Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 92

Reparations Need Not Be Reimagined

Nov 25, 2022

Happy Friday —

It’s been a little while since our last edition — mostly because I’ve been busy with conferences, symposiums, and shows (I’ve seen Robert Glasper twice in the last month — it was immaculate ).

OG @GRReynolds3

Robert Glasper, Bilal, and Lalah Hathaway covering Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" 🙏🏾👏🏿

I have been reading, watching, listening, and writing. A few weeks ago, my colleague and I published an op-ed in Yes! Magazine titled ‘On the Other Side of Reparations, a New World Awaits,’ which I’ll expand on in today’s Opinion section.

Some thoughts on recent news:

We have something to learn from Germany’s monument landscape.

We should be talking about affirmative action more.

The city of Providence’s $10 million reparations budget is set. Here’s what they’re spending it on.

There’s a new documentary called Deconstructing Karen about a dinner experience where white women are asked to interrogate their own racism. I watched it a few weeks ago; it was thoroughly entertaining.

The New York Times and I agree — white supremacy is a global problem.

It’s inspiring to see the growing momentum behind the LANDBACK movement.

The International African American Museum is slated to open this January in Charleston. It looks incredible.

Opinion

Good writers find ways to make at least one sentence stick with you. The best writers find ways to completely transform your worldview.

Ever since I started reading A History of Hope: When Americans Have Dared to Dream of a Better Future by historian James Fraser, I’ve been transfixed by the idea of hope. '

The social psychologists who have broken down the meaning of hope define it as “a snapshot of a person’s current goal-directed thinking, highlighting the motivated pursuit of goals and the expectation that those goals can be achieved.”

As it relates to social change, particularly regarding matters surrounding race, we have little collective hope that our current state of affairs can be radically transformed. This can be evidenced by arguments like those of Columbia University Professor Andrew Delbanco, who recently penned a piece in the Washington Post calling for reparations to be “reimagined in a way that could turn aspiration into action.”

As If It Could Be Otherwise…

As mentioned earlier, my colleague and I also recently published a similar piece that called for our country to radically engage its imaginations. Both of our pieces quote an emerging voice within the reparations conversation, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. Though, it seems we have two different interpretations of Táíwò and his recent book, Reconsidering Reparations.

Delbanco calls for a version of reparations that is more inclusive of all people, including white people alluding to the fact that “a great many of white Americans feel as demeaned and discarded as Black Americans, and just as forgotten.”

I hate to engage in what some might call “Oppression Olympics,” but Delbanco leaves me no choice. Any effort to equate the feelings of white people with those of Black people in a conversation about racism and racial violence is futile.

There is a common suggestion among political and academic elites that reparations for Black Americans are unfeasible because of the likely ensuing backlash from white Americans. It should alarm us that our fear of white racial violence prevents us from moving forward with addressing past harm.

As it relates to social change, particularly concerning matters of race, racism, and anti-Blackness, we have a profound inability to look at things as if they could be otherwise.

This inability elicit arguments that acquiesce to the status quo — that do not dare to dream of a world where we have abolished the current constructs that deeply embed inequality.

We must not reimagine reparations. We must reimagine our understanding of what Black people deserve — a point I will continuously make.

We must construct an entirely new worldview that admits that the ‘American Dream has always been a farce — a lie from both economic and racial perspectives.

Black People Deserve…

How do we construct a new worldview?

I do not have an exact answer, but I know that we must all collectively agree that our current worldview is worth discarding.

Once there, I believe and hope, we can construct a new social imagination filled with transformed deep narratives, stories, and messages — a new collective language.

One that does not always seek to center the fears and anxieties of white people. One that understands that the disproportionate struggles of today exist solely because of our choices in the past. What can replace the American Dream? What is our new founding story?