Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 77
The Revival of an Abolitionist Newspaper
Happy Tuesday!
The much-anticipated project between The Boston Globe Opinion Boston University’s Center for Antiracist Research launched yesterday. The new joint venture is a revival of the country’s first abolitionist newspaper — The Emancipator.
The original paper was founded in 1820 to advocate for the “abolition of slavery and to be a repository of tracts on that interesting and important subject.”In yesterday’s Editors’ Letter, co-editors-in-chief Amber Payne and Deborah Douglas said that this new version of The Emancipator “will amplify big ideas and solutions for achieving a racially just society.”
Today’s Hot Takes section focuses on their debut series, “We Can Solve The Racial Wealth Gap.”
Some reparations-related news that I recommend reading today:
NPR spoke to some California residents about the possibility of reparations in the state.
Justice for Greenwood, The Terence Crutcher Foundation, Councilwoman Vanessa Hall-Harper, and others will host a press conference today at 1:00 pm ET at the Greenwood Cultural Center. There will also be a virtual town hall at 8:00 pm ET. Both events will be broadcasted on The Black Wall Street Times’ social media channels.
Judges are utilizing racist medical formulas to keep Black people in cages — as detailed in the New York Times.
It’s heartbreaking that the story of Patrick Lyoya is not getting as much attention as it should. Lyoya was just 26 and was shot in the back of the head while facedown on the ground by a Grand Rapids police officer.
With radical love,
Trevor
National News
The Emancipator: The Emancipator reimagines
The Emancipator: We can solve the racial wealth gap
New York Times: How a Race-Based Medical Formula Is Keeping Some Black Men in Prison
NPR: Patrick Lyoya fled Congo to escape war. A traffic stop in Michigan cost him his life
KQED: What Reparations Might Look Like for Indigenous Peoples
KQED: Meet Three of the Women Behind an Indigenous Land Back Effort to Reclaim an SF Peninsula Farm
New York Times: He Fuels the Right’s Cultural Fires (and Spreads Them to Florida)
Harvard Crimson: U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee Discusses the Legacy of Reparations at HKS
Afrotech: Young Black Investors Are Key To Help Close The Racial Wealth Gap, Survey Shows
WGBH: How to close the racial wealth gap through building community wealth
Teen Vogue: Critical Race Theory in Colleges: How It Can Help Empower Students of Color
The New Inquiry: Understanding abolition through bell hooks
Boston Review: Abolition Democracy’s Forgotten Founder
The Grio: Tribeca Festival announces 2022 lineup
NBC News: Women put 'friendly face' on Jan. 6 attack, extremism research argues in new study
Regional News
NPR: Black Californians discuss the possibility of reparations in their state
The Black Wall Street Times: Justice for Greenwood – Press Conference
Fox 23: Hearing set for Tulsa Race Massacre reparations case
Philadelphia Inquirer: Reparations are a moral calling for these Germantown Quakers. First up: Help for Black homeowners.
KUAR: Past board member details flaws with Arkansas Crime Victims Reparations Board
LA Progressive: Reparations for Black Californians
AL.com: Alabama to observe Confederate Memorial Day on Monday; state offices will be closed
AL.com: SPLC denounces Confederate Memorial Day, recognizes removal of monuments
WFTV: Confederate Memorial Day: What is the controversial holiday recognized in Florida?
ABC News: Tennessee county gets permission to remove Confederate flag
NBC News: 'These textbooks are not indoctrination': Florida community reacts to math books rejected for CRT
The Daily Northwestern: Local leaders reflect on Evanston’s reparations effort, one year later
Route Fifty: Cities Pick up Pace on Reparations Efforts, and Controversy Follows
Seattle Times: Reparations for slavery: A road map
International News
The Nation: The Global South Is Calling for Climate Reparations
The Independent: Antigua and Barbuda PM tells Prince Edward and Sophie that Britain should pay slavery reparations
Hot Takes
Despite the sudden closures of The Black News Channel and CNN+, I am hopefully optimistic about The Emancipator becoming a thriving news outlet and a hub for race-related news.
It certainly has a star-studded line-up — it’s headed up by Deborah Douglas, former Managing Editor of MLK 50, and Amber Payne, formerly of NBCBLK, BET, and Teen Vogue. It was co-founded by Ibram Kendi, author of ‘How to Be an Antiracist,” and Bina Venkataraman, editor-at-large of the Boston Globe’s opinion section. And it has some of the most recognizable Black voices serving on its advisory board, including Jelani Cobb, Eddie S. Glaude Jr, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Heather McGhee, and Joy-Ann Reid.
Douglas and Payne state that they hope to use “Black liberation as a point of entry into foundational ideas about freedom and democracy” and uplift “deeply evidenced, scholarly-drive, and community-informed insights” that seek to explore how racism harms everyone.
They kicked off their debut with a series on a topic that I believe is the most pressing social and economic problem of our time (hence this newsletter) — the racial wealth gap.
The author, Kimberly Atkins Stohr, a senior opinion writer and columnist for the Boston Globe, tweeted the below this morning.
In her column, Atkins-Stohr notes that she was inspired to write the series by Maria W. Stewart, an abolitionist, writer, women’s rights activist, and public speaker who was the first woman to lecture to audiences of all genders publicly.
In one of her first speeches to an integrated audience in Boston at the African Masonic Hall, she said;
“Give the man of color an equal opportunity with the white, from the cradle to manhood, and from manhood to the grave, and you would discover the dignified statesman, the man of science, and the philosopher. But there is no such opportunity for the sons of Africa, and I fear that our powerful ones are fully determined that there shall never be.”
This message that if Black people were given an equal starting point, they too would also thrive has been used by the thousands of freedom fighters, advocates, and organizers, who came after Stewart, and a point that Atkins-Stohr illuminates in her column through a story of her own.
She reminisces on the conversations she had with her graduate school classmates on the immense amount of loans she was saddled with, hoping to engage in “a little group venting session.”
She realizes that her primarily white classmates had received their parents' financial aid and were leaving school with no school debt. “That was the first time I really understood what the racial wealth gap was,” Atkins-Stohr points out. “I worked hard, stayed in school, did what I was told to do to be successful. Yet my professional adult life began with me about $200,000 behind the starting line as compared with my peers.”
This is a reality for many college graduates — but the average Black college graduate owes an average of $25,000 more than their white counterparts, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Atkins-Stohor goes on to tell the origins of the racial wealth gap — a story that has been rebranded as Critical Race Theory (it’s not) and being banned from being taught in classrooms across the country.
She then gets to the part that I anxiously wait for whenever reading a piece about the racial wealth gap — reparations. She states that we need to “reimagine reparations” and expand our thinking away from just “transferring wealth from one group to another.” Instead, she insists that we repair American systems to “eliminate the built-in racism that perpetuates injustices like the racial wealth gap, and in the process, making those systems work better for all of us.”
She states that the racial wealth gap series “will offer a number of solutions that a broad array of stakeholders — lawmakers, community members, banks, philanthropists, educational institutions, and more — can begin implementing today.”
It reminded me of a similar, albeit more academic project, published last year by The Aspen Institute and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, titled “The Future of Building Wealth.”
It is a 522-page long book featuring 63 original essays from 106 contributors offering “novel ideas to build the balance sheets of struggling U.S. families.” While I know that the Aspen Institute and Federal Reserve are not the beacons of racial justice that the Antiracism Center hopes to be, they do state that we need to “utilize a reparative lens, with the goal of increasing the wealth of Black and Brown households by meaningful and measurable amounts after too many decades as the target of wealth-stripping actions.”
The book also features racial and economic justice experts such as Kilolo Jijakazi, Angela Glover Blackwell, Aisha Nyandoro, William Darity (featured in vol 31), Kirsten Mullen, Darrick Hamilton, and Naomi Zewde, to name a few. It is the most comprehensive publication related to the racial wealth gap I have seen in recent times — and it’s free.
I mention this not to say that The Emancipator wealth gap series isn’t necessary — it absolutely is necessary. They reach an audience that the Aspen Institute and Federal Reserve could never reach.
As a curator of this type of news and commentary, I feel compelled to urge us all to read, read, and read some more. It was Octavia Butler who said that “there is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
I wish The Emancipator and all involved the best of luck on their work in bringing us closer to a new sun.