By Kyle T. Mays

Juneteenth celebration and march through Uptown Greenville, North Carolina. Photo credit: Rawpixel

Since the racial reckoning in the summer of 2020, reparations have become a greater part of the national consciousness and discourse. Municipalities across the US implemented some form of reparations programs; two states, including California and New York, have implemented task forces to study the possibility of it. There is no consensus on reparations and cash payments, though. The recent discussions and debates on reparations for Black Americans remain controversial across racial and party lines. According to a 2022 Pew Research Center Poll, 18% of white Americans support reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans; 77% of African Americans support reparations for the descendants of enslaved peoples. For those who vote Democrat or are Democrat-leaning independents, 48% support reparations while 49% do not. 8% of Republicans support reparations while 91% do not.

What we cannot forget is that the core of reparations is about compensation for exploited labor, stolen land, and property, to address past wrongs from the period of slavery and through the period of Jim Crow. Land and property rights are essential characteristics of what it means to be an American, a core part of the promise of democracy. However, the core idea of democracy in the US, both in theory and practice, was based on the dispossession of Indigenous peoples and the enslavement of African peoples. Critical race scholar Cheryl Harris reminds us that the notion of property was based on the “parallel systems of domination of Black and Native American peoples.” In other words, whiteness was the determinant of who could own property and who could become property—that is, Indigenous peoples could not properly hold property and Black people could become property. A quick perusal of the founding documents, including the Constitution and the Federalist Papers, reveal the accuracy.

In general, advocates of reparations seek either compensation for land promised in the form of 40 Acres or a return of land stolen from the period of Reconstruction and throughout the period of Jim Crow. Others seek cash payments to be paid to descendants of enslaved Africans for enslaved labor. From the investigative journalism produced at Mother Jones or the recent publications, such as The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice, a focus on private property and generational wealth seems central to remedy past wrongs. We should reject seeking reparations in the form of general wealth and private property. Let’s take a step back in time, during the period of Reconstruction (1865-1877).  

In W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic, Black Reconstruction (1935), he spends a significant time on the importance of land in the South for white plantation owners and Black, formerly enslaved workers. During Reconstruction, Black people “expressed their right to land and the deep importance of this right.” As Du Bois further opines, Black people had earned that land because of their 250 years of uncompensated labor, “and by every analogy in history, when they were emancipated the land ought to have belonged in large part to the workers.” The US has tried their hardest to include Black people only slightly into this democracy, often at the expense of Indigenous peoples. For example, on January 16, 1865, General William T. Sherman declared in Special Field Order No. 15: “Whenever a negro has enlisted in the military service of the United States, he may locate his family in any one of the settlements at pleasure and acquire a homestead and all other rights and privileges of a settler.” Notice the term settler. While I don’t consider those enslaved peoples nor their descendants as settlers in the same way I do Europeans who came to settle and replace Indigenous peoples and whose ancestors continue to benefit from expropriated land, they can participate in the colonial project. And while it makes sense for those ancestors to seek land, I would suggest that they didn’t know much about Indigenous dispossession in their time. And certainly, it does not mean that we must carry the settler-colonial project into the present.

As my grandma would say, “When you know better, you do better.” So, despite Mother Jones’ fantastic reporting and tracing of 1,500 land titles that were given to freedpeoples and swiftly taken away, can we also have a serious conversation why land should not be the sole focus on Black American reparations? Do we want to continue the violent nature of this so-called democracy—built on both the enslavement of Black people and the expropriation of Indigenous land? Do we really want to be compensated for the exploitation of people and land, both forms of property under a settler colonial society? Private property should not be the goal of reparations; it should be justice and a complete banishment of private property as well as a fundamental critique of American capitalism.

Why should Black people care about abolishing private property? One of the few Black people who understood the nature of the settler colonialism point was Stokely Carmichael, who would change his name to Kwame Ture. In a speech he gave in front of a mixed Black and Indigenous crowd in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1975, he argued that this is not Black people’s land. And any dealings with land should center Indigenous nations. If he understood this in 1975, we should keep this same energy going in 2024 and beyond. After all, we should never desire to live in this wretched nation-state as is, without working in comradeship with our Indigenous relatives. Will this be perfect? No. But perfection is not the point of solidarity—it is about being on the right side of history, for the future of us all.

We should strive in every way possible to reject capitalism, and in this case, that means avoid harping on the generational wealth as a route to reparatory justice. In The Black Reparations Project, editors William Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen state: “We propose that a true reparations plan . . . must focus on the elimination of the black-white wealth disparity at the mean, rather than the median.” I’m not opposed to helping the most vulnerable in society right now. If you’ve known the depths of inhumanity that exists in being poor in this country, you know what I mean when I say the most vulnerable in society could use cash right now. I also think, in the interim, Universal Basic Income would be great for most people. And yet I stand by the idea that we must reject generational wealth. Surely, reading that we should reject generational wealth as a fundamental ideal will have a strong reaction because our ancestors’ blood and sweat tarries in the soil. I ask this in response: How much are our ancestors’ bones worth? I understand that the development of United States’ wealth was based on land expropriation and enslavement, but that does not mean Black people should so eagerly want to become inducted into the hall of settler-capitalist shame. A focus on securing wealth, even to become average with white Americans, is not ideal because it does not lead to decolonization.

Historian Robin D. G. Kelley asks in the latest version of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination: “Is it possible to reconcile reparations for slavery and structural racism with decolonization?” If people want to focus on generational wealth and private property, the answer is no. If the desire is to imagine something more, where Black and Indigenous peoples can coexist, then yes, it is a possibility. But we must change our approach. So, what can reparatory justice look like? Rejecting generational wealth and private property should be fundamental in our approach toward reparatory justice. Sure, reparations could be a part of a broader social program to redistribute wealth to all workers as some socialists suggest. However, the land question must remain primary. You can’t redistribute Indigenous land without Indigenous say so. What good is redistributing wealth and paying reparations if land is not returned to Indigenous peoples? Someone will likely say that the “Indians enslaved Black people.” No, those were a handful of elites in the Five Tribes who did so under difficult circumstances. Most Indigenous nations did not enslave Africans. In our move toward reparatory justice, there two primary things that could happen sooner rather than later so we can iron out the details for our Afro-Indigenous future.

First, Black and Indigenous peoples must connect together on the land. We must meet on the land and discuss how we envision shared land beyond private property and how we can pool resources that seek to take care of the collective and not focus on building generational wealth. After all, we haven’t had it anyways, right? So why start engaging in this capitalist hoarding process now? Second, Indigenous nations, using whatever protocols they have, should consider classifying Black Americans as kin in their territories. This could take many forms and it is up to those nations how they do so. What I am asking requires re-education, ending anti-Blackness and anti-Indianness in our communities. I think we can do it, though. We will need to have long, hard conversations over seasoned food, fit for everyone’s diet, but it can happen. We shall get our freedom, in this life.

About the Author 

Kyle T. Mays (he/him) is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2021). Connect with him online at kyle-mays.com, on Twitter (@mays_kyle), and Instagram (@mayskyle).