Thread by @GuyEmersonMount

While in, one sense, this is certainly cause to celebrate, the devil is always in the details. What the city council is effectively saying is that #reparations for slave racial capitalism requires an INCREASED participation IN slave racial capitalism.

A quick breakdown thread

Here is a copy of the full resolution passed by @CityofAsheville's City Council and signed by @EstherManheimer scribd.com/document/46872…

So, first, the celebration part. The power of the language of repair in this document cannot be overstated. The idea of local governance seeing their mission as making amends for slavery and Jim Crow is likewise a game changer and something that should be replicated.

But talk is cheap and when you start to interrogate the thinking about how that reparative process is being conceptualized, you find some significant (but not insurmountable) shortcomings.

While short on specifics (which I'm actually OK with as this is a long term process that, to do right, is going to require countless hours of planning & organizing by community orgs to shape the course of the reparative process) some of the early assumptions here trouble me.

The first involves who is at the table and who should NOT be at the table. Forming a Reparations Commission is the right thing to do. It must be broadly represnetative of local Black community interests in the area. However...

the idea (quoting from the original news report now) that such a commission should include "businesses, local groups, and elected officials" is going to be a disaster. Local groups, yes. But businesses and the state itself should have no place on a Reparations Commission.

The first principle here (spelled out clearly in any proper theory of reparations including the U.N. best practices guidelines) is that those who have been harmed decide what constitutes repair for that harm. The state & capitalism CAUSED the harm. They don't get a say.

Closely tied to this is the logic of capitalism which is the background hegemonic violence secretly informing this document. For anyone needing a primer on why capitalism and Black liberation don't mix read...like anything... maybe starting here aaihs.org/capitalism-and…

"Increasing minority homeownership," "strategies to grow equity", "employment," "increasing minority business ownership" & "fairness WITHIN criminal justice" (my emphasis) should all raise red flags. Reparations must end the logic of capitalism & punitive justice not embrace it

Thankfully, there are alternatives, some of which even present themselves in the document itself including "access to other affordable housing" and "closing the gaps in health care."

Given that there is an approximately 10x racial wealth gap, any measure that assumes Black people will just automatically bootstrap to freedom w/ just a little more start up capital is badly mistaken. Capitalism doesn't work that way. It never has & it can't be forced to do so.

Any #reparations plan that does not address the systemic racism embedded within capitalism itself is a Band-Aid, at best, and a malicious obfuscation that will enable the harms of capitalism to deepen and expand, at worse.

While, of course, I'm all for "survival pending revolution" we can't lose sight of that revolution in the process. An anti-racist political economy is essential starting point. There are transitional alternatives that don't require a full embrace of market capitalism, for example

Rather than "employment" or "business ownership"
worker co-ops can break that formulation as there are no shareholders (or the only shareholders are the workers themselves) and workers decide if their boss has a job NOT the other way around. federation.coop

Rather than Black OWNED banks, Black CONTROLLED credit unions that operate on a collective, community benefits model without shareholders are a great alternative. I wrote about credit unions a while back here aaihs.org/why-bankblack-…

For housing, there are community land trusts that treat housing not as private property and a means of building individual wealth but as a human right that everyone in the community is entitled to regardless of the ability to pay. bloomberg.com/news/articles/… See @ndbconnolly

The same principle of collectively owned/un-owned land also applies to productive land uses such as cooperative Black farming enterprises that do not require replicating white individualistic private property regimes npr.org/2019/10/03/766…

And lest we forget that ALL the land we are talking about is the traditional homeland of thousands of indigenous groups who must be consulted and repaired as well. The private property regime in the Americas is an act of racism and genocide for both Black and indigenous people.

Reparations must break that cycle not replicate it. As per King and Gandhi, the means ARE part of the ends. The process itself is just as important as the outcome. You can't build an anti-racist world using racist tools (i.e. Lourde)

So, hats off to #Asheville for taking a truly historic first step. Now the hard work begins. Harm must stop in the present and the existing system of state violence supporting an institutional network slave racial capitalism must stop.

#Reparations, real reparations, must be truly transformative and fully reparative. It is a revolutionary praxis and a permanent revolution NOT a public policy. Punitive justice must end and the harms of racial capitalism be repaired through an entirely new world of justice