To build a better mixtape for the future, Matt & Jesse transition from diagramming how the George Floyd uprisings can move beyond defunding the police (and abolishing it entirely), and instead look at how this movement could lead to larger more long-term transformations. The demand first met must include a long-sought Truth & Reckoning Commission, which has not only happened in South Africa (and more recently Canada), but has occurred in 41 other nations and counting—all of which shows how this is not a dancing unicorn demand in a nation that largely ignores demands from below; there is a vital and visceral need for this commission to surface in the here and now. Our co-hosts will then talk about how this Commission can ramp up to justly deserved reparations for America’s Twin Sins: the enslavement and genocide of Native & Black folks during the era of settler-colonialism, the lawfare and warfare of Jim Crow and the continued racist sadism of the State as COVID-19 ravages Black & Native communities across a country. While many Americans are faced with celebrating this 4th of July without fireworks or freedom, Jesse & Matt acknowledge how white folks’ entrapment in their homes has built a secret solidarity with the lives of African Americans, who have been geographically and economically trapped by centuries of racial capitalism, and who have neither felt freedom nor fireworks in a nation-state that denies their right to breathe or exist. And lastly, money—our shared, mass hallucination—will be questioned and reimagined in order to create a new understanding of what “value” must include, so that we can firmly seed a future of what’s so rightly deserved. To stand up, we must fight back; as the Black Communist & poet, Claude McKay, once wrote: “If we must die, let it not be like hogs / Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot [. . .] we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, / Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!”
Mentioned In This Episode:
The Reparations Debate with Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor and Adolph Reed Jr. - June 24, 2019 in Dissent Magazine; Audio Version: Found Here.
Peter Moore provides a breakdown of the racial divide in the 2014 YouGov Study that shows how only 6% of White Americans Support Cash-Payment Reparation Versus How 60% African Americans Support Reparations.
Cristina Novoa and Jamila Taylor in Center for American Progress: “Exploring African Americans’ High Maternal and Infant Death Rates”
Lisa Rapaport in Physician's Weekly: “Nonwhite Patients Get Less Pain Relief in U.S. Emergency Rooms”
List of Truth and Reconciliation Commissions: As of Now, 43 Nations & Counting {Other than the U.S., Turkey is notably absent in the list, given the many crimes against Armenians and Kurds}
Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic: “The Case for Reparations” (2014)
Special Field Orders No. 15 - a main source for the expression "forty acres and a mule"
Remember to Read the Fine Print, Y’all: It Was a Promise Grossly Broken - Special Order #15 by the Commander of the Military Division of the Mississippi, Major General W.T. Sherman.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. in The Root: “The Truth Behind ‘40 Acres and a Mule’”
Claude F. Oubre’s Forty Acres and a Mule: The Freedmen's Bureau and Black Land Ownership (1978)
Adam Sanchez in the Zinn Education Project: “40 Acres and a Mule: Role-Playing What Reconstruction Could Have Been”
Tera W. Hunter’s Op-Ed in The New York Times: “When Slaveowners Got Reparations”
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor in Jacobin: “The Consequences of Forgetting”
Nikole Hannah-Jones in The New York Times: What is Owed (It Is Time For Reparations)
The New York Times: “The 1619 Project”
HR 40 - John Conyers Jr (House Representative from Detroit) introduced the "Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act" (H.R. 3745) in January 1989.
Conyers Reintroduces National Single-Payer Health Care Bill
Abigail Abrams in Time Magazine: “The Surprising Origins of ‘Medicare for All'”
John Cavanaugh in Common Dreams: “Celebrating John Conyers, the Longest-Serving African-American Congressman”
Cedric Johnson in Jacobin: “An Open Letter to Ta-Nehisi Coates and the Liberals Who Love Him”
Yamiche Alcindor in The New York Times: “Ta-Nehisi Coates Says He Will Vote for Bernie Sanders, but Rejects the Term ‘Supporter’”
Larry Buchanan in The New York Times: “Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in US History”
Examples of Where a Small (Largely White) City Has People (Sometimes Just One Person) Waving Black Lives Matter Signs: Here, Here, Here and Here.
Marisa Iata in The Washington Post: “An 8-Year Old Organized His Own Black Lives Matter Protest. Hundreds Marched Alongside Him”
Matthew Snyder’s Bernie Facebook Pal, Patrick Lindsey, was involved in tearing down racist monuments in his hometown of Richmond, Virginia. Photos of this historic teardown of Jefferson Davis (the only non-Virginian displayed on Monument Avenue) can be found: here, here, here, here and here.
Michael Martin for NPR’s All Things Considered: A stunning and recent Monmouth University Poll said 76% of Americans now say racial discrimination is a big problem in the United States (which lowers to 71% if asking only White folks). This is an astounding 25% jump from 2015 polling.
Brian Jones in Jacobin: “The Social Construction of Race”
Peter Force’s Tract Published in the Richmond Enquirer in 1835: “The Beginning, Progress, and Conclusion of Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, In the Years 1675 and 1676”
James D. Rice’s Tales from a Revolution: Bacon's Rebellion and the Transformation of Early America (2013)
Alex Gourevitch’s Examination of the Lost History of America’s Working Class with the Knights of Labor in Jacobin: “Our Forgotten Labor Revolution”
Leon Fink’s Workingmen's Democracy: The Knights of Labor and American Politics (1985)
Mike Davis’ Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class (1986)
Visual Artist Jenny Holzer: MoMa Bio; Abuse of Power Comes as No Surprise (Screenprint on Wood): 2018
Manny Fernandez and Audra D. S. Burch in The New York Times: “Who Is George Floyd?”
Lecture by Sander Vander Dew Leeuw at Arizona State University: “Complex Systems Theory, Sustainability, and Innovation”
Wallace Stevens’ Poem: “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird”
Jim Edwards and Theron Mohamed in Business Insider: “MMT: Here's a Plain-English Guide to 'Modern Monetary Theory' and Why It's Interesting”
Matt Bruenig in The People’s Policy Project: “What’s the Point of Modern Monetary Theory?”George Monbiot in The Guardian: “How US Billionaires Are Fuelling the Hard-Right Cause in Britain”
Michael Hiltzik in The Los Angeles Times: “Did the Koch Family Buy a Piece of the University of Utah to ‘Balance’ a Marxist Faculty?”
Erica L. Green and Stephanie Saul in The New York Times: “What Charles Koch and Other Donors to George Mason University Got for Their Money”
Nancy MacClean’s Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right's Stealth Plan for America (2017)
Tom Gara in BuzzfeedNews: “The Real Economic Catastrophe Hasn’t Hit Yet. Just Wait For August.”
Eric Levitz in The New York Magazine: “Why Our Economy May Be Headed for a Decade of Depression”
Thomas Piketty's Capital in the Twenty-First Century (2017)
Matt Egan for CNN: “US Billionaires Have Regained $565 Billion in Wealth Since the Pit of the Crisis”
Erik Olin Wright’s How to Be an Anticapitalist in the Twenty-First Century. Published in 2019 by Verso Books.
More on the Man Who Invented Inside-Outside Strategy in Seen Peter Dreier’s Article for In These Times: “Paul Wellstone’s Legacy: 10 Years After the Minnesota Senator’s Death, He Still Sets the Bar for a Politics of Conviction.”
Jamaal Bowman's Reconstruction Agenda – Reconcile With Our History
Sarah Churchwell in The New York Review of Books: “‘The Lehman Trilogy’ and Wall Street’s Debt to Slavery”
A Working List of American Companies that Profited from U.S. Slavery
Nick Srnicek’s Op-Ed in The Guardian: “We Need to Nationalise Google, Facebook and Amazon. Here’s Why . . .”
Philip F. Rubio in The Atlantic: “Save the Postal Service”
Danny Glover’s Op-Ed in USA Today: “My Parents Proudly Worked for the US Postal Service. Don't Destroy It.”
Paul Prescod in Jacobin: “Defend the Post Office, Defend Black Workers”