Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 94

Reparations On My Soul: Hopes & Predictions for 2023

Jan 02, 2023

Happy New Year!

Welcome to 2023 and our first edition of the year!

An emphasis of this newsletter is the concept of hope. Throughout the year, I plan to revisit hope as a concept as I look for ways to connect it to the reparations conversation.

Hope, as scholars have argued, does not exist by itself — something must facilitate its growth. When there is enough of it, hope can often turn into action. How can we collectively increase hope about reparations? It’s a question that I’ll revisit throughout the year.

Today’s Opinion section offers five hopeful predictions about the reparations movement in 2023.

News Recommendations

How Conservatives co-opted “woke.”

Affirmative action faces a tough road, and its relationship to Asian-American stereotypes further complicates it.

One in five adults who play video games reported being confronted by white supremacist ideologies.

The Boston City Council voted to form a reparations task force.

Yamiche Alcindor and Emmanuel Felton sat down to talk about Providence.

The violence of the criminal legal system affects the racial wealth gap.

The California Reparations Task Force has started quantifying a figure for a potential financial reparations component.

Poll

Opinion

Reparations On My Soul? Five Predictions for 2023.

The following are, in many ways, both predictions and hopes for 2023.

The list isn’t exhaustive and seeks to touch on the different cultural components that impact the reparations debate. Overall, 2023 could be the year when the movement for reparations takes a significant leap forward.

Ta-Nehisi Coates Writes a Follow-up Reparations Piece

We are a little over a year away from the tenth anniversary of Coates’ most recognized piece for The Atlantic, ‘The Case for Reparations.’

In his debut essay collection, Who Will Pay Reparations On My Soul, Jesse McCarthy touts the Atlantic essay as the impetus for the resuscitation of a word with the “rhetorical heft necessary to shift a conversation on race that has become too personalized, and too complacent.”

(Image courtesy of The Atlantic)

Coates’ essay called into question the morality of the United States and what it might owe its Black citizens into the public lexicon in a way that had not been done in recent history.

What could follow such a piece, particularly when a large segment of the country is still stuck on the “why” of reparations?

There is a noticeable lack of future-oriented storytelling on this topic that can serve as a basis to move us beyond the “why.” McCarthy, whose book is named after the Gil Scott-Heron song, Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul, urges all of us, but particularly Coates, to consider the question, “what can reparations mean when the damage cannot be accounted for in the only system of accounting that a society recognizes?”

I hope that Coates, whose no stranger to creative writing, could take this year to embark on a futuristic piece that helps transform our collective understanding of some of the potential outcomes of a federal reparations process.

The Movement Is Adequately Prepared for the Backlash from the Right

As the calls for reparations grow stronger, so will the calls from our opposition. I touched on this in our last edition, but it’s worth reiterating.

Reparations will be used as a political and cultural wedge between Black people and everybody else. Tucker Carlson, who has helped mainstream “replacement theory,” targeted reparations on multiple occasions in 2022.

Carlson has started to frequent the phrase “legacy Americans,” which the New York Times describes as a dog-whistle term only used in white nationalist outlets like The Daily Stormer.

(Image courtesy of the New York Times)

As state and local efforts gain more traction, there lies a significant danger from right-wing talking heads like Carlson to increasingly tie reparations into the story of white supremacy he tells his audience every night.

I hope that the reparations movement is sufficiently prepared with a counternarrative that can guard against the rise in misinformation that will distort the vision for reparations.

A Joint Critique of Colonialism

Avatar: The Way of Water has already amassed $1 billion globally at the box office and has earned over $400 million in the United States. It’s already being lauded as “unbeatable” in the Best Visual Effects category and showing signs that it could win Best Picture.

Indigenous activists have already criticized the film for its lack of inclusion of Indigenous writers and actors, its generalization of Indigenous communities, and its romanticization of colonialism.

Avatar’s potential Oscar wins are, of course, a result of a culture that has normalized the erasure of Indigenous experiences from our storytelling and seeks to capitalize off stories rooted in white supremacy.

For the reparations movement, particularly with the renewed attention both Avatar and Black Panther will receive, the Oscars will provide an opportunity to tell a more complete story that ties the origin myth of the United States to the structure of settler colonialism.

More Celebrities Weigh In

On a random Wednesday afternoon in November last year, Nick Young, the former Los Angeles Lakers guard also known as “Swaggy P,” tweeted, “why aren’t our superstars and leaders* making reparations a main priority.”

Nick Young @NickSwagyPYoung

Why aren’t our super stars and Leader making reparations a main priority

Young, now retired, wasn’t known for his political activism during his playing days, but presents a valid question.

Given the significant increase in attention from the media and action at the local level, one would hope that Black celebrities would have a lot more to say about the topic.

Some notable celebrities like Ice Cube and Talib Kweli have weighed in on the topic, and others like Chance the Rapper and Beyonce have lyrics that mention reparations — but as Young points out, there is not much-sustained advocacy throughout the sports and entertainment industries.

Chance The Rapper @chancetherapper
Ok this is me slowly trying to get down from this hill without falling and dying: Whoever you vote for I hope they abolish the prison system as we know it, honor black reparations and all treaties with Indigenous folk and lastly end homelessness. Whomever that may be God bless em
7:42 PM ∙ Jul 13, 2020
23,696Likes2,132Retweets

This will likely change in 2023, mainly as more work is completed through research and commissions at the local level. It’s also worth noting the increasingly dangerous right-leaning rhetoric from Black male celebrities like Kyrie Irving, Ye, and Dave Chapelle. This should serve as a reminder that not all Black celebrities who enter the conversation may be helpful to it.

Havard Sets Aside Dollars for Restitution

Last year, Harvard University released a report detailing the school’s involvement with slavery and anti-Black discrimination. The school itself enslaved 70 people between 1636 to 1783, and many of the original donors of the school profited directly from the slave trade.

Harvard allocated $100 million to create a “Legacy of Slavery Fund,” which they said would be kept in an endowment and strategically invested to support the implementation of the report’s recommendations.

The report isn’t particularly specific about the recommendations and leaves much to be interpreted and imagined. The university may set aside some of the $100 million to go into a seperate fund specifically for the descendants of the families that the university enslaved.