The Communal Impacts of Drug Criminalization in Maryland

Reparations Means Community Repair, not
Reconciliation or Reform
“In my work as a mental health provider, it was about
reconnecting to ancestral connection and veneration around
who our people were. It was about pointing out where
Eurocentric or whitewashed or White supremacist ideals have
been embedded within us. For example, African-American folks
not wanting to be Black, or seeking to have proximity to
whiteness. So, if we're thinking about this, how I might support
a person that maybe is struggling with addiction or navigating
systems, I would first define community from an African-
Centered perspective that is not reliant on white mainstream
institutions and is not led by or maintaining any level of power
over them.
…decriminalization would be easier, if we had more voices of
folks that had some critical consciousness experience where
they had the ability to see themselves in their own life, see it,
alongside what's happening politically, and then begin to
advocate and be supported by funded community supported
and advocated, so that they could be in the face of, and be
supported collectively, and transforming everything that we
think about when we think about why people use drugs. They
use drugs because they are trying to connect to spirit or are in
deep, deep pain and trying to numb that pain. How can we
create a space where everyone feels like they don’t have to
escape through a substance to heal their pain?”
Our research shows that the very definition of reparations needs
to become a critical site of political contestation. Interviews did
not predominantly use a “racial equity and inclusion” frame,
claiming that successful decriminalization would lead to equal
access to existing institutions, but an institution building
framework, which centered on the production of new,
community-controlled institutions to meet essential needs.
The definition of reparations presented by the interview subjects
did not center on repairing the divide between oppressed and
oppressor by granting the oppressed increased access to existing
political and social service infrastructure, but instead on using
public investment to build up the infrastructural capacity of the
oppressed, so they were no longer dependent on the goodwill of
the oppressor for their survival.
The Drug Policy/Decriminalization advocacy communities'
inattention to the dynamic of self-determination was not seen as
unique to harm reduction or decriminalization advocating, but
an extension of the larger society paradigm of denigration of
Black communities' capacity for self-governance, as one
interviewee noted:
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