
Obama Was Your Reparations
The St. Petersburg, Fl. mayoral race is great politics. The town has a quarter of a million people, and a quarter of them are black. St. Petersburg is one of those southern towns where a lot of money flows through, but relatively little of that money flows through black hands, for all of the regular reasons including housing, education, and employment discrimination and disparate policing.
One candidate, Jesse Nevel, is running on a reparations platform: “Unity through Reparations.” In response to Nevel’s candidacy, candidate Paul Congemi said, “ Your reparations came in the form of a man named Barack Obama.” This sentiment can be paraphrased as, “You had your black president, why are you still yapping?”
I appreciate Congemi’s candor. The Republican won’t win; however, the person who does win the race will probably be a warmed over version of that Republican. One who knows not to say that Obama’s election was all the reparations black people are owed, but one who will steer policy as if Obama’s election was all the reparations black people are owed. We don’t need an increase in homeownership or living wage jobs; we got Obama family photos.
Immediately, candidates and politicians started deriding Congemi for being ignorant. But many of the “progressive” candidates who had a problem with Congemi’s tone don’t themselves have a plan to make the black community whole.
What these “allies” were lamenting about Congemi is not his lack of substantive policies, but the crassness with which he expressed his policy priorities.
That’s a problem.
I don’t care about Congemi’s tone. Any politician who doesn’t have a plan to redress housing, education, and employment discrimination is just Congemi with a softer tongue.
The second fascinating bit about Jesse Nevel’s run is that this may all be a strategy to raise the profile of Akile Cainion, a woman running in the sixth district city council race. She was a long shot candidate, but with the media attention Nevel draws, she could win her seat on the tails of the movement. And that, my friends, would be an electoral triumph because you can do a lot of good media work, getting out your issues, from a city council seat. The fight for 15 was launched from a city council seat.
Using candidacies to give air to policy platform prescriptions is a fantastic strategy for movement building. I wish candidates understood that how you use the campaign infrastructure before and after the election is almost as important as whether you win.