Random Musings of an #ADOS Man — Part 1: What Reparations Means To Me
Disclaimer: My thoughts are mine and mine alone and do not represent the official or stated positions of ADOS, NCOBRA, or NAARC. Also I’m not an academic or author so I ain’t bendin over backwards to proofread and source this shit. Third, I said Part 1 but I ain’t promising a Part 2.
When I think of reparations I am immediately transported back to my days as a teenager living in Tulsa, Oklahoma. During the years that I lived there my mother never allowed me to forget the injustices that made the city of Tulsa what it is today. She reminded me of how segregated the city was, Blacks corralled in the now under developed north side and the affluent whites on the south side. She reminded me of the greatness of Black people when they come together and work among themselves and for them selves. She told me stories of the banks, of the doctors, of the churches, of the institutions, of the greatness of Black people despite the gross injustices and racial terror that wreaked havoc on black people all over the United States at that time. She reminded me of the massacres, the firebombings of businesses, the complicity of law enforcement, and the government’s unfulfilled promise to rebuild what was known then as the Black Wall Street. She would tell me that Tulsa would have been a type of Atlanta, an economic Black Mecca, today had it not been razed to the ground by jealous whites and the government that supported them or at best turned a blind eye as they trampled on Black peoples’ rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. What stuck out to me then as it does today is the government’s broken promise to rebuild and repair that which they had broken through segregation, Jim Crow, and willful neglect as white terrorists destroyed a vibrant Black community. I also think about the racial wealth gap in Oklahoma where white families have a median net worth of over $113,000 while African-American families have less than $6000. When I look at the numbers I am almost certain that within these calculations depreciating assets such as clothing furniture and vehicles are included in that number. Take these things out and the African-American family in Oklahoma has at best zero net worth and almost certainly negative net worth.
http://www.oknativeassets.org/Resources/Documents/4_The%20Racial%20Wealth%20Gap%20in%20Oklahoma.pdf
Had these businesses been rebuilt, allowed to thrive, and given the same government investments as their white counterparts, these numbers would look different today.
When I think of reparations I also remember trips to Dallas, Texas to visit my maternal great grandmother. Her distinctly reddish hair is forever burned into my memory. Her red hair was not a fashion choice but rather a horrific reminder of a legacy of enslavement, forced labor, and the rape of her grandmother by her grandfather, an irish slave master. I often wonder what the lives of that irish slave master’s white descendants look like. I think of the accrued advantages that were given to them through the wealth from owning slaves as well as their preferential treatment under Jim Crowe and ultimately the New Deal. I contrast that with the accrued disadvantages forced upon my great-grandmother’s grandmother. Not only the terror and theft of wealth endured under slavery but also the subsequent suffering, terror, exclusion, and marginalization of her descendants all the way down to me.
I think about the painstaking work it must have taken my paternal grandfather to search public records birth certificates articles and other sources without the help of the internet to trace my patrilineal line not only to African slaves but again to another irish slave master who won one of my African female ancestors in a game of cards. I think of the level of antipathy and avarice, and the capacity for dehumanization that would cause someone to casually reduce a human being to nothing more than a poker chip. The wealth of the slaves in the United States, not their labor, not the crops they produced, but the bodies of the slaves themselves were THE largest assets America had at the time. More than it’s resources, real estate, infrastructure, crops, everything. The slaves were worth more than ALL of the United States assets and wealth COMBINED. So it also makes me wonder what level of wealth this group of card players had that made them comfortable enough to bet a valuable commodity like their slaves at the poker table. It makes me wonder what my life would look like, what America would look like, had my ancestors and all the descendants forward been compensated not only for the wealth stolen through their labor but also for the wealth extracted from their very bodies. Wealth that the built banks, which are now institutions such as JP Morgan Chase who literally had slaves on their books, collateral, seized when slave owners defaulted on their loans. Wealth that built insurance companies such as Aetna who issued life insurance policies on the bodies of slaves and naming their owners as beneficiaries.
So when I think of what reparations means or what form it should take, I cannot think of any sort of apology that would address the ever present pain that comes from the remembering and retelling of my ancestors’ stories, the justified rage that comes from counting the trillions upon trillions of dollars of wealth, land, and resources that were built on the backs of and subsequently kept out of the hands of this nation’s slaves, former slaves, and their descendants, and the righteous anger that comes from understanding the wealth position of my community and the third world economic conditions in which we are forced to live while residing in the richest country on earth.
While no one can empirically measure pain, one can absolutely measure profit. The amount of wealth, the ways in which it was stolen, accrued, and leveraged over time to build the richest nation on earth is well documented. The laws and policies on federal, state, and local levels that were used to steal from, terrorize, and economically exclude African-Americans are also part of the historical record albeit buried and willfully forgotten.
There are many ways in which people in the past and present have framed what reparations would look like.
The National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (NCOBRA) frames reparations as Cessation, Restitution, Compensation, Satisfaction, and Rehabilitation.
http://www.ncobraonline.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/HR40-Primer-1.pdf
The recently birthed reparations advocacy movement American Descendants of Slavery (ADOS) has called for a race and lineage specific realignment of affirmative action, reinstitution of voting rights protections, targeted small business lending to Black business, massive infrastructure programs specifically for Black neighborhoods, compensation for the over 3,000 cities poisoned by lead and injured by neglect from the EPA, true criminal justice reform, auditing the banks for trends in lending discrimination, and among other things direct monetary compensation to the American descendants of slavery in the United States.
https://ados101.com/black-agenda
The National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) calls for among other things a formal apology from the United States, the right of repatriation to the African continent, the right to land, entrepreneurial development, investments for health and wellness, education, and affordable housing.
While my personal view of reparations for the most part comports with all three of these frameworks, my simple view of reparations goes something like this: The United States must economically, politically, socially, and culturally repair the descendants of its former slaves with the same specificity and intention with which it has broken us over the past 400 years.
When I look at what a post-reparations America may look like my imagination cannot help but expand outward past the borders of the United States to other parts of the African Diaspora. My imagination takes me there not simply because a cultural affinity for all people and all things African but also from a personal connection. For when I see my children I also see their Panamanian and Haitian grandparents. As I study my specific history and calculate what is owed to me as an American descendant of slavery, my studies also raise questions about the histories and present conditions of other African people who suffered not only from the transatlantic slave trade but also from colonialism and neocolonialism. I ask what did the french do to Haiti? What did portuguese do to Brazil? What did the british do to Jamaica? What did the belgians do the Congo? What did all these colonial powers do and continue to do to the African continent? What was stolen? Who was hurt and how? What does repair look like to these people and their descendants?
How can I help?
Living in a city where Black american families have a median net worth of $8, I can’t imagine what an underclass under threat of economic genocide have the power to do for other African people a world away. Still, that last question brings me back to america reckoning with its specific history of slavery and the subsequent terrors that were visited upon the descendants of slaves here in the U.S and partly informs why I focus my advocacy where I am. I see America as the head of the snake, as the flagship of the global fleet that is white supremacy. If the head is cut off, the body dies. If the flagship sinks, the fleet is lost. It’s my view that if america is forced reckon with its past then so must england, france, spain, portugal, belgium and all other european colonizers. Simply put they will fall like dominoes. My hope is that this newly revitalized push for reparations for the descendants of american slavery sends shockwaves of fear and trepidation to colonizers around the world in the same way that Nat Turner’s rebellion shook europe, in the same way that the Haitian revolution shook the United States, and in the same way that the reclaiming of land in Zimbabwe has now fueled the movement to reclaim land in South Africa from its colonizers.
This is some of what reparations means to me.