04.27.19 The Case For ADOS: What We Are For, Why It Matters, & How We Arrived (Part Two)
In Part One, I wanted to address a cross-section of the attacks this nascent ADOS movement has experienced and why they are wrong. With this follow-up, it is my hope this serves as a continued explainer, with the focus on what we are *for.*
The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade on this landmass is the American Stain that must be cleansed if this nation is ever to resemble A More Perfect Union that the Framers of this nation purported to stand for.
ADOS…is a designation of a people. In a back-and-forth dialogue with Howard Africana Studies Chair Greg Carr, he said, dismissively, that “#ADOS is just a hashtag.” Perhaps it is. Not, however, in ways that he thinks.
ADOS, American descendants of slavery, describes an aggrieved class of people who have a justice claim in America. There is an unfortunate, continued, durable stubbornness, particularly in the Baby Boomer and older Generation-X class of both Pan-Africans and Democratic partisans that holds a spirit of denial around our emergence and developing impact. So much so that our work has been wrongfully slurred and horribly slandered.
Our emergence is a matter of what I have long referred to as “Time, Chance and Circumstance.” Technology and media and opportunity came together at this moment to build this movement.
We live in a world where nearly everyone in the so-called first world and about half of the people in the developing world have miniature streaming multimedia supercomputers that they carry in their pocket, strapped on their belts or in their purses. With the ability to instantly transmit and share information, information moves faster, ideas evolve faster, and the people and those who love Black ADOS communities have to have the ability to adapt and address these changes.
The founders of ADOS101.com, Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore, had the prescience to understand the value of YouTube as a platform to create and deliver educational political and socioeconomic content that could resonate with far more people than shouting from a street corner or speaking from a brick-and-mortar building. If the education is done well and you are prepared and have engaged in the necessary work, digital media allows you to extend the power of your reach.
We share data and resources and have created informal, and ultimately formal networks of local Black community stations to share clips and news. Create pop-up media to counter biased mainstream media reporting against ADOS.
A critical segment of this movement’s evolution is to create more media channels and scorecards that target our officials and elected representation to examine their voting and productivity records to keep them under review.
An additional element of our educational project centers around what can be called Agile Activism. This is a particular kind of community-focused activism based on the principles of Agile software development. In a nutshell, as under Agile software development, “solutions evolve through the collaborative effort of self-organizing and cross-functional teams and their customer(s)/end user(s)”, and with agile activism, the same principles apply, but the “software” is addressing community needs, from the most small of things to…the ADOS political justice claim. The “customers/end users,” are ADOS in the cities and neighborhoods where Black people live. In my next article, I shall go into greater detail on “Agile Activism.”
WHAT ARE THE GOALS OF ADOS AND WHO ARE WE?
This movement’s mission is to make the United States descendants of American chattel slavery whole. We work to do this through elevating America’s consciousness on the scope of its crimes, as well as demand restoration through compensation for the enormous damage wrought upon Black America. This is an American claim beginning with chattel slavery on these shores, and covers the imposed subsequent legacies of disadvantage and compounded, generational failure that reaches to today.
If this country shall ever remove its blinders of denial and make a good-faith effort to cleanse this American Stain, this nation must “pay a multi-trillion dollar debt to American descendants of slavery in the form of both cash payments and large scale programs.”
We are faced with the herculean American task of moving the Overton window on “race.” We understand that this is no small effort in a country with the schizophrenic history that it has. There are other ADOS and non-ADOS Black Americans affiliated with other, more long-standing reparations groups who disagree with such a strategy. We hear them, and we are aware of the limited historical success that it has had in the nation as well. Nevertheless, it is necessary and these times demand that there is someone willing to do so.
We are a lineage-based movement. Being pro- or anti-immigrant, Pan-African, Democrat, Republican, Green, Independent, LBGTQ or straight, scientific socialist, democratic socialist, progressive, liberal, centrist or conservative, is not the priority nor even important. There are members of this lineage-based ethnicity that may claim membership of any one of these descriptions, several or even some incongruous combination of a few. None of these, however, are as essential more than the interests of the American descendants of chattel slavery.
As described on the ADOS website, the “ADOS movement is underpinned by the demand for reparative justice in making the group whole, and as a necessary component in fulfilling the promise of opportunity from which, by design, ADOS have been historically excluded and denied.”
It matters that we engage in “a program of self-interested political action that actually corresponds to (our) particular oppression.” It matters that this focus and self-interest are centered around our deep concerns around the frightening socioeconomic position of ADOS in an ever-automating America. The American descendants of the institution of chattel slavery no longer can afford to engage in an emotionalized politics of symbolism and photo-ops shoutouts and callbacks to Black culture. ADOS, as a lineage of American citizens require less political *theater* and absolutely must have political *substance,* through targeted policy to close the racial wealth gap.
Considering this need for targeted policy, this is why we assess *all* of the Democratic candidates for president under the standards of how best they will address our agenda concerns of:
1) reparations
2) the catastrophe of mass incarceration
3) the racial wealth gap
The challenge for us, and a key focus of our work, is to learn how to discern and vote for what the masses of what ADOS needs and what will benefit our descendants generations after we all are long gone.
In the global Pan-Africanist missions that American-based reparations and justice organizations have, the emergencies of the racial wealth gap and organizing to make a mission focus around this concern is something the falls between the cracks of internationalist movements.
The better our collective can stay focused on the critical goal of addressing this massive wealth disparity, the better America’s political parties will get to coming to us in good faith, as opposed to putting a couple of brown faces in high places and tricking ADOS into voting for them.
A LITTLE MORE ADOS DEFENSE, PART TWO
Due to the undeniable record of atrocities that the enslaved Africans and subsequent ADOS were subjected to, we have been stigmatized by color and position as our people were forced into a bottom caste in America.
There is more than a little pushback from the Pan-Africanist academic community, and even the striver middle-class amongst Black Americans, because there is a lot of trauma around the word “slave,” often preferring terms such as “enslaved,” “enslaved Afri(k)ans,” or the designation “Descendants of Enslaved Afrikans in the U.S. (DAEUS).
We are less worried about that. We do not obsess over the word “slave” as a badge of shame. Why would we? It’s not our fault!
The institution of American chattel slavery and its subsequent oppressions are a horrible, centuries-long system that has laid devastating consequences for its African descendants in America. It also was not the fault of our ancestors brought to the American coast. The enslaved did not capture themselves. They were kidnapped, but far more often than occasionally, sold. This is another inconvenient truth that is not always addressed or seriously taken in the so-called “conscious community” of Pan-Africanist or Pan-Africanist-adjacent supporters.
SIDEBAR: despite the reality that the enslaved were sold and delivered to the ports in America by African brokers, it in no way excuses what the planter class of Americans did with those captives after they arrived. This the very reason that we seek to hold the governments and responsible institutional entities accountable.
There is…a lingering deceit, despite all of the critical protestations of our relative or actual conservatism and lack of revolutionary ideology.
Be honest.
Just admit that you are contemptuous of what ADOS strive to achieve. The righteous justice claim of the tens of millions of our people only matter as a means of a larger struggle — a struggle to petition a world authority greater than the sovereign countries responsible for these crimes against ADOS (and others in the African diaspora). An authority of humans that does not yet exist, with no ability to enforce or extract justice from stolen labor and wealth.
The work of our people, ADOS, is not in “alliance with known white supremacist organizations.” Whatever the Progressives For Immigration Reform (PFIR) or who any progenitors or funders may or may not be, there is absolutely no say so, direct funding in, or control in any of the work that we seek to do with this righteous demand for justice. We do not lament “the failed promise of negro integration,” (so disrespectful!) because it was not our generation(s) that engaged into that agreement after the passages of the Civil Rights Act (1964), Voting Rights Act (1965) and Fair Housing Act (1968).
We have observed that as ADOS are have been made a bottom caste in this country and forced to eat the failure, we do not want our people to suffer that fate. This struggle is for the futures of our descendants and their opportunities to live and flourish in this nation, or elsewhere if they so choose. Hence the reason that we demand from this country what our ancestors and we are owed. Is this not, at least, some of the motivation that reparations organizations have in demanding redress?
You cannot solve America’s policies created by race with raceless policy. A people profoundly disadvantaged with such a massive racial wealth gap in this country cannot be made whole with policy that makes things more even. Rising tides drown people who do not have boats, and this is overwhelmingly the wealth position of ADOS. We demand more. This is about an essential confrontation with The American Stain and a redoubled effort to atone for those crimes. It demands a level of collective self-awareness that this nation and its governments have shown, at best, in brief and capricious fits and spurts.
It is unfortunate that in your attacks against who we are and our justice claim, along with these efforts to poison the well of perception about us with those that have not yet been educated and exposed, you do a *severe* disservice to the goal of reparations that you say that you are for. What a problem!
You are actually discrediting the righteous claim of tens of millions of Black Americans and, whether intentional or accidental, delegitimizing the entire ADOS justice claim, and perhaps the entire effort for reparations for Africans worldwide, in front of the national body politic because you do not trust one or two people and because of…embarrassment, I guess? Ego, possibly? Control? An unwillingness, inflexibility or inability in leveraging 21st century media tools to your advantage? If any of that is true, that is historically tragic and could have a devastating effect on future justice movements.
We have a *legal standing* as an aggrieved group having not received proper recompense for our ancestors’ labor, systematic denial of wealth through direct government policy and racial terrorism violence, and being made a bottom caste through our skin color(s) being treated as a contagion that destroys property value that must be contained in American ghettoes.
…AND ONE MORE THING
There is something that I want to clarify under this idea of our demand that ADOS people are “made whole.”
Part of making ADOS people whole demands a comprehensive health care system with an amount of mental health counseling for the aftereffects of negative adaptations that developed as a result of generational poverty and societal over-policing (lineage therapy.) This demand for the resources to engage in this healing is no one’s admission of “inferiority” of any kind. The ongoing oppression of ADOS in this country has led most of America to remain willfully ignorant. A very large number of Americans who cannot be bothered to know or care about the caste status of most ADOS life in America, and this willful ignorance moves them to make the wrong inferences.
As antiracist scholar Ibram X. Kendi has asserted, “Black Americans’ history of oppression has made Black opportunities — not Black behaviors — inferior.” Let us reconsider our notions that Black people, ADOS, as a group are needing to be healed from racist trauma. Black people demand reparations so that ADOS can be *freed* from racist trauma.
This is a battleground for our lives and lifetimes. We are engaged in this work, in the midst of the hostile political environment that challenges the veracity of justice demand, the eligibility of our justice demand, and efforts have been made to marginalize your fellow citizens who live and work and raise their families among you…all in the name of prolonging injustice. ADOS need more than empathy. We demand justice.
. . .
I thank all contributors who have provided support along the way. I continue to be committed in the engagement of this critical work for a righteous justice claim. Any and all contributions to help me research and write future pieces are humbly appreciated. You can donate here: Pay Michael R Hicks using PayPal.Me.
NEXT ARTICLE: (Part Three) Methods of Engagement and Organization: Agile Activism, A Discussion
