Why AllLivesMatter-ing the question of reparations is a non-starter with me

Reparations are much in the conversation, on the Dem side, in the run-up to 2020. Setting aside any question of whether such discussions are red herrings or serious conversations of what recompense is due; questions of how "fair" it would be (to whom??) to pay such monies or how the White majority would likely respond to any such payment, I want to share a few thoughts on why candidates who are dismissive of the idea won't get a second look from me and how i think reparations could be done.

First and foremost, there's the obvious question, the one you know folks are asking: why do we need to have this discussion at all? Why can't it be tabled for later?

In three words: now is later. In a four more words: if not now, when? Isn't 2019 'later' enough for us as a nation? It's been 400 years. C'mon people, it's time; time to stop dilly dallying and shilly shallying. 

Any suggestion that talking about reparations is somehow divisive or otherwise unhelpful to national unity (hahaha!) is first, laughable and second, translates simply into "We don't really care what has been done to Black Americans historically even when we say we do. Certainly, we don't care enough to work at redress. Can't we all just get along? Kumbaya."  Yeah well that kind of response is no longer going to satisfy. 

There's a great deal of focus on 1619 as the beginning of the slave trade. Whether we agree or not that 1619 was the start of the inhumane trade we can, at the very least, agree that it's been at least 400 years since the trade and the brutality of White supremacy in this place made its first marks. Surely, at the 400th anniversary we should be ready to have this discussion; ready to take some kind of reparative action? Or maybe it's been 400 years because America #ReallyDontCareDoYou? 

First lady Melania Trump at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland wearing a jacket with the words "I REALLY DON'T CARE. DO U?" after her visit Thursday with migrant children who are being detained at the U.S.-Mexico border.

The data are pretty conclusive, the descendants of the enslaved have fared far worse economically than every other group - bar the Native Americans - who live on this land mass. That ain't no accident. And while the data usually focus on the facts and figures, I haven't seen too many researchers focus on the underlying whys, perhaps because answering the why question involves making inferences about motivation and that's not what researchers typically do. I am not a researcher however, I'm an essayist and I will infer the hell outta some findings. 

Here's what I infer: White supremacy is the cause of the racial wealth gap; White supremacy is the cause of the ongoing economic insecurities of Black and brown families; hell, White supremacy is also why we don't have universal health care; White supremacy (with a healthy dash of nihilistic Christianity thrown in) is why we currently have a government that thinks defunding Planned Parenthood and the Special Olympics is good policy.  

The data is out there and to me, it's pretty clear. But data only gets us so far. We have to choose to believe what the data is telling us, and many of us just don't. 97% of scientists, for example, say that climate change is real and yet climate change denialism is still a thing; voting against one's on best interests (unless that interest is the protection of unearned privilege) is a thing; voting for people who suppress others' right to vote (all while holding your nation up as a beacon of democracy) is a thing.  

So yeah, White supremacy is the problem and reparations would be the beginning of a solution. Reparations need to be talked about and then we need to stop talking and we need to get to acting on that talk. The talk needs to occur despite the objections of heartland and frankly many liberal cities' White folx to Black people getting two coins. Cuz let's face it, that is at the root of the objection. 

I'm not a politician dependent on peoples' votes, so I can say, "Screw 'em" and carry on. Buttigieg and others cannot. Frankly though, the politics are not my concern, the payment of the long overdue moral debt is. 

It is past time to stop trying to make Whiteness comfortable with equity adjustments for Black people (no one has to explain lawsuits. Consider reparations a big ole lawsuit with a big ole settlement);
It is past time to stop feeling like an explanation of equity adjustments is even necessary (history books are free);  
It's past time to stop pretending that "policies" that are broad and general will impact Black people the way they impact White people (don't play like y'all don't know how to game the hell outta any policy so that the intended beneficiaries gain the least. The data is out there. Go look and see who benefits the most from affirmative action. I'll wait.) 
And it's surely past time to have some politicians who have the intestinal fortitude to hold these views. 

If we are serious about economic inequality as a 2020 issue, some part of our focus has to be on the racial wealth gap; some part of our focus has to be on Black economic insecurity and the dual legacies of economic insecurity on account of discrimination and wealth theft on account of White supremacy. And all of this is why Pete Buttigieg and Bernie Sanders who both blithely dismiss all considerations of reparations can get little love from me. And I say this as one who was  #AllBernieAllTheTime in 2016.

I'm compelled to commit these words to 'paper' on this issue because Pete Buttigieg, my (former) front-runner candidate, was asked about reparations in an Esquire interview, and he totally and absolutely All Lives Mattered the response. Here's his response in full:

"I've never seen a specific, workable proposal. But what I do think is convincing is the idea that we have to be intentional about addressing or reversing harms and inequities that didn't just happen on their own. The cleanest way I can think of to do it are through policies. So we know in housing and criminal justice, to some extent in basic economic policies around wages and taxation, that some policy improvements that are also the right thing to do will have a disproportionate benefit to people of color. I think that's one way that we can be intentional and make a difference on this. I've just not seen a cash transfer mechanism that’s been laid out that you can envision working that most people would think is fair."

Yeah, that's a no from me dawg. Nope. No. Nah.

He said he hasn't seen a workable proposal? here's my back of the envelope, 5 minute plan. Sure this is basic and sure it'll need to be teased out and some ideas will be found to be unworkable but the enslavement and forced breeding of millions should have been unworkable too, no? If we can do that, we can do any-facking-thing. 

1. Create lists: identify potential recipients. Not all Black people in America today are entitled. I, for one, am not. My reparations have to come from the Queen as an immigrant from a former British colony. So step one must be to  identify recipients. This alone could take two decades. 
2. Calculate the value of forty good acres (note: I said *good*)
3. Calculate a reasonable rate of growth that careful husbandry of the investment would have yielded. We love conservatism don't we? Let's determine what "conservative" estimates of growth would have been for the 40 acres' value. And before you even ask the question, no not all emancipated persons would have carefully and successfully managed their 40 acres, but that's not the point. The point is that they weren't given the opportunity to even try. They weren't given opportunity to build anything. As a matter of fact, their every attempt to build was frustrated. That's in your history. I'm not just making that up off the top of my pointy head. And God knows, even if they had been given opportunity to build, they would have been robbed of its yield. (see anything written about theft of sharecroppers' livelihoods or this about bad seeds)
4. Divide by descendants
5. Pay

I'll develop these ideas in my next essay. Hopefully I can get it done in a week. 

How the lie of supremacy + fact of fragility leads to the toxic myth of blamelessness

If you listened to Judge TS Ellis saying of Manafort that despite copious evidence to the contrary, Manafort had led an "otherwise blameless life" you might conclude that White men can do no wrong. Even when they've obviously done (and been convicted of) wrong. Such is the power of Whiteness. 

There may be some who are conflicted about whether Paulie did in fact lead a blameless life prior to his prosecution but I ain't among them. I am not conflicted or in any way confused. He's a crook. He's been a crook. He will ever be a crook. But since the concept of blamelessness is now in doubt, since we're now not sure what blamelessness looks like, lemme help you out with that. Let me offer for your consideration, some truly blameless lives....

Emmett Till, 14. Fourteen. "Blamed" by a nice White lady (NWL) of sexually aggressive behavior. Kidnapped and brutalized by NWL's husband and brother. Over a lie. A lie she admitted to in 2017. She's not in jail or even threatened with jail though because she has, since this unfortunate incident, led an otherwise blameless life.

Chaney, Goodman & Schwerner, In Freedom Summer - 1964 - these three young men worked to register Black voters. While driving to Meridian, Mississippi after visiting the charred remains of a KKK-burned church, the three were arrested, held, and eventually kidnapped from jail and executed.

Trayvon Maritn, 17. Executed by a wannabe cop on the sidewalk in Sanford, FL. Because he was Black and unexpected. That's a life otherwise blameless.

Tamir Rice, 12. Murdered in 2014 by a rookie police officer who had been let go by his previous employer for being unfit for police work. Tamir, 12, playing alone with a toy gun in a park. Some Chad called in a report  and the rest, as they say, is history. Tamir's life? Blameless. 

Richard Collins III, college student brutally murdered while minding his own business (this is a theme with many of these murders) for the dual crimes of Blackness and not stepping out of the way of a White man/child. Life? You guessed it: blameless. The malefactor, whose life is not blameless, is awaiting trial on murder and hate crimes charges. 

Aiyana Stanley-Jones, 7. She didn't have enough time on the planet to be blamed for anything. Police, executing one of their infamous "no knock" warrants, shoot her dead while asleep on her grandmother's couch. The police officer who ended her life was cleared of all charges.

And there are so many others. There's Renisha McBride; Jordan Davis; John Crawford III; Terrence Crutcher; Alton Sterling; Thomas Moss, Calvin McDowell, and William "Henry" Stewart and on and on and on the list goes. The endless list proves there exists a surfeit of White supremacist-fueled entitlement and rage that can and do capriciously seek to end or constrain others' lives. It is our refusal to deal with this reality that gives supremacy cover; cover to spew its violence - physical, economic, and/or legal - upon the rest of us.

White supremacy is a fascinating thing. The same supremacist-built justice system that calls Manafort blameless, takes seventy years to exonerate George Stinney, who was in fact without blame. 

The same system that calls Manafort blameless, has yet to pour out any blame on the people who killed Terrence Crutcher; Alton Sterling, Tamir Rice and Stephon Clark. 

But the justice system is just one fruit of the larger tree of White supremacy. As I see it, the tree's two contradictory roots are the intractability of supremacist thinking and the fragility of White belief in its competence. As strong as the belief in (the fallacy of) supremacy purports to be, it is clearly undermined by a lack of faith in that so-called supremacy. I guess it is as my mother always said, superiority complexes are in fact inferiority complexes trying to make themselves feel good.

The tension between these opposing views must cause no end of emotional stress and in an effort to resolve this cognitive dissonance of mammoth proportion, Whiteness has become fearful of every damn thing and every-facking-one non-White. 

The fear is not an unreasonable one. Having stolen from everyone, everywhere; having oppressed people everywhere; having struck out with a conquistador's zeal and created colonies everywhere, developing a fear of retributive justice was inevitable. Sensible even. The colonizer now fears colonization. How could he/she not? But rather than step back from its colonizer past, change its approach and do better, supremacy chooses to stand firm with teeth bared, ready and willing to tear what it fears to shreds. And so, here we are.

Stories of White blamelessness arise out of all of this. Colonizers and their descendants have all too often avoided difficult discussions of their history of purloined wealth. They have also avoided any culpability for the state of the world's poorest nations and people. And they have continued to claim entitlement to benefits of their theft. But such hiding from the truth creates dank spaces where dangerous beliefs can fester. 

In the time that it has taken me to marshal my thoughts on this question of blamelessness, yet another blameless White man has struck. And naturally there are those who fix their mouths to suggest that his actions were understandable (that's  another euphemism for blameless). Even the president has suggested that White terrorists are few and far between and, of course, mentally ill (ergo, not culpable). 

It is supremacy-speak 101 to claim - even as a man stands accused of unspeakable evil - that even though his  actions are abominable, he is without culpability. Mental illness; understandable rage against immigrants; fear of invasion....all these are creative ways to say that he is blameless. 

White criminals, whether mere fraudsters like Manafort or terrorists like the Aussie in New Zealand, are either blameless, mentally ill, or justified. Never straight up wrong or evil, because Whiteness means perpetual exculpation, even as White malefactors hold the literal smoking gun in their hands. 

To be White is to have access to the "Yes, he's guilty but" form of sentencing..

*This option only available in the US. New Zealand looks poised to do different. Thank heaven.

To be White is to be innocent even when proven guilty. 

To be White is to be entitled to everything good in the world even when you bring the bad to others. 

To be White is to be held to a different standard or to no standard at all.

To be White is to be blame retardant, Teflon and to be blameless is to learn nothing from your punishment and to teach others nothing by your punishment.

To be White and blameless is to repeat problematic behaviors again and again in expectation of the same result.

Ah to be White and blameless! 

Environment matters - why Ralph Northam's hometown needs a close look

At the end of the weirdest (or perhaps most honest) Black history month evah I just wanted to say to ytfolx, ladies and gentlemen, welcome to our America, where Blackface is still a thing, where nooses are a style and little Black Sambo-esque iconography as fashion statement.  Welcome to a world where thirty years ago, when some of us were Black and young and trying to make our way, young men (and women I'm sure) were using klan robes and blackface as a source of entertainment. And yes, some of the people so entertained were future lawmakers, doctors, bankers, police officers and sundry other professionals upon whom Black lives and livelihoods would depend. But hey, that's American life right? No big deal!

The Northam story broke on Feb 1, and while this was hardly first story of its kind, this was Black History Month 2019's inauspicious beginning. Here's the troubling truth though, there have been other similar stories. The Northam story is sad on its face, as it speaks to a disturbing level of toxic ignorance. Yes, the actions described are thirty years old, but Northam was grown. Full damn grown. Twenty-two. So the fact of that the actions occurred (allegedly) three decades ago?Immaterial. 

But Northam ain't the only politician with an interesting past. Here's another story that highlights how close our so-called leaders are to America's ignominious past and how truly unprepared most of them are to deal with the truths of that past.  

A candidate for governor of South Carolina who once said she was “proud” of the Confederacy now claims she didn’t know her ancestors owned more than 60 slaves humans.

 During a campaign speech at Bob Jones University earlier this month, Republican candidate Catherine Templeton touted her Southern heritage and her family’s involvement in the Confederacy.

During the speech, Templeton was vague about her slave-owning ancestors, telling the audience: “I think it’s important that my family didn’t fight because we had slaves. My family fought because the federal government was trying to tell us how to live. We didn’t need them to tell us how to live way back then and we don’t need them to tell us how to live today.”

(from a NY Post article about a SC gubernatorial candidate. See more here)

Templeton's ancestor, William Brawley inherited the family’s working plantation from his father. He managed it for two years, before serving in the South Carolina infantry during the Civil War and later being elected to Congress and then appointed as a federal judge in 1894.

“I’m proud of the Confederacy,” Templeton has said. Um, OK. That's a conversation for another day.....or is it? 

Bearing in mind that pride, what policies do we imagine Ms. Templeton might champion as Congresswoman? As a member of Gov. Nikki Haley's cabinet? Like her ancestor before her, Templeton went into public service. What's the likelihood that she went in to serve all the public equally? I'm going to take a wild guess and say that William Brawley, Ms. Templeton's great-grand-pappy, wasn't there serving anyone who looked like me. Mayhap neither was she.  

History matters. Family history especially matters, which brings us to the Northam family.

In light of Ms. Templeton's story, it's definitely worth asking who were Ralphie's forbears. As a native Virginian with roots in the tiny Nassawadox, VA  community, a community where in the 1600s the Onancock wharf was the site of importations of enslaved persons primarily from Barbados and the Caribbean, Mr. Northam's family history matters. 

Nassawadox is a town - per the 2000 census - of 572 people and 121 families. It lies at the intersection of America's two great sins: genocide (the land is stolen native land hence the Native name) and enslavement (the town is a mere twenty miles from a port where enslaved persons made land in these United States). All of America lies at that intersection it is true, but this particular town occupies that space in an obvious way. Between its name and its proximity to a landing site for the enslaved, it's hard to escape questions about what kind of place it might once have been; what kind of place it might be today as a result.

So who are Northam's forebears? What roles did they play in the trade in the 1600s and in the society writ large, since? And perhaps most importantly, what has Ralph learned about or at the feet of those various forebears and in the bosom of that society? With whom did Ralph go to school (think a little about what desegregation might have looked like in Nassawadox)? What was he taught? By whom? Who taught the people who taught the teachers who taught Ralph? What casual racism did Ralph hear or participate in during his formative years? What noxious racism did he hear or participate in as a child and young adult? 

Given these questions about Ralph's place of birth, should the 2019 discovery of his medical school year book really have been in the least bit surprising?  

The Northam Incident (incidentS if you include his wife's profoundly stupid "Imagine you had to pick cotton all day" business) forces us to consider that perhaps we come by our racism honestly and that we might need to do a great deal of work (and over an extremely long period of time) to change our subconscious scripts. Pro tip: the answer to "how long?" is forever.

I began to have a discussion about these very issues with someone (White) recently and the immediacy of the push back was hardly surprising. The responses were variously - unsurprisingly - "You can't blame someone's family...." and "You can't assume that because someone came from a racist family that....". Um, yeah. You can. You really can. 

If you come from a family of musicians, is there not a high likelihood that you too will be a musician?

If you come from a family of dancers, are you not likely to be a dancer?

I come from a family of teachers, guess what my niece wants to be?

To simplify it further, you put your chicken in a seasoning environment will it not eventually have some flavor? And no, that's not shade. That's just how seasoning works. You create the environment, you get a particular result. Y'all should maybe try it sometime. That is shade. 

Environments matter, they have an impact. Explain to me why that truth applies to every environment except a racist one? 

If in 1984 Ralph Northam allegedly did an ugly thing, there are only a couple of questions we need to ask: First, "Who the hell raised him?" and second, "What work has he done shaking that ugliness off?" 

I don't want to hear about his Black friend. I want to hear how he has had his own personal truth and reconciliation process. And based on his poor showing at his press conference, I'm gonna say that he hasn't even begun the "truth" portion of that process, so I'm definitely a hard pass on the "reconciliation" piece. Reconciliation is impossible without acknowledgement of wrongdoing and Ralph ain't there yet. 

Count me out of the Kumbaya chorus on this one. I'm not about to give Ralph (or his wife) a pat on the head and a cookie.

Thank God Black History month is over. Forget history, this BHM started and ended with some cold Black present. This BHM was exhibit 49,000,001 to prove (for those who missed the previous 49,000,000 exhibits, that racism ain't over and that the Northams are not some exception that proves the rule.  

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