Four summers ago, amid an all-too-brief global uprising against racism after the murder of George Floyd, I wrote that Juneteenth is the closest thing this country has to an honest Independence Day. This Wednesday marks a moment of emancipation, of course. But with Reconstruction lasting only a little more than a decade before the rise of Jim Crow, Juneteenth also represents, perhaps, a missed opportunity for America to save itself from itself.
Reparations, arguably, would give us another chance to realize the promise not just of the nation at-large, but also the neighborhoods where we live. Looking toward that future is why I wanted us at The Emancipator to produce an epilogue to the GBH News podcast series “What Is Owed?,” hosted by Saraya Wintersmith. As she and I discussed at the top of the show, we sought to help audiences understand there is a future for reparations. We want to look toward what can be, what should be and what needs to be.
So, what does a repaired society look like? I first asked Reverend Cornell William Brooks, the former NAACP president and CEO who now is a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School, one of the three members of my panel. He argued that reparations look like a city and country “better than its best” in every respect: safe, healthy, and thriving neighborhoods and populations.
Brooks, who co-authored a new paper on reparations which was published on Juneteenth, argues that we can’t get there without “clear sight” of our racial inequities and injustices. A repaired society is one in which we do not “merely acknowledge the past, begrudgingly, but we recognize it, we embrace it, we honor it, and we attempt to reconcile ourselves with it by remediating the ongoing harms.”
Whether or not Boston’s reputation as one of America’s most racist cities holds true today, GBH host and commentator Callie Crossley noted that it means everything to see the area become a leader on reparations. “For Boston to do what essentially would be a 360-degree flip would be amazing,” she said. “Now, is that impossible to think about if we’re thinking radically and out of the box? No.”
It is possible because, in some respects, this repair is already underway. Dara Bayer, a co-director of Cambridge Heart, a non-carceral community crisis and care program, has a young daughter who attends school at “a beautiful institution” where she sees “the Kwanzaa principles lived out among children starting from age zero up through 12 years old. So I think about little pockets of people organizing with each other, building meaningful community, and developing community cohesion, and really trying to disrupt cycles of harm that come from our history and are perpetuated both through the institutions that we live under [and] through intergenerational trauma.”
A repaired society is one in which we do not “merely acknowledge the past, begrudgingly, but we recognize it, we embrace it, we honor it, and we attempt to reconcile ourselves with it by remediating the ongoing harms.”
Cornell William Brooks
Unerringly, we must look toward the future of reparations as if there can and will be one. We must radically imagine that which should not seem so radical as it is necessary. With restitution and repair, our communities and institutions will work better, not just for those of us who are descendants of the enslaved, but for us all.
This episode was produced by GBH News’ Paul Singer and Amber Payne and Alex LaSalvia from The Emancipator. Find “What Is Owed?” here or wherever you get your podcasts.
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