An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

possible. Our imaginations, coupled with radical love, knowledge of our
ancestors’ freedom dreams, and resistance, will carry us home. The US and
Europe owe us some checks, and we need to take them and cash them! This
won’t be easy, and remember: it took a bloody civil war to end
enslavement. People really believed that slavery was never going to end,
and then it did.
It is difficult to have a reparations conversation within the context of a
capitalist system. This system of exploitation has, I think, constricted the
public discourse about what is owed. Radical change under capitalism
won’t work. We can’t have radical change or what Leanne Simpson calls a
radical resurgence until capitalism is gone. It is a racist system rooted in the
history of slavery and dispossession, and currently based upon imperialism,
militarism, and the exploitation of workers. 27 We cannot get rid of racism
without also uprooting its capitalist base. The modern capitalist system is
based upon the exploitation of Black and Brown people around the globe.
Indeed, the term “transatlantic slave trade” signifies the global nature of this
historical sin and its permanent consequences for people today. Below, I
outline just a few ways in which we might think about reparations, at least
at the level of discourse.
LAND. In order to have the right conversation about reparations, we have to
include Indigenous peoples, and we have to center a discussion of land. We
know that the US government has participated in the dispossession of Black
people’s land. A 2001 investigation by the Associated Press confirms this to
be true. In one case, stolen land became a country club; and in another, an
oil field. 28 That history is unjust and racist. It shows that dispossession has
long been a part of antiblackness in this so-called democracy. However, that
dispossession occurred first with Native peoples. We cannot forget that.
This was and remains their land. How do we come to terms with this
conversation? We must return land to Indigenous people. To do so, the
United States, as it currently exists, must radically transform. How this
happens is up to the oppressed. However, as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. told
us a long time ago, we need a “revolution of values.” We have to rethink the
concept of land, we have to rethink the concept of land ownership, and no
longer in terms of a capitalist logic. Land can no longer be a commodity
used for capitalist excavation. For example, even if the settler governments
return land, can we still survive off poisonous land and water? No. And let’s