Guy Emerson Mount Profile picture
Jul 15, 2020 22 tweets 6 min read Read on X
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

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More from @GuyEmersonMount

Aug 13, 2021
"What if we saw in this data the increasing numbers of racially blended families and mixed-race children – and understood them as signs of a more racially diverse, economically just and culturally rich future? "

This is called mixed race utopianism. It's wack. A quick thread.
Since at least the 16th century settler colonial societies in the Americas imagined the mixed race character of the colonies as some kind of futuristic utopian ideal where the bodies of mixed people would somehow magically lead to a more just world (w/o any affirmative politics).
Mixed race people have continuously been used as America's symbolic embodiment of hope and change---being forced into the role of political props to deny the existence of racism (despite being so brutally subjected to it). The empires of violence that made mixed people get erased
Read 8 tweets
Sep 28, 2020
Can we please stop individualizing and moralizing this.

The 'patriotic' state SYSTEMATICALLY subsidizes the 'owners' of stolen land and labor through a variety of police actions and tax incentives.

Receipts below on how to make tons of money in real estate while paying no taxes
The IRS has "How to tips" to show accountants and wealthy owners how to avoid taxes. It starts with depreciation. Owners of rental property can offset profits by deducting 3.6% of its purchase price per year for 27.5 years even if the value is going up. irs.gov/publications/p…
This means you can buy a rental property for 1,000,000 dollars, it can go up in value by, say, $50,000 but in that tax year it will look like you lost $36,363 (3.6%). Add in deductions for interest payments insurance, maintenance, etc. and you'll usually pay no taxes on rents.
Read 14 tweets
Sep 21, 2020
"Against State Capture" by @AustinMcCoy3 in @TowardFreedom is THE read of the day. So much insight from one of the most caring scholar activists I know. Avoiding elite capture of this uprising is SO important right now (even as it's already happening). towardfreedom.org/story/against-…
"Confrontations with police and attacks on property operate symbiotically with various strategies and tactics that activists and organizations have devised to evade state and electoral capture."---@AustinMcCoy3 on a diversity of tactics.
The notion of “non-reformist reforms” is likewise something that we cannot ever lose sight of. Any demand must ask itself how it is going to deepen and extend this crisis. The risk of falling into well-laid neoliberal traps right now is serious.
Read 10 tweets
Sep 8, 2020
Would you believe me if I told you it was even worse?
Enslavers DID know that they were dealing with fully complicated human beings but decided to regard enslaved peoples as chattel anyway in hopes of destroying that very humanity (while reifying their own).
#AuburnWorldHistory
For proof of this, think about Mary Prince's diary and how often, how arbitrarily, and how much "pleasure" her enslavers took in beating her. They didn't need to treat their cows that way because there was no human spirit to control, condition, and manipulate. @bethany_hadley1
In many ways, the racist notion of enslaved peoples as non-human is an attempt to justify the naked violence that is required to hold human beings in a condition of slavery. #AuburnWorldHistory @bethany_hadley1
Read 4 tweets
Sep 4, 2020
Excellent, balanced review by @JRWinters77 in @BlkPerspectives

I'd only add that, in my reading, critics of #Afropessimism who see it as "a death knell for...the kind of hope and energy needed to confront current problems" don't really understand Afropessimism

It's VERY utopian
It's certainly pessimistic as it relates to OTHER utopian visions (Pan-Africanism, Marxism, feminism, etc.) but only then as it relates to the question of Black ontologies and the capacity to address antiblackness. Destroying capitalism/sexism is part of destroying the world.
In this way I always contend that a better name for those who get hung up on the pessimism part is Afrorealism or Afroskepticism.
Read 6 tweets
Sep 2, 2020
Black grad students @UChicago are joining the #MoreThanDiversity strike by withholding their labor from diversity committees and refusing to help recruit Black students to campus until the university meets their demands for #abolition and #reparations. docs.google.com/document/d/1DO…
The original faculty letter (also calling for abolition and various forms of reparations on and off-campus) can be found here docs.google.com/document/d/1ks…

They also are calling for a full outside boycott of all UChicago sponsored events (seminars, workshops, conferences, etc.).
Additional, specific, reparative demands that are now part of the student letter include increased funding and scholarships for Black grad students, a "formal grievance and reconciliation process" for acts of racism, and grad student participation in university governance.
Read 4 tweets

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