Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 96

On Catastrophe and Potential in San Francisco.

Mar 28, 2023

All eyes are on San Fransisco right now after the second largest bank collapse in U.S. history and since the release of a draft plan outlining recommendations for a reparations policy for its Black residents.

Today’s Opinion section situates the potential of the San Francisco reparations report against the catostrophe that is capitalism and the Silicon Valley Bank meltdown.

With radical love,
Trevor

News Recommendations

The question of what reparations could look like at the local level continues to be explored. Marketplace published a half-hour podcast on the topic, and the Economic Policy Institute outlined five principles for making state and local reparations plan reparative.

A BBC reporter apologized on her ancestor’s behalf for their role in slavery and pledged to give £100,000 in “reparations.”

President Biden signed his second racial equity executive order since being in office.

At-large D.C. Councilmember Kenyan McDuffie, the same legislator who championed baby bonds in Washington, D.C., is pushing for a reparations fund for Black D.C. residents.

Opinion

A Time of Catastrophe and Potential

We live in a time of unparalleled tension. A time where both utter catastrophe and the potential for change lurk behind every corner. This is true, at least for Jen Parker and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, the co-founders of the new Black political magazine Hammer and Hope.

Perhaps no city better exemplifies this tension right now than San Francisco. The city is simultaneously grappling with the fallout of the shuttering of the Silicon Valley Bank and significant media attention from a historic report from the city’s Reparations Advisory Committee.

Both stories illustrate the cultural and political tensions we currently wade in. No one has more recently captured how these tensions exist in our movements and organizations than Maurice Mitchell in his article ‘Building Resilient Organizations.’ The tensions and fallacies that Mitchell outlines in his piece, of course, can also be found in the reparations movement, particularly in the current national vs local reparations debate.

These tensions have been magnified by a media system that has sought to paint local reparations efforts as ill-fated, rushed, and illogical. Articles often leave out the appropriate context needed to crystalize the enormous constraints many of these local commissions are up against.

Within the media, there seems to be intense and significant scrutiny being placed on these local efforts, while little pressure or attention being levied on the federal government's inaction on reparations. The same people who kneeled in a Kente cloth a few months after George Floyd was murdered, refuse to bring this country into the national reckoning it must go through. That, to me, is the bigger story.

Meanwhile, within days of the Silicon Valley Bank going under, the Federal Reserve stepped in to ensure that its customers didn’t face a catastrophic loss.

Catastrophe

On Wednedsday March 8, according to the New York Times, SVB announced that it would need to raise capital after selling its $21 billion bond portfolio for a loss. The next day, customers rushed to pull over $40 million from the bank, the fastest bank run in history. By Sunday, March 12th, federal regulators announced that the government would ensure that all depositors of SVB would be paid back in full.

The bank’s failure and subsequent bailout is the second-largest in U.S. history, but investors are already trying to relabel it as simply “bad risk management.” More astonishing than the “mismangement,” is how swift the federal government took action.

In his recent book of essays, Who Will Pay Reparations On My Soul, writer Jesse McCarthy states that the 2008 financial crisis undoubtedly “ripped a new gash in what remained of an already battered American working class that had suffered decades of decline under both Republican and Democratic leadership.”

American households, and Black American households in particular, had not fully recovered from the Great Recession before Covid-19 widened inequalities across the country. In 2020, white households held $94 trillion or 84 percent of total household wealth, while Black people held just 4 percent.

If I were to iterate on McCarthy’s gash metaphor, the Black body in America would be completely covered with gashes, not only from the dire economic straits the average Black person finds themselves in but from the dismemberment of our political power, the barrage of violence inflicted on our people and made for viral consumption, the empty promises, and distortion of our history.

The SVB failure, of course, exemplifies a larger, more systemic, and cultural problem – the United States is built and sustained on two things: racism and greed. It is the mixture of greed and racism that has fueled capitalism in the United States to a point where reform is not possible.

In the days after the bank collapse, Ro Khanna, one of my favorite legislators, reiterated his belief in “responsible capitalism and a capitalism with ethics.” This is quite ironic because perhaps the most ridiculous part of this entire story is the lack of accountability that was apparent before the collapse. The CEO of SVB was on the Board of the San Francisco Federal Reserve, the very entity tasked to oversee the bank.

Bernie Sanders @SenSanders

One of the most absurd aspects of the Silicon Valley bank failure is that its CEO was a director of the same body in charge of regulating it: the San Francisco Fed. I'll be introducing a bill to end this conflict of interest by banning big bank CEOs from serving on Fed boards.

In the U.S., we have the uncanny ability to look at something that is so obviously on fire and claim nothing is wrong. Responsible capitalism is an oxymoron and we must drop it from any serious policy discussion.

Potential

Against the backdrop of the bank collapse sits the historic San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee that has been exploring comprehensive ways to address inequities that exist in the Black San Francisco community as a result of slavery’s legacy and systemic oppression.

Since 2021, a 15-member advisory committee led by different community members and experts across the city hae been working on a report to “elevate policy and program recommendations for a comprehensive Reparations plan for Black San Franciscans.”

The media, both liberal and conservative, have latched on to the city’s recommendation to provide a “one-time lump sum of $5 million to each eligible person.”

Of course, when the story of reparations is framed solely through the lens of money, it will pique interest across audiences. But, the report, and the larger story of reparations, must not be told through a strictly financial lens. While the economic damages must be repaired, the report and the larger story of reparations transcend simply addressing the financial well-being of Black people. We must repair the whole.

Missing from much of the San Francisco coverage are the other recommendations that the advisory committee recommended, including the expansion of Black-owned and governed banks, comprehensive debt forgiveness programs, and the creation of a Black reparations trust.

The commission has arguably provided a vision that would seek to disrupt the forces that allowed the SVB bank collapse to happen. Yet, the media has zeroed in and sought to poke holes in the cash recommendation rather than situate the commission within the broader context of our current sociopolitical environment.

What we are seeing across states and cities is historic, powerful, and speaks to the enormous potential of Black political organizing.

There is something in the air right now regarding reparations, and it’s an honor to have such a breathtaking vantage point of the movement and how its congealing in skillful and inspiring ways. It’s important to remember that no state or city alone will deliver reparations to Black people at the scale we need. More important to remember is that no state leader or local official has ever claimed that reparations at the local level are the ultimate goal.

I see hope at the local level of reparations.

I see repair being practiced and pushed for.

I see tensions being held beautifully and the fight for a federal effort marching forward.

Resistance and Change Begin In Words

“We have a moral language and a popular tongue at our disposal,” McCarthy so eloquently puts it, but reminds us that we must “ learn to use it again.”

We cannot use capitalistic language or tools to solve issues that racial capitalism created. Capitalism does not exist to create equality. It relies on subordination, and in the United States, it specifically relies on the subordination of Black people.

Given this, these local reparations efforts face quite a conundrum. Though we should aim any frustrations with local reparations efforts at the federal government – the largest culpable party, which has repeatedly proven it would rather repair damages wrought by monied and corporate interests than address the vestiges of slavery and colonialism.

The task at hand, in my eyes, is both closing the Black-white wealth gap and reconstructing our society and economy to ensure that it stays closed forever.

What’s more significant, in my mind, is organizing our country toward a politic of loving Blackness. In no offense to the economists and mathematicians of the world, but the hard work does not rest on the formula behind any financial reparations proposal, but rather in collectively shifting our national consciousness.

Orienting ourselves toward a Black love ethic, according to our new ancestor bell hooks, requires the decolonization of our minds.

Ursula K. Le Guin bot @UrsulaBot

We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in our art, the art of words.

If resistance and change begin in the art of words.

What words, mindsets, frameworks, and ideologies must we completely discard as we continue the fight for reparations in the United States? And what new words, mindsets, frameworks, and ideologies must we learn to use again?