Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?
On Juneteenth, freedom and the Black imagination
(6 minutes)
Lucille Clifton’s 1993 poem “won’t you celebrate with me” is an invitation. It gestures towards joy, gratefulness, and more subtly, freedom. Having the audacity to celebrate in the face of constant threat is bold. And it is exactly what Black folks have done for centuries. I first encountered this stanza through an art installation in Brooklyn, New York’s Prospect Park. Towards the end of last summer, I took long bike rides as a way to free myself. Between the unprecedented death toll caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, the bloody summer of police brutality, the climate crisis and nationwide burnout, 2020 was the worst time for my mental health. On countless days last year, I could barely leave my bed because I was crippled by anxiety and grief. I still wonder how I managed to make it through. Jill Scott and Erykah Badu’s Versuz helped, so did fresh tulips, Beyoncé’s Black is King, loving on my partner, listening to Amaarae’s debut album, Tyler Mitchell’s Night at the Cinema program series, watering Zora (my monstera plant), reading Yaa Gysai’s novel Homegoing and biking through Brooklyn. As my time in New York approached a necessary close and I prepared for a return to Texas, Clifton’s words reminded me that every triumph is worth celebrating.
The summer of 2020 is defined in part by the countless news reports and social media hashtags that flooded my feed each time a Black person was murdered. This virtual death loop was nothing short of psychological torture. I was exhausted by the number of corporations, brands, museums and publications who issued half-ass statements in address of the uprisings—most with no real intention to stop the systemic violence happening within their ranks. All of this was disorienting, but nowhere was this performative activism more frustrating than on Juneteenth. From last summer to now, a 156-year-old, Black Texan holiday—that remained largely unacknowledged outside the South— has been co-opted at a federal level. Our sacred day of mourning, celebration, plotting, and imagining has been whitewashed. This is not to suggest that the day isn’t worthy of mainstream recognition, of course it is. But at what cost? The day does not belong to everyone. It belongs to Black Texans whose ancestors were delayed notice of their freedom. It belongs to Black Southerners who are still disproportionately affected by political and economic disenfranchisement in the region. It belongs to Black Americans still fighting for protection under the law. Perhaps for some, Juneteenth being made a federal holiday might symbolize the start of a reconciliation process. But the road to Black liberation is far more nuanced than a day off from work.
In the feature essay of a book entitled Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul?, cultural critic Jesse McCarthy argues that what the United States owes Black Americans for slavery is a “moral rather than a material debt.” Our lack of a sovereign state makes monetary compensation extremely unlikely. As McCarthy puts it, "Within its own borders the way for a state to do justice to an oppressed minority is not by paying it off, but by creating the conditions for it to flourish equally." If you ask me, “flourishing equally” demands the complete abolition of police and prisons, an immediate end to education and housing apartheid, and while we’re at it, the end of capitalism. All of this is possible, it just requires the capacity to imagine a world beyond the one we’re currently in.
While living in Chicago a few years ago, I attended a program featuring interdisciplinary artist Avery R. Young. During his performance, he shared why he considers Harriet Tubman to be an Afrofuturist. He said, "Harriet did not run to freedom. Harriet ran because she was already free." Tubman envisioned herself beyond bondage, a radical act that built the foundation for her fight to freedom. Perhaps, our liberation begins with the ability to imagine ourselves as free, as sovereign. But how do we get there if our minds are burdened by the daily assault on our bodies? As Gil Scott-Heron first asked, who’ll pay reparations on my soul?!
I’ve been thinking a lot about social death and the psychological impacts of racial trauma. Social death is a condition based on the idea that certain groups of people are excluded from being considered “fully human” by wider society. (For example, the Three-fifths compromise: a constitutional amendment that relegated every enslaved individual as 3/5ths of a person in order to settle a dispute about state populations and congressional representation.) I’m concerned with how the things we absorb about ourselves online amplify this condition. It's why I am so critical of folks who still believe it’s productive to recirculate videos of police brutality for the sake of awareness. I'm not interested in anyone or anything that reproduces anti-black violence through images, especially with no real end game. It’s why I continue to champion visual artists and filmmakers who are actively visualizing refusal of this condition. Folks like Terence Nance (Texas), Ja’Tovia Gary (Texas), and Bria Lauren (Texas) are really out here pushing us into the future and encouraging us to heal. Look at the material!
This past year, I realized that one of the greatest gifts my ancestors left me was the power to refuse the things that are intended to kill me. And so I've taken it upon myself to explore what liberation can truly be for myself and other Black women. I have embraced Lucille Clifton’s invitation: to honor the gift of resilience, to be free. If my ancestors made it happen, I know I certainly can. So, won’t you?
As promised, below are some things for you to check out. If you share anything that resonated, please tag me <3. Thank you for reading. Love yall.
READ—Who Will Pay Reparations on My Soul: Essays by essayist and cultural critic Jesse McCarthy. It’s brilliant.
WATCH—Miss Juneteenth (2020) a beautiful and intimate film by Fort Worth-born filmmaker Channing Godfrey Peoples.
LISTEN—The Revolution Will Be Chopped, a mixtape by Houston legends The Chopstars in collaboration with filmmaker Barry Jenkins.
Hi Amarie! What do you think about the viability of reparations? Are material reparations necessary for Black people if we, in some future, receive our moral reparations?