Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 86

What Every Black Person Deserves

Aug 12, 2022

Happy Friday!

Some reparations-related news:

California is embarking on a series of listening sessions to receive feedback from the community on the historic legislation.

Evanston allocated another $3.45 million in reparations funds.

An argument about how slavery fueled the climate crisis.

They got a new hotline to report white supremacists, so you can start snitching on that neighbor who always gives you funny looks.

Did the Pope offer an adequate apology? Indigenous people on the land that is now called Canada don’t believe so.

White adults are more than twice as likely as others to get financial help from their parents or elders.

Mississippi has more incarcerated people per capita than any state or nation, including China, Russia, and Iran.

Illinois is making billions off its marijuana sales.

They are trying to do DNA tests in Tulsa to see if folks are the descendants of those killed in the massacre. Policing and surveillance experts don’t think it’s a good idea. (I don’t either)

I remember reading this story back in 2020 about a bike shop offering ‘reparations’ in the form of a 45 percent discount to any Black customer who wanted to buy a bike. The company’s lawyers advised shutting the initiative down.

The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation is looking to fund research proposals on how effective policies like reparations, baby bonds, and UBI are.

A grand jury declined to indict the woman whose lie got Emmett Till lynched.

Fox News is turning its attention to bashing reparations.

A new report from the ACLU and Human Rights Watch on solutions to racial discrimination.

Decolonizing Wealth made its second round of grants in its #Case4Reparations funding initiative.

Teachers continue to be told not to talk about race.

Opinion

I’ve been feeling particularly grateful over the last few weeks.

I partnered with a dozen other organizations within the reparations and racial justice space to kick off Liberation Ventures’ first narrative initiative — the Reparations Narrative Lab.

I joined forces with the fantastic folks at Common Future on their Policy Incubator program.

My friend, Jhumpa Bhattacharya, and I penned an op-ed that explores what we can learn from the recent Child Tax Credit debate in our advocacy for reparations.

In it, we highlight some of the narratives at play that served as roadblocks, one of which is the ‘deservedness’ narrative.

We argue that lawmakers often “frame programs as the Child Tax Credit or guaranteed income as hand-outs. Yet, when predominantly white-owned companies are given billions of dollars in public grants and loans to avoid a collapse brought on by their poor business decisions,” they are seen as bailouts necessary to keep the economy alive.

We operate from the mental model that people get what they deserve. We perceive an individual as deserving based on assumptions about particular outcomes that we believe should match a person’s behavior or character. Our mental models around deservedness are strongly linked to our conceptions of justice — what we perceive to be fair and equal. And our conceptions of collective conceptions of justice are violently anti-Black.

Racist tropes of the welfare-queen, the “super predator,” and others still linger throughout our collective consciousness and impact what we deem as “fair” or “equitable,” as Jhumpa and I argue in the Nonprofit Quarterly piece.

“The federal government intercepts child support payments made to low-income families who receive public cash assistance from TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) to recoup that program’s costs. And like its forerunner programs, TANF became more and more punitive as Black women and other women of color enrolled in greater numbers, making it a prime example of a federal policy that puts our notions of deservedness to the test. Our government simply does not believe that Black families deserve public aid and therefore takes money away from young children—via families receiving child support—to offset a public goods program.”

How then might we shift these narratives? Social psychologists have argued that encouraging a belief that everyone deserves certain rights broadens people’s definition of humanity and extends social categories of who is seen as an in-group member.

Though, recognizing our shared humanity alone is not enough to shift perceptions about deservedness and justice. We must also shift our perceptions about race, particularly about Blackness.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about an exercise I participated in at the Aspen IDEAS Festival created by Eric Liu called ‘Ten Things Every American Should Know.’

Perhaps, to shift the narrative about deservedness, we should ask, ‘what are ten things every Black person deserves?’

Here’s my list:

10 Things Every Black Person Deserves

Love
Moments of serenity
Education
Time to read, write, and listen/watch music, poetry, and art
Adequate housing
Affordable healthcare
Clean air, water, and space
Enough capital to live
Their entire identities to be recognized and protected
Reparations

What are ten things you think every Black person deserves? Write down your list and email it to me at (tsmith@reparationslab.org) if you’d like to have it featured in a future edition of Reparations Daily (ish)!

With radical love,
Trevor