up in a tech and internet-obsessed world that no other generation has ever experienced and been exposed to social issues much earlier than the rest of us ever were.
When I worked at the New York Civil Liberties Union, I got to work a little bit with some high school students through their Teen Activist Project (TAP). These students take what they’re learning from NYCLU lawyers and strategists and create campaigns, organize protests, and write op-eds on an array of issues. I was in awe of the mature and creative ways they would approach these issues and have always thought it was one of the best parts of my time at the NYCLU.
Students have always played an essential role in our fight for a more racially just world, and they will again play an important role in securing reparations for Black Americans.
Last summer, I was following the events to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre and came across a group called The Amendment Project (whose acronym is also funnily enough TAP). Their Instagram bio read, “we are a student-led grassroots organization raising awareness and lobbying city councils for reparations for Black and Indigenous Americans, #TAPin.”
I shot them a DM and met the founder and director, Sydni Scott, a few weeks later.
Within the first 10 minutes of speaking with Sydni, I knew that I had met someone who would catalyst the movement.
A pre-law senior at Columbia University, track-and-field athlete, a recent recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, and the daughter of famed ESPN anchor Stuart Scott, Sydni took some time out to speak with me last week about her path to starting TAP and what organizing young people around this issue has looked like.
You can follow TAP on Instagram, their handle is theamendmentproject, or subscribe to their blog, TAP Weekly, here. Head to the Hot Takes section for the full interview.
Here are some pieces I’d recommend checking out today:
This podcast from Harvard on what reparations and restorative justice have historically looked like in the United States.
This Politico article on the ways in which American white supremacist groups are branching out internationally.
This story from ABC about a Black woman who recently retired from her job at a Confederate museum.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
Harvard Kennedy School: The United States pays reparations every day—just not to Black America
USA Today: Supreme Court fight shows why Americans have such a hard time talking about equity for Black women
Politico: Is Biden Ignoring a Key Tool to Combat Violent Extremists?
New York Times: The Backlash Against C.R.T. Shows That Republicans Are Losing Ground
Business Insider: Book bans and anti-critical race theory laws won't stop these educators from teaching Black History Month
Smithsonian: More Than 500 Acres of Redwood Forest Returned to Indigenous Tribes
ABC News: Black worker at Confederate site raises race complaint
ABC News: Critical race theory thrust into spotlight by misinformation
The Root: Is the Race-Wealth Gap About to Get Worse?
MSNBC: ‘A systemic incident of poor behavior’: NFL forced to confront its diversity issues.’
NPR: Federal hate crimes trial set to begin for Ahmaud Arbery's convicted killers
CNBC: Black business leaders: Advice for the next generation on overcoming racial and economic inequity
Teen Vogue: Black History Month 2022: What Is There to Celebrate?
Nonprofit Quarterly: Goodbye “Race Neutrality”—The Case for Race-Conscious Economic Policy
Reason: Educators, Please Stop Teaching the Characteristics of 'White Supremacy Culture'
The Nation: The GOP Dials Up Its Attacks on Critical Race Theory
Yahoo News: Art as reparation: Artist Nikesha Breeze delivers dignity to African ancestors
Regional News
NBC 12: Gov. Youngkin defends education tip line and moves on critical race theory
Rolling Stone: Arizona Republican Compares Opposition to Anti-Democratic Election Bill to a ‘Lynching’
Marijuana Moment: Washington Governor Says Use Marijuana Money To Repair Harms For Communities Targeted By Drug War
KQED: An Example of 'Land Back' in Northern California
Hot Takes
The following conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
Trevor: Thanks for joining us, Sydni. Can you tell me a bit about yourself? Where are you from, and what do reparations mean to you and your family?
Sydni: I was born in North Carolina, and both of my parents are from North Carolina. They both went to UNC but didn’t know each other while they were there, but I think it’s cute that they have the same alma mater.
My dad started working at ESPN, so my family moved to Connecticut. In a lot of ways, my childhood was influential in pushing me to want to engage with racial equity and ultimately reparations. I was fortunate, and I had a great childhood, and I attribute that to the fact that there were resources available to spur my curiosity.
It also was a little bit a representation of how proximate Black wealth is to Black generational poverty. My sister and I were the first in our family to have that privilege of education and exposure. So, in many ways, growing up and being in a predominantly white school and then going home and visiting with family, I realized that these were not opportunities extended to everyone in our family or every little Black girl growing up in the world.
I know that a lot comes from being able to provide opportunities for exploration, and that is something that I’ll never forget. But, still, there is something wrong if not every child has the opportunities I had growing up. So, if there is something that I can do to rectify that, then I have to pursue it.
Trevor: Right. So then tell me what the transition was like from high school to college. What has your college experience been like? How did The Amendment Project start?
Sydni: Absolutely. So, freshman year, I was intimidated by the prospect of living and navigating New York, but that was part of the reason for wanting to go to Columbia. I figured if I could figure myself out and grow as a person while navigating this global city, I could go anywhere.
I came in freshman year a little overwhelmed, and I think I took a step back from some of the things I was passionate about. I was the head of diversity at my high school and engaged with social and racial justice issues, but when I started college, I was focused on managing my time as a student-athlete and figuring everything out.
At the beginning of my Sophomore year, I injured my knee badly and was on crutches for about ten months, and I had all of this free time, so I started to get back into all of these topics.
Then Covid happened and then the reignition of the global movement for racial justice, but I couldn’t go to protests because I wasn’t physically mobile. I had a lot of time to reflect and figure out how I could be doing more with the opportunities that I’d been afforded.
I ended up joining one of my high school’s alumni boards and organized a panel series in the summer with the first Black student who graduated from my high school — and she’s not even that old.
So it was a process for me to examine what these issues look like in my community and the microscopic places that I inhabit, and I realized that I don’t have to do some massive revolutionary thing; it can be addressing these issues on smaller levels in my own community.
The Amendment Project started because I was researching the racial wealth gap with a professor, specifically about public opinion on race-conscious policy versus race-neutral policy.
I came across Evanston’s reparations resolution. It was the most incredible thing because even though I was studying politics, I had never come across reparations as a feasible solution. So I got hooked by that, and I did my own research project on reparations and thought about what else I could do to get more students interested in this topic.
There is a lot to talk about and discuss, and it’s complicated and nuanced, and none of it is easy, but it is so worth the conversation. It is so worth talking about it in practice and thinking about what equity means, what debt means, what reparative justice means, and all of these things.
Trevor: That’s amazing. Where did The Amendment Project's name come from, and what did some of those initial conversations with your fellow students sound like?
Sydni: So the name for The Amendment Project came after watching a conservative pundit talk about the fact that the United States was not founded on racism. It was ridiculous to us because if you look at the drafting and implementation of the US Constitution, Black people weren’t considered human beings. But, through amendments, we had imperfectly changed the foundational structure of the United States.
So part of naming it The Amendment Project was to examine the relationship between amending, repairing, and restoring. Also, embarrassingly, since the acronym was TAP, at the time, and the tap-in challenge was very popular, we thought we could capitalize on that.
Trevor: It’s funny you bring up TikTok because I found you all on Instagram when I was trying to follow everything going on in Tulsa last year. What did that work look like, and what are some of the other projects you got going on?
Sydni: Tulsa was the first campaign that we worked on, and it was exciting to be a part of. We were introduced to the campaign in Tulsa through Keith Young, a former city council member from Asheville, North Carolina, who ultimately got the reparations resolution passed in Asheville. He had been working with other municipalities to pass reparations resolutions.
We ended up having meetings with some city council members in Tulsa who were considering a resolution around the Tulsa Race Massacre. The campaign work we were going to be doing was to encourage people to advocate for this bill to be passed through email campaigns, phone call campaigns, and petition campaigns.
A student on my team who was a computer science major coded hundreds of different emails, and essentially we had a little over 10,000 people participate through these different streams.
It was special because we had a crazy 48 hours where we were doing all of this work, and at the end of it, we were watching the live stream of the hearing, and we had this moment where we realized that we meaningfully contributed to this effort with just laptops and wifi.
One of the biggest lessons about TAP that I have learned is that it often feels as if there are unspoken rules of what you can do as a student. As a result, there is some hesitance as someone so young to feel like I could engage in something that someone hasn’t explicitly told me that I’m allowed to pursue.
After the first campaign, we had a workshop with the ACLU and their summer institute. We did a case study workshop and went through some background on who we were and then split up into breakout rooms, and had students would work through the tenets of reparations and what it might look like in different contexts.
Every single session that we did, students came up with new solutions or new ways than we had never thought about before. That is the beautiful part about working on with young people.
Trevor: Right, so what do you think is the role students can and should play in the reparations movement?
Sydni: Looking forward, our major goal right now is to expand our workshop team so that we can bring these ideas to more schools, particularly high school students.
We’ve also been with organizations in Boston over the last nine months as they are pursuing a reparations resolution on both the city and state levels. We are working with King Boston, BECMA, and the Black Mass Coalition to mobilize folks. Boston City Council had a hearing in the Fall, and we organized with many student groups on sending in testimony.
Trevor: I think there’s also a ton of opportunity for you all to start pushing universities to reckon with their role in slavery and racial discrimination, but let’s switch gears a bit and talk about sports. You’re an athlete. Can you tell me about your career and the conversations with your teammates and coaches around reparations?
Sydni: Sports has been a very integral part of who I am as a person. My dad was obviously very engaged with sports, and my mom, grandad, and grandmother all played tennis.
I’ve played sports since I was five and have played competitively throughout my life, but my knee injury was freeing in a way because it gave me the room to breathe and reflect on who I wanted to be and how I wanted to spend my time.
I’ve gone back to the track, and I love being a part of that team, but since TAP started, there have been more conversations about sports and my reparations work.
When we first started with six people, five of them were track athletes at Columbia. It is a community where people support these ideas and projects, but it’s also a big team with over 100 people.
It also come at an interesting time when the track team struggled to contend with how to approach issues of race. The team has cautiously made its way through in addressing these issues, and it’s sometimes felt like box-ticking, but honestly, I don’t think people know what to do. I genuinely think people are trying but haven’t contended with it enough to lead a large team through that kind of accountability process.
It’s been complicated. It wouldn’t be accurate to say that it’s been all positive or all negative. It’s been special to work on something I’m passionate about with my teammates, and even though it’s not as blissful as one might want, it’s been a memorable experience.
Trevor: What role do you think professional athletes should play in the reparations fight? In the wake of the Brian Flores lawsuit, conversations at the collegiate level of paying athletes, the Colin Kapernick story, and the steam that reparations is gaining in places like California and Evanston, what role should athletes play at this moment?
Sydni: I love this question because I think there is a lot of potential for athletes to play a critical role. Sports as an industry has always shielded itself from any criticism of racial discrimination under the idea that Black athletes have dominated certain sports, and that sports are an area where people can come together and not be judged by the color of their skin. This lawsuit from Brian Flores and other similar cases proves that isn’t true, and the pushback on that narrative is essential, but because sports do have a meaningful role in creating bonds — professional athletes can help shift the way people think about this topic.
Athletics has always been political in the same way that Hollywood and film have been political, and there is a lot of room in this reparations conversation for athletes to speak up. I think that athletes can put a voice to reparations that will legitimize it and humanize it and bring it down to a level where many more people can understand the concept of reparations.
A lot of people can get behind the idea that someone was harmed, and it is our responsibility to rectify that harm. That is an idea that I think many people can get behind. Athletes could launch this topic further into our mainstream and broad political consciousness and invite people who never came across it before to investigate what reparations could mean for Black communities.
Trevor: Amazing answer, and I 100 percent agree with you. Last question, I’d love to talk a bit about your dad. He had a significant impact on the world and I’m sure he had a similar effect on you. What did that impact look like? What do you think he would say to you in this moment about reparations and the work you are doing?
Sydni: There was nothing better in the world than me having a good game and then talking to him about it afterward. It was just the most exciting and thrilling thing for me. I was 15 when he died, and a lot of my interests in racial justice were still developing, but essentially I think that the fundamental narrative of not giving up on things and pursuing things with a sense of purpose.
I found that valuable as it relates to sports, and I’m now trying to transition that to other parts of my life.
I love hearing stories about what it meant for him to represent Black culture in a mainstream way. He maintained a refusal to conform to what was demanded of contemporary sports broadcast journalism. Even subtly, when I couldn't recognize it in these words, it demonstrated to me that it’s worth the sacrifice to refuse to turn your back on the community that raised you, especially when you can recognize that there are inequities that remain.
I would love to know what he would’ve thought about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. His engagement with Black culture was grounded in who he was as a person. As my sister and I got older, we started challenging him on whether he had a critical lens for analyzing these things.
I don’t know where he would’ve stood. He didn’t shy away from controversy, and he didn’t shy away from giving his opinion on most things. I think it would’ve been exciting and special to see someone who has done so much to champion Black people to talk and think about reparations and the Black Lives Matter movement. As a prominent Black public figure, it would have been interesting to navigate his role and what it means to watch these conversations about race become more explicit. So, I’m not sure, but I think he would’ve been open to the conversation we’re currently having.
Trevor: Right, so I appreciate you taking the time. It was so amazing to sit down and speak with you, and you know I’ll be watching what you and continue to do.
Great interview with Sydni. Keep up the good work, Trevor!