Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 98

Why is We Americans?: Our Collective Responsibility to Become Reparationists

Aug 25, 2023

Happy Friday —

It’s been a bit since our last edition, so this is a very link-heavy edition. I’ve been writing a report based on our work over the past year in the Reparations Narrative Lab. The report is titled There Are New Suns: Building a Transformative Narrative for the Black Reparations Movement, and will be out in September.

Accompanying the report is a schematic that we call the Narrative House, which we co-created with 13 activists from across the reparations movement. In today’s Opinion section, I give a concise preview of a section of the Narrative House that deals with a very big component of the reparations conversation: identity.

Inspired by the legend Amiri Baraka’s poem — I pose the question, what does it mean to be an “American?”

With radical love,
Trevor

All eyes should be on Tulsa and the ongoing disservice to the survivors and descendants of the Tulsa race massacre.
Now that the California Reparations Taskforce has released its final report — NPR details what may come next.
Caribbean countries are making waves from their calls for reparations.
It’s a bit dated now, but Reuters did a fantastic deep dive into how many members of Congress are the descendants of slaveholders.
Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis is following the Trump playbook and running on white supremacy — doubling down on claims that slavery benefited Black people.
The New York Times gives an update, though through a negative frame, on the movement for reparations.

Opinion

Throughout the report I’m writing, the editor we are working with changed every mention of “American” to “people in the United States.” It is a new push (particularly within progressive academic circles from what I’ve seen) to prevent the United States from laying claim over all of the geographical landmass that is the Americas. It is, of course, a noble effort and comes at a time when the country is facing what I would call a massive identity crisis.

I encourage you to listen to the full poem performed by Amiri Baraka, the legendary poet and leader of the Black Arts movement. After listing all the reasons why reparations must be paid to Black and Native people, he writes, “If there is democracy in you, that is where it will be shown. This is the only way we is Americans. That is the only truth that can be told.”

The opening poem of our upcoming report was inspired by Baraka and is titled ‘Our Inheritance.’ It grapples with the fact that the United States was borne out of a profound and violent contradiction that we often ignore in conversations about our nation's history.

The final stanza in the poem reads:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

Some of us inherit privilege, 
Some of us inherit hardships, 
All of us inherit a history of harm, 
It is our story,
We must tell it,
It is our song, 
We must sing it, 
We must claim it, 
And most importantly, 
We must repair it, 
After all, 
As “Americans” 
This is our inheritance.

In a new report about how narrative change can drive social identity formation, the Pop Culture Collaborative asserts that to create lasting and transformative change throughout society, “it is critical that the pop culture narrative change field and philanthropic sector work together to cultivate durable social identities that make new ideas and behaviors resilient, shaping how people see themselves in the world, relate to others, make meaning, and navigate decisions.”

Social identity is how we see and explain ourselves in the world — it is how we define who we believe ourselves to be and how we protect and defend our worldviews. According to scholars, the result of social identification is a “collective, personalized identity based on group membership imbued with positive aspects.” Being seen as an “out-group” is at the root of dehumanization — and what led so many white Americans to sit idly by as the institution of slavery was furthered year after year.

‘Our Inheritance’ aims to push us to rethink what we collectively inherit as inhabitants of this settler nation. As the poem states, not all of us inherit the same material resources, but we all inherit the same history of harm.

Therefore, it will be significantly important in the movement for reparations to further construct and uplift an identity about what it means to be a person who inherits this history and is dedicated to repairing it. Leaders in the reparations movement have long self-identified as Reparationists — someone entirely devoted to repairing and liberating all colonized and dehumanized peoples.

I am excited to share the report later in September and further thoughts about the role of collective identity within social movements. Until then, I’ll leave you with these questions — please feel free to email me directly with answers if you feel inspired (tsmith@reparationslab.org)

What does being an “American” mean to you?
Is it possible to shift our conception of what it means to be an “American”? If so, what would that new conception look like?
What would need to happen to make you self-identify as a Reparationist?
What role does identity and collective identity play in the movement for reparations?

Bu-de-daaaa. Bu-de-daaaa. Bu-de-daaaa.