racial reckoning, movements for racial justice, and governing for equity
Today, Megan Ming Francis and Deepak have a new article in The Nation: “After Innocence: Racial Reckoning is Needed to Save Democracy.” Megan and Deepak make the case that
A crucial mistake recurs in American history: trying to move forward without reckoning honestly with injustice. We have an opportunity to break this pattern of forgetting. Remembrance and repair are not just morally necessary—they are the keys to saving our fragile multiracial democracy. Here we offer a plan to undertake that vital work.
Also on the theme of race, reparations, and remembrance, here’s a valuable article, “What Price Wholeness?” by Shenette Garrett-Scott, who reviews William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen’s important recent book From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. There’s a ton of good stuff in Garrett-Scott’s article, including insights on the connection between racism and imperialism. She tells the story of the long history of the movement for reparations in a powerful way. And she begins and ends her piece quoting from a novel by Toni Cade Bambara:
In Salt Eaters, the desperately unwell Velma Henry, after contemplating Minnie Ransom’s offer of wholeness, undergoes a communal process that involves other healers as well as medical professionals and neighbors. Illness is a social condition, and while Velma’s illness lies within her, it isn’t hers alone. It’s also a consequence of the world she lives in. True healing for an individual shouldn’t be separated from addressing malaise in communities, institutions, and structures, particularly the malaise that emerges from racism infecting the body politic. “Wholeness is no trifling matter,” Minnie insists. “A lot of weight when you’re well.” In From Here to Equality, Darity and Mullen challenge the United States to bear the moral weight of the legacies of slavery and deeply entrenched racism: to reject trifling, half-hearted measures and to approach—and perhaps even achieve—wholeness through reparations.
While you’re in this historical frame of mind, you should also check out Megan Ming Francis’s important research, including her brilliant book Civil Rights and the Making of the Modern American State. Her work on the distorting impact of philanthropy on social movements’ agendas is also profound and original. A paper in Law & Society in 2019, “The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives, White Funding, and Movement Capture,” is very relevant to today’s movements. The abstract of the paper is below, and you can also read about it in this good Vox piece. Everyone who raises or gives away money should be required to read Megan’s work.
What influence do funders have on the development of civil rights legal mobilization? Fundraising is critical to the creation, operation, and survival of rights organizations. Yet, despite the importance of funding, there is little systematic attention in the law and social movements and cause lawyering literatures on the relationship between funders and grantees. This article recovers a forgotten history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s (NAACP) campaign to protect black lives from lynchings and mob violence in the early twentieth century. I argue that funders engaged in a process of movement capture whereby they used their financial leverage to redirect the NAACP’s agenda away from the issue of racial violence to a focus on education at a critical juncture in the civil rights movement. The findings in this article suggest that activists tread carefully as the interaction between funders and social movement organizations often creates gaps between what activists want and what funders think movements should do.
We were moved by Laleh Ispahani’s piece in Just Security, “Biden Executive Actions Make Unity Possible for Millions of Marginalized Americans,” which brings the impact of Biden’s early anti-racist executive actions home and makes the case for the right kind of unity.
So, rather than divide Americans, as conventional wisdom might have it, these actions are a powerful and necessary precondition for unifying Americans. Unity to me is not defined by whether senators in Washington, D.C. are getting along. Unity to me is whether my daughter and I are welcome in the United States, and are once again included in the American story.
One executive action in particular reconnects my household with our adopted country: Biden overturning, on his first day in office, President Donald Trump’s “Muslim ban,” which blocked travelers from largely Muslim nations from entering the United States. As a Muslim, an immigrant, and a mother, I have struggled these past four years to figure out how to talk to my teenage daughter about how the U.S. government came to practice state-sanctioned bigotry.
We just got and are super excited to read the new book Heather McGhee published this week, The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together. Heather gave a preview of the book in last Saturday’s brilliant New York Times op-ed “The Way Out of America’s Zero-Sum Thinking on Race and Wealth.”
Savvy Corner
Finally, Lorella Praeli and Community Change will be hosting an event on “Immigration Policy in the First 100 Days and Beyond” that we highly recommend on 2/26 at 1 p.m. The event features Rep. Pramila Jayapal, Cecilia Munoz, Cristina Jimenez, and Deepak, and is a soft launch for the forthcoming book Immigration Matters: Visions, Movements, and Strategies for a Progressive Future (co-edited by Ruth Milkman, Deepak, and Penny Lewis). You can register for the event here.