Why Black Americans Need Reparations Now

As a Haitian American, I have heard stories of resistance from my elders starting at the tender age of three. The accounts were often told through fairy tales, but as I grew older, the message became more direct. By late adolescence, my relatives’ narrative was on how much agency enslaved Africans in Saint-Domingue had in shaping their future. They were not to be pitied, nor were they to be seen as anything less than brave. This was a powerful story, and I am incredibly proud of my ancestors who fought in the Haitian Revolution, mainly because they fought for freedom for everyone.

Then and now, my grandparents have been paragons of integrity, not only because they were taller than I or could survive in a rural setting, but because they gave me a sense of dignity to embrace my Blackness. My doubts about the cost of rebellion arose when I visited Haiti for the second time, with adolescent eyes. I was thirteen, traveling through the countryside, and I saw how impoverished Haiti was, with clear signs of malnutrition in children my age. So, I asked my grandparents, “Why is Haiti so poor?” Here, they refused to answer, mainly because the history they had hinted at before our visit conflicted with the reality of the country before me.

Prejudice is a marker of American society, eating through the soul of the country.

During some of my teenage years, it was hard for me to shake the shame of being Haitian, hearing constantly from teachers that Haiti was the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. That narrative, a history-deficient account, often failed to explain how one of the wealthiest colonies in the Caribbean was made poor. It wasn’t until years later that I took the initiative to seek answers to my youthful curiosity. Centuries of accrued debt and decades of structural adjustment programs have crippled the lives of Haitians today. My ancestors have moved, both by force and of their own free will, and so have I. Being mobile within the Black Atlantic has provided me with the insight to see how my history and the financial devastation faced by Haitians cannot be understood in isolation. There are deep connections between enslavement in the eighteenth century and the material conditions today.

Prejudice is a marker of American society, eating through the soul of the country. The disparities from slavery to Jim Crow continue to haunt Black life and have fueled Black insurrection. As the Antiguan-American novelist and essayist Jamaica Kincaid sharply observed in her books, the Afro-Caribbean experience is one of defeat, survival, and resistance. Kincaid documented the wry, rueful conditions of colonialism and made a request of one of Britain’s most famous fictional characters. Kincaid writes:

Dear Mr. Crusoe, Please stay home. There’s no need for this ruse of going on a trading journey, in which more often than not the goods you are trading are people like me, Friday. There’s no need at all to leave your nice bed and your nice wife and your nice children (everything with you is always nice, except you yourself are not) and hop on a ship that is going to be wrecked in a storm at night.

While the letter is amusing and frank, Kincaid is making a request that would have been ignored. Colonial officials terrorized the Caribbean, like other sections of the Americas, and the region was a deliberate and conscious zone of anti-Black terror by European henchmen—a visible reminder of the forced removal of Africans and their coerced labor on stolen Indigenous land. I was born in Miami during Ronald Reagan’s presidency. It was a period when elites grew more prosperous, and Black people were vilified. Growing up Black in America shaped the possibilities I was afforded and those I was denied. With each year, I learned the varied ways that Black people were disparaged. We were typecast as welfare queens, at-risk kids, and undeserving of college admission. These stereotypes were violent, callous, and inaccurate.

Black dispossession in the Americas contributed to European wealth, which was built on the unpaid surplus value extracted from enslaved Black people. Far from being abstract, the profits reaped lined the pockets and vaults of merchants, banks, and other institutions that used those funds to establish the Barclays Bank (British), the ABN AMRO Bank (Dutch), the Caisse des dépôts et consignations (French), to name three known entities that prosper today.2 For the British, the earnings from the transatlantic slave trade and enslavement in the Caribbean went into investments in purchasing plots of land throughout Britain, establishing factories in Manchester, funding libraries in Glasgow, and expanding the shipping industry in Liverpool.

For many of us, historical and perennial suffering can be mended through reparations.

As noted by Eric Williams, author of the 1944 book Capitalism and Slavery, British industrialization was made possible by the empire “making the whole world her footstool. She was clothing the world, exporting men and machines, and had become the world’s banker.” For the Dutch, Hope & Co.—the predecessor to ABN AMRO Bank—was the largest financial company that handled slavery-related insurance, brokering claims on enslaved people and slave ships.5 Estimated to have transported six hundred thousand Africans, the Dutch West India Company and the Netherlands, by extension, received low-cost tobacco, sugar, and coffee from Surinamese plantations.

For the French, Caisse des dépôts et consignations coordinated the transfer of twenty-one billion euros from the descendants of slaves in Haiti to the descendants of French enslavers from 1804 to 1946; fortunately, French antiracist activists have sued over this matter.6 Activists not only demanded that the French pay back Haiti, but they also challenged the relationship that France had with its Caribbean overseas territories—Martinique, Guadeloupe, and French Guinea—and how the descendants of slaves living in France also face massive income inequality when compared to white French people.

No one was innocent. Even if an individual did not own shares directly tied to the transatlantic slave trade, the capital generated by the practice was funneled into various pillars of European society, embedded in architecture, statutes, and schools.

How do we write about the suffering that has been inflicted? How do we describe what reconciliation provides? What are we owed? For many of us, historical and perennial suffering can be mended through reparations. By every measure, the quality of life in the United States for many Black people and working-class people of color is grave. From Luanda, Angola, to Kingston, Jamaica, the global majority are stuck in perpetual debt. And people of African descent disproportionately face long-term joblessness, ongoing climate disaster, and lack of health care. These circumstances are exhibited globally, in slow-moving yet violent ways, but they have been challenged by individuals and groups alike, all seeking a way to heal the wounds of the past.

The word repair originates from the Latin reparare, signifying restoration and return. Like its Latin predecessor, the term has become associated with remedy and renewal, sometimes with reference to physical objects and other times signaling relationships. The case for reparations is more than economic calculations or political demands. It is animated by community restoration, by investing in social and cultural services that provide people with care and restorative justice. Reparations are not a simple act of recovery, but an expansive politic that benefits everyone. They are built on providing descendants of the enslaved with the right to live their lives to the fullest.

Reparations are an essential part of my political imagination, and they are closely linked to my desire for abolition. In a sense, a remedy to remove harm should be approached through a systematic perspective, a strategy to seek equity, and targeted targeting of companies that continue to profit from slavery, colonialism, and the carceral state. Relatedly, restitution may begin to address the pain that has become ubiquitous, an opportunity to unlatch the tentacle grips of oppression, which can be loosened through collective organizing, with something for everyone and not just a few.

Black liberation, no matter how distinct in its language, history, and practice, cannot be absent from any discussion of historical quiescence. As a historian, I delve into archives to search for evidence of colonial crimes and to find freedom fighters. More than anything, the reparations movement—despite being marginal for most of my life—is part of the Black radical tradition, and this is my inheritance.

The abolitionist Sojourner Truth opined, “I shall make them understand that there is a debt to the Negro people which they can never repay. At least, then, they must make amends.” Chattel slavery, in all its brutality, Sojourner laments, could not just be forgotten; African Americans needed to be compensated for centuries of hardship. They were owed for feeding colonial America, they were owed for making Europe rich, and they were also owed for having their African cultural identities stolen from them. But instead, many Africans were further exploited and bequeathed with debt that continues to this day. There is a segment of Americans who believe that slavery is so far in the past that it must be forgotten. There are other Americans who are confronted with the reality that the injustices of the past have continued to make society separate and unequal.

The first formal petition for reparations in the United States was pursued and won by a formerly enslaved African-born woman named Belinda. After her enslaver died, she filed a claim to the Massachusetts General Assembly of 1783, requesting a pension from his estate for her uncompensated labor. “Fifty years her faithful hands have been compelled to ignoble servitude for the benefit of an Isaac Royall,” wrote the court, affording her compensation for her labor. Unusual for the time, the body ruled that she was to be granted £15.12 per year from the Royal family estate, which would have amounted to $373 today.

Throughout the United States, accountability for slavery’s harms remains unresolved, calling for a federal solution to a national problem.

Nearly one hundred years later, after emancipation from slavery, atonement was pursued by Callie House, a formerly enslaved person. Born into slavery in 1861, she organized a campaign that demanded not only pensions for African Americans who served as Union soldiers during the Civil War but also direct compensation for Black Americans’ unpaid labor under enslavement. Her efforts were criticized on multiple fronts. The US Department of Justice banned her organization, alleging that she and other organizers were engaged in mail fraud. Some elite African Americans derided her efforts and called for humility and respectability.

For Belinda and Callie, compensation was a necessary condition to settle the score of their exploitation, to get what they were owed, and to get justice. Their efforts show that, while reparations may seem out of reach to some, for others they are possible and directly address the unfinished business of history.

Well before the civil rights movement, the Black trade unionist A. Philip Randolph devised a Freedom Budget for wiping out poverty in the United States, which he saw as “a political necessity. It is a moral commitment to the fundamental principles on which this nation was founded.” As a socialist, Randolph organized the first African American–led labor union in 1925. He knew any fight for racial justice had to be integrated into the workplace. His ten-point plan was also later endorsed by the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, a testament to how Black religious groups sought to address wealth inequality.

In his book A Testament to Hope, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. wrote, “In these trying circumstances, the black revolution is much more than a struggle for the rights of Negroes. It is forcing America to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism.” King argued that the United States was a country riddled with political and ideological mechanisms of violence. When King wrote this text, he and so many other Black Americans were haunted by the legacy of slavery and living through Jim Crow. They concluded that the Black American struggle is not merely about fighting for mere equality but defying the capitalist system that creates and perpetuates structural racism. His contemporaries Kwame Ture and Charles V. Hamilton wrote in their manuscript Black Power about the role that discrimination plays, which “keeps black people locked in dilapidated slum tenements, subject to the daily prey of exploitative slumlords, merchants, loan sharks, and discriminatory real estate agents.” Racism is not just an ideological tool; it has real consequences that bleed into various aspects of life.

During the civil rights movement, Black-led organizations were present in every sphere of life, including far-left and religious groups, some striking, others genteel, but most committed themselves to shifting the political and economic terrain.

The call for reparations encompasses more than simple compound interest on the never-realized promise of forty acres and a mule—it is about solving the problems of twenty-first-century racial inequality and the widened wealth disparities between white Americans and African Americans before and since the end of formal Jim Crow segregation. But even more so, the reparations movement articulates the need for a long-term process of undoing the damage done.

One reparations template has appeared before. In the 1970s, a Yale Law professor, Boris Bittker, argued in The Case for Black Reparations that a rough price tag for reparations could be determined by multiplying the number of African Americans in the population by the difference in white and Black per capita income. The resulting figure was $34 billion in 1973, when Bittker wrote his book. By the late 1980s, the reparations movement coalesced under the umbrella organization the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, and in 1993 the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) endorsed reparations.

Two factors mistakenly confine popular understandings of the reparations debate in the United States. First, conventional perspectives on reparations are assumed to be repayment for the historical injustice of slavery alone. Second, mainstream perspectives disconnect Black liberation struggles from Pan-African and Pan-American efforts to hold the beneficiaries of anti-Black oppression accountable for their unearned gains, regardless of national boundaries. Though not always at the center of popular accounts of the reparations movement, the ongoing racism faced by descendants of slaves has been at the core of this work.

Reconciliation and reparations programs in Africa have shown that one-time payments are not enough.

In the Francophone Caribbean, Mouvement International pour les Réparations has emphasized the necessity to not only fight against all forms of racism but to acknowledge the particular victimization of people of African heritage. For the coalition, the forced deportation and labor of African people is a crime that must be resolved today.

Black people are not the only ones appealing for financial remittance and restitution for descendants of the enslaved. As of 2021, the tide for reparations is shifting globally: in the United States, three-quarters of African Americans are in favor of reparations while over 85 percent of white Americans oppose them.That same year, the Princeton Theological Seminary endorsed a $27.6 million plan to provide reparations to the descendants of slavery through a scholarship fund and education program with the Princeton community. Throughout the United States, accountability for slavery’s harms remains unresolved, calling for a federal solution to a national problem.

Since April 2021, the US Congress has voted to advance HR 40, the slavery-reparations bill, almost three decades after it was initially introduced.16 If successful, the measure would establish a committee to offer an apology for chattel slavery and submit recommendations to Congress on how to compensate African Americans for centuries-long discrimination. Although others are calling for a more robust program, this was, as US representative Sheila Jackson Lee has noted, a “path to restorative justice.” That equity is not merely associated with chattel slavery, but also with African objects that were stolen during European colonial rule.

In late April 2021, Berlin’s Ethnology Museum agreed to return Benin bronze sculptures and carvings that were stolen in 1897 from Benin (present-day Nigeria) during European colonization of Africa. Germany is not the only European country holding stolen goods from Benin; others include Scotland, England, and France.

Reconciliation and reparations programs in Africa have shown that one-time payments are not enough.

After nearly ten years of civil war in Sierra Leone, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed in 1999 and recommended reparations for survivors that would have provided free health care, education, and pensions for the severely wounded and survivors of assault. Rather than providing comprehensive programs to address long-standing economic issues, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission distributed $1,000 payments to the 30,000 registered survivors. Short of delivering longterm solutions for perennial structural problems, this program failed to provide redress. In Kenya, veterans of the Mau Mau uprising won a settlement in which the British government would distribute £20 million in reparations to five thousand of their survivors.

The compensation plan is intended to address a fraction of the harms the British colonial administration committed when it conducted a mass deportation of Africans and seized their land for tea plantations. When the British government refused to pay out to the survivors, they demanded more. It was, after all, their right given the cowardly stance of the British government in refusing to honor an agreed settlement. The struggle for reparations on the African continent is ongoing, and survivors are being insulted by the failure to implement comprehensive reparations programs that are due.

The CARICOM (Caribbean Community and Common Market), a fifteen-member political union, has examined how slavery and colonialism continue to cripple the region’s economy. The institution formed a reparations committee with a ten-point plan centered on debt cancellation, along with psychological rehabilitation, public health justice, and an African-knowledge program.21 All of these measures would deepen the vibrant Caribbean community. They would begin to undo the humiliation that has become common for Black people in the Caribbean. The contemporary reparations movement is sociologically essential. It is not charity; restitution is owed.

One cannot address racism without also tackling the ongoing assault on public services, the rise in poverty, and joblessness. Reparations can be among the many remedies to heal the laceration inflicted by centuries of calculated, harsh dispossession. And while reparations might feel abstract for some, I believe redress through mental health care can be one of the solutions for the tremendous trauma affecting Black people. What if the money spent on militarization and policing were instead invested in programs like more public parks or free on-demand childcare? What if there were community programs where everyone could gather and make art collectively? Reparations are about exercising a radical vision, thinking beyond the harshness of life, and knowing that something better is possible. While reform and progressive promises can improve people’s lives in the short term, they are not enough. We need abolitionist policies.

Repairing Black lives means building new social relationships outside of the prison-industrial complex. At present, prison abolitionists have demanded new conditions for addressing racial capital, turning away from the brutal system of punitive measures to a framework of racial repair. An abolitionist framework, such as the one sketched by activists and scholars like Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba, and Derecka Purnell, could serve as a rubric for racial repair, built on defunding the police, redirecting funds to social services, and prioritizing community care.

The case for reparations is grounded in the fact that there is a universe bigger than a Black person’s, and getting there means establishing an ongoing material and social plan for racial reckoning. This is a vision that allows Black people to rest, to have agency over their labor and time, to have freedom of movement, to convene together. Most of all, it is about curating a world where Black people finally get what they deserve.

How do we express and envision the road to racial justice? Tending to the future is what we should aspire to in excavating the involuntary and voluntary memories we have about the living and the dead. As a historian, I learn about the departed so I can more comfortably fight for the living.

In a country that was built on the free labor of Black people and where only 1.2 percent of the US population has a PhD, having a scholarship— with no strings attached—can ameliorate the quality of life for working-class people.

That means dreaming about Black liberation, not as an impossibility but as something that will come to fruition. That connotes living and breathing Black resistance every day, even when confronted with acts of racial violence. It entails learning about the histories that have been lost, stolen, erased, or deemed unimportant.

It means building collective power and using new tactics, or a bit of the old—grounded on repair, restitution, and reparations.

Between the efforts of the formerly enslaved, like Belinda and Callie, and the contemporary demands of living survivors of the Jim Crow era, financial compensation has been sought out by Black women seeking due justice for racial discrimination. For the modern-day reparations movement, the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, which granted reparations to Japanese Americans for their unjust incarceration during World War II, is an important precedent.23 After the passage of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act, Representative John Conyers introduced a bill in 1989 to “establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery and subsequent racial and economic discrimination against African Americans and the impact of these forces on Black people today.” The bill, HR 40, echoed the unfulfilled promise to provide African Americans with forty acres and a mule. As of the writing of this book, the proposals have not been successful in yielding a federal program for African Americans.

Nevertheless, scholars and activists have done diligent work to calculate the damage. In their book, From Here to Equality, William A. Darity and Andrea Kirsten Mullen initially estimated the reparations amount to $7.95 trillion. Still, when they accounted for the massive wealth gap of Black Americans, their figure rose to $10.7 trillion, which is $267,000 for each Black American descendant of slavery.

In April 1994, the Florida legislature, under Democratic governor Lawton Chiles, passed a law to make amends for the Rosewood massacre. It provided $2.1 million to the survivors and created a scholarship fund that allowed descendants of those affected by the killings—as victims or as survivors—to go to college in the state for free. This was the first instance in the United States of a legislative body giving reparations to a community of African Americans. It is exceptional in that it not only acknowledges the systematic discrimination and racial terror that Rosewood residents and their descendants faced but also tried to provide material benefits through academic scholarships. Since the law’s passage, nearly three hundred students have received assistance from the Rosewood scholarship.

The initial impetus for the program came not from the Florida government, but from Rosewood descendants themselves, who demanded that the state both make amends for its past and secure their families’ futures. Reflecting on the emotional significance of reparations for the descendants of Rosewood, Washington Post journalist Robert Samuels noted: “What can a scholarship do to address a historic injustice? For Carter and her family, reparations changed the frame of a tortured past. The Rosewood story no longer ends with a scared boy running through the woods; it continues with graduation robes and diplomas, potentially the family’s first doctorate.”

This is no small feat. In a country that was built on the free labor of Black people and where only 1.2 percent of the US population has a PhD, having a scholarship— with no strings attached—can ameliorate the quality of life for working-class people.

In 2001, Oklahoma legislators passed the Tulsa Riot Reconciliation Act, laying the groundwork for a memorial to commemorate the victims of the massacre. As in Florida, the city of Tulsa also established a scholarship fund.28 In 2001, the New York State Assembly created the Commission to Quantify the Debt Owed to African Americans, proposing that the legislature compensate “African American communities for the continuing economic and social impact of slavery.” To varying degrees, the commission became inert and was unable to yield money or power to back this campaign. However, the COVID-19 pandemic, antiracist demonstrations of 2020, and growing reparations task forces throughout the US shifted the tide.

In 2015, the city of Chicago started a $5.5 million reparations fund for the more than one hundred victims tortured at the hands of police commander Jon Burge.

The same year, students at Georgetown University demanded that the administration set aside an endowment equal to the profit from an 1838 slave sale that helped pay off the university’s debt to recruit Black professors. At the time, 272 enslaved people were sold for $400 each, the equivalent of about $2.7 million today. One day after protests began, students successfully renamed a residence hall named after Thomas Mulledy, the university president who oversaw the sale. (It was renamed Freedom Hall.) In March 2021, the city of Evanston, Illinois, initiated a plan to provide reparations for Black residents who had experienced housing discrimination, an initiative spurred by the Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program.

The economic crisis sparked by the 2008 crash has kept Black people thinking proactively—how can we undo the damage that we live through today? In his 2014 Atlantic magazine article “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates opened a contemporary reparations debate and helped to popularize the idea. Coates argued that it wasn’t merely slavery that necessitated restitution, but the dispossession after the end of slavery that lasted for more than a century and continues today.

In the text, he shows how institutional racism in housing is salient, as Black people spend their lives paying off unfair loans. Using housing as a focus, he illustrates how Black people in the US are living through an American tragedy, a ferocious set of policies that were carried out in the name of segregation. Coates’s demand for government and corporate responsibility is intent on not only acknowledging the exploitation of Black people but on finding a solution to the housing problem.

After Coates’ article was published, for the first two years there was a slew of debates on the socialist left of the United States. The article put reparations into public discourse in a way it hadn’t been before, due to both the force of his ideas and his writing, as well as The Atlantic’s series of articles and conversations that promoted the discourse.

For some people, it was not immediately evident that reparations could be a socialist issue. Political scientist Cedric Johnson offered a condescending, and I would argue conservative, social-democratic position: “Coates’s views about class and race—and this nation’s complex and tortured historical development—are well-meaning and at times poetic, but wrongheaded. The reparations argument is rooted in black nationalist politics, which traditionally elides class and neglects the way that race-first politics are often the means for advancing discrete, bourgeois class interests.” It is not the case, as Johnson suggests, that any claim for material recompense by Black people would not challenge structural racism, but this particular quote about the origins of reparations is erroneous.

The reparations movement has been dexterous and incisive, and transnationalism has been key in the reparations movement.

On top of this, his tone is condescending by suggesting that any claim for material recompense by Black people can only come from a Black nationalist and bourgeois initiative. But more destructive to Johnson’s claim was that remediation could not challenge structural racism or empower Black people to demand more; Johnson cannot imagine that reform for a marginalized group could be universally beneficial for everyone. Perhaps this is a failure of his imagination.

In response to Johnson, Black American socialist and writer Brian Jones insisted that, on the contrary, the call for reparations can build support for class politics and even for public investment in health care and education. Princeton University professor Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor offered another corollary to the reparations debate, arguing in her book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation that reparations cannot be reduced to mere policy prescriptions. Instead, they represent a way of “not forgetting” the foundational role of slavery in the accumulation of wealth and arrangements of class in former slave societies in the Americas.

Although the left is engaged in an active debate about reparations, given the vacuum existing in parts of the left, the significance of the reparations debate is that it offered honest spaces for conversations about the ongoing material dispossession of Black people. Reparations’ reception was varied within African American communities. At various points, some African Americans have resisted reparations, dubious that a payout would be easy to implement. Some were uninterested in monetary compensation as a form of justice, acknowledging that anti-Black violence would not be addressed with finances alone. Black elites were worried that fighting for justice would threaten their marginally privileged status. A set of disparate campaigns of supporters of reparations—including nominal Black nationalists, prison abolitionists, the incarcerated, and more—has inserted itself forcefully into the debate about redress.

Pan-Africanist organizations have articulated the appeal for reparations—it isn’t the same thing as civil damages, nor is it a singular concept, but part of a set of legal remedies to moral injustices. In 1993, the First Pan-African Congress on Reparations met in Abuja, Nigeria, which set the foundations for the 2001 United Nations World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia, and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa.

During the 1993 Pan-African Congress on Reparations, as historian Hilary Beckles documents in Britain’s Black Debt, European nations did not consider their role in the enslavement of Africans as a crime against humanity because, for them, the practice was legal at the time. Furthermore, many Europeans often deny how deeply they were involved in the mass enslavement of millions of Africans and their descendants. This involvement includes the shipping industries that built the ships transporting slaves, European empires that had forts in West Africa, European merchants who owned plantations in the Caribbean, and the sugar refineries trading with enslavers in the Americas. As political scientist and author Adom Getachew has noted in her book Worldmaking After Empire, even when African nations have been reticent to make formal reparations claims, grassroots African and Afro-Caribbean groups have been inspired by each other’s movements.

Additionally, CARICOM has led an active reparations movement since 2013, demanding that Europe address the unpaid debt owed to the descendants of captured Africans.

In 2019, Glasgow University committed itself to alloting £20 million to reparative justice in response to a report that proved the university’s connections to Scottish slavers. Glasgow’s program opened a new relationship with the University of the West Indies, where they will collaborate to raise awareness of slavery’s legacy in the Caribbean. In a similar vein, a collaboration between Harvard University Medical School and the Lancet Commission on Reparations and Redistributive Justice has yielded a project to establish what Black people are owed for racial discrimination in medicine historically and today.

In 2020, the Movement for Black Lives introduced the BREATHE Act as part of its vision to provide reparations to the victims of police violence. The list of local and international initiatives for reparations continues and reflects what is owed to Black people globally. Reparations is about structural repair and redress on a massive scale. It is about making amends for the intergenerational debt that has affected people.

The reparations movement has been dexterous and incisive, and transnationalism has been key in the reparations movement. The Rhodes Must Fall movement, which began at the University of Cape Town, erupted on university campuses around the world. Activists Roseanne Chantiluke, Brian Kwoba, and Athinangamso Nkopo, in their thorough analysis of the movement, not only called for the removal of Cecil Rhodes monuments that were sprinkled across Britain and its former colonies, but they also challenged the toxic inheritance of the past and the perennial underrepresentation of people of color at universities.4For these activists, changing the ethnic and racial makeup of the student body and faculty is the first step in addressing the university’s complicity. It also involves returning stolen items and providing material support to former European colonies. They offered a meaningful platform that went beyond politics of representation and aimed for a real policy of reparations.

It’s no surprise that dreams hold such significance in Haitian culture, because they are larger than us; they give us dignity and the tools to fulfill our humanity with purpose.

In an interview on the podcast Jemele Hill Is Unbothered, activist and author Alicia Garza noted, “Hashtags do not build movements, people do.” In that same interview, she remarked that we must refuse to accept things as they are and instead embark on a political journey that offers clarity and expediency, which we have inherited from our elders. That acuity sharpens when we lean into our history, especially the Black radical tradition, which is rooted in a rich framework. Abolition has been a component of the contemporary movement for Black lives, a strategy to dismantle oppression and a vision for a world without police, prisons, borders, a carceral state, and debt.

During the nineteenth century, an older form of abolitionism was led by Black radicals. They echoed abolition through the lens of Pan-African movements and in some cases through Black women’s liberation. Abolition was not just a mode of justice; it was a proposal that provided deep texture to the Black radical tradition. As Tobi Haslett wrote in n+1, “Scrapping departments isn’t enough; neither is closing prisons. Incarceration and policing have become the state’s annihilating reflex when confronted with murder and sexual violence, but also homelessness and addiction—the social disintegration that marks those lives consumed by poverty.” He further notes that redistribution of wealth and resources is key to settling the racial inequities of the present.

“The past,” as James Baldwin wrote in Notes of a Native Son, “is all that makes the present coherent, and further the past will remain horrible for exactly as long as we refuse to assess it honestly.” Belinda’s and Callie’s spirits live on in recent personal claims for racial repair.

In May 2021, at the age of 107, Viola Fletcher, a survivor of the Tulsa Massacre, sought financial compensation and justice for the destruction of her community and the decimation of her potential.49 In her testimony to the US Congress, she stated: “Our country may forget this history, but I cannot. I will not and other survivors do not, and our descendants do not. When my family was forced to leave Tulsa, I lost my chance at an education. I never finished school past the fourth grade. I have never made much money.” Fletcher, in her appeal, directly connected her tragedy to her financial loss and highlighted that the destruction of her thriving community by a violent white mob left her neighborhood and her life in ruins.

My grandparents are buried side by side in a small village in northwestern Haiti, where their graves absorb the salty wind from the Atlantic Ocean. They never received a formal education, never had a bank account, and couldn’t read or write. They lived off the land and did their best to hold on to the histories they were told. When people express pity or concern about Haiti’s wealth, it can be tempting to either accept that impoverishment is inevitable or to focus on how far I’ve come from my working-class background. Clinging to this narrative, though easy, fails to do the necessary work of uncovering the people, institutions, and circumstances that initially caused Haiti’s poverty. More importantly, collective guilt doesn’t undo the damage. We deserve better, and an honest conversation about reparations, restitution, and repair must be part of our healing process.

In my family, the Haitian Creole word for dream, rèv, is proactive, promising something more. For a long time, I believed our dreams were parochial, bent on a reality that lacked grounding in empiricism—yet another reason to dismiss them. But as I grew older, I realized it signified something deeper. Rèv is a blend of premonition, spirituality, and everyday life. As one cousin said in our group chat, “It could be anything, an answer to a prayer, clarity, and also a warning.” Rèv can reveal hidden trauma, failing relationships, but it also signifies rebirth—a vibrant force—capturing the shifting marvels of our imagination. It’s no surprise that dreams hold such significance in Haitian culture, because they are larger than us; they give us dignity and the tools to fulfill our humanity with purpose. Growing up in Seminole territory, now the state of Florida, I have also inherited the importance of dreams as articulated by Black Americans.

In 1951, Langston Hughes published the terse poem “Harlem,” which posed a set of allegorical questions about Black American adversity, potential, and resistance. The core query was: “What happens to a dream deferred?” For Hughes, the potential for Black Americans to achieve their dreams is not merely a matter of social inertia; rather, the potential to dream can be punctuated by Black dreams becoming ambition. The poem is rife with open meanings; however, its principal question is important for anyone who has felt slighted or discouraged from conducting their lives with reverie.

Dreams may be a universal and rich experience that plunges us into the unconscious to evoke some truth. “The dream,” wrote Toni Cade Bambara in her novel The Salt Eaters, “is real, my friends. The failure to make it work is unreal.”1 Set in Georgia in the 1970s, the book focuses on Velma Henry, a disillusioned civil rights activist. Despite the tremendous fear of living in a world where Black people are dealing with impoverishment, some of the characters develop an inexorable will to fight anti-Black oppression.

Although Black people can sometimes feel deflected and defeated, their dreams have been a challenge for racial capitalism in America. That resistance runs through the culture, especially in spoken words. Black sages have shown that Black rage will not be silenced; rather, it is directed toward creative expression. My mind stays close to the many tender dreams that form the foundation of grief, desire, love, and living.

In recent years, Afrofuturism, as Brent Staples noted in The New York Times, has grown considerably, aiming to write African Americans into a fantastical future built on salvation, tribulation, and futuristic escape. The reemergence and popularization of the Marvel Black Panther comic, and subsequently the film, generated a host of commentary by intersectional theorists, leftists, and postcolonial scholars about the radical tenor of the comics, as professor Christopher Lebron noted in the Boston Review.

So much of Black history requires reflection, remembering that the people and stories we explore were actual human beings with thoughts, emotions, weaknesses, and biases, and that they loved tremendously. As Toni Morrison writes in The Source of Self-Regard, “That in so many ways all our lives are entangled with the past—its manipulations and, fearful of its grasp, ignoring or dismissing or distorting it to suit ourselves, but always unable to erase it.”4 In other words, some histories are incomplete, fragmented textual absences that live in people’s faces and gestures. Some of those histories are still in the making, and 2020 made so many people I know—my family, friends, and comrades—keenly contend with how to expose and confront the reactionary and antidemocratic realities of today.

Writing this book during a pandemic was an unsettling and unpredictable experience. I swung between mourning and dreaming, going through periods of isolation as I relocated from one apartment to another, while absorbing the aftershock of global unrest. The rise of an empowered police state and the brutal display of Black suffering left me furious. With little support in Berlin, I had to navigate the emotional pain of being Black in this world while also finding ways to survive.

The true fight is for self-determination and restitution; anything less is unacceptable.

The act of writing is a pathway to my restoration, a journey to heal from generations of dispossession. As a diasporic person, I am filled with prickling ironies. I cannot escape the reality of being raised poor, Black, and Haitian. I cannot escape the massive student loan debt I have incurred despite my academic merit. I cannot abscond from how Black life languishes in death in a society that falsely insists that white-collar professions will save us, that middle-class existence will give us financial security or a house. This is the lie that we have been sold. Like most Black Americans that I know, homeownership and being debt-free is out of reach. My disillusionment comes in the aftermath of being part of various African diasporic communities that have been devastated, devalued, and sickened by capitalism.

For a time, I thought that exodus could be my salvation. I have always desired to leave the places that held me down, to reconstruct my life in new places in which my intellect and dreams would be taken seriously. My family’s recent history of migration—post-emancipation—influenced my desire to escape the United States shortly after the forty-fifth president was sworn into office. My retreat was an attempt to find freedom in a place that claims to have dealt with its history. I was wrong. In Germany, where I currently live, anti-Blackness is rampant. For this reason, every place must recognize its own legacies of anti-Blackness even if its inhabitants may think they are not directly involved in the transatlantic slave trade, chattel slavery, or racial apartheid that shaped the history of my ancestors and their descendants.

Freedom is an ongoing struggle, and we cannot achieve it alone. The injustices faced by Black people serve as a gauge for how undemocratic and divisive the world has been and still is. But just as that oppression affects our bodies and our souls, it can also be the fire that fuels our resistance. As the activist Assata Olugbala Shakur remarks, the chains of oppression can be broken with love, support, and care, and the Black radical imagination cannot be quelled even when our lives are on the line. Given that Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army, she was a target of the United States counterintelligence program, popularly known as COINTELPRO, which targeted Black Power activists through wrongful convictions and murder.

While serving a prison sentence in 1979, she escaped and sought political asylum in Cuba, where she lived until her death in 2025. Black freedom fighters like Assata created spaces of freedom, contributed to a black feminism. Here is an excerpt from Assata:

r/evolution means the end of exploitation. r/evolution means respecting people from other cultures. r/evolution is creative.
r/evolution means treating your mate as a friend and an equal. r/evolution is sexy.
r/evolution means respecting and learning from your children. r/evolution is beautiful. r/evolution means protecting the people. the
plants. the animals. the air. the water. r/evolution means saving this planet. r/evolution is love.

The writer Kiese Laymon once noted, “The struggle against oppression is that of our flesh and brains and blood and bones and hearts and souls.” As a historian, I am aware that the histories that I was presented in my early education did not give the oppressed the attention and time they deserved. Growing up in the United States, I was fed a sanitized version of the civil rights movement. But living in Berlin, New York City, and Miami was part of my political education.

Africans and Black people more broadly have demanded compensation for the bodily harm they have endured and for stolen people and resources. Reparations serve as redress—indemnity through compensation, addressing grievances, and tending to wounds.

Any effort to rectify racial inequalities worldwide must consider the immense wealth accumulated through the global exploitation of Black people—unpaid labor, physical abuse, torture, and genocide. The true fight is for self-determination and restitution; anything less is unacceptable.

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