UBI is plagued by centuries of oppression and dehumanization of blackness carried through the Wake – smokescreen and cruel optimism

Universal basic income programs are meant to broadly distribute wealth so that no one falls below the threshold for a decent standard of living. However, this policy alone cannot address the historical damage of systematic discrimination and cumulative disadvantage that has marginalized many communities in the first place. In addition, efforts to restitute past injustices—such as campaigns for reparations or struggles to maintain the current welfare state —may, paradoxically, be threatened by the implementation of what I term neoliberal universal basic income.This section explains why those living in the wake of historical injustice (Sharpe 2016) should take particular interest in the structure and policy goals of any proposed UBI program to avoid the adoption of a program that could undermine the efficacy of UBI for improving the overall well-being of historically marginalized communities. One of UBI’s primary and most discussed advantages as a policy is that it is universal. By giving benefits to every member of society, UBI avoids the stigma that usually comes from receiving welfare. As Van Parijs (2004, 13) puts it, “there is nothing humiliating about benefits given to all as a matter of citizenship.” However, a universal policy that distributes equal benefits cannot explicitly recognize or ameliorate disparities in income and generational wealth that have emerged historically along gender and racial lines. Standard UBI proposals are not structurally designed to redress the inequalities produced by centuries of oppression, slavery, exploitation, settler colonialism, and race- and gender-based exploitation. While most UBI proposals would clearly benefit the most marginalized to some extent, they cannot directly address the harm, both in terms of a dearth of material resources as well as the psychic and collective pain of marginalized groups, that centuries of capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity have produced. Put simply, a universal basic income may be desirable for a variety of reasons, but it is not a panacea for social problems, nor can it serve as a replacement for reparations for historical injustices inflicted on marginalized groups. UBI could lessen economic inequality but does not address the systemic and historical processes and phenomena that have generated contemporary patterns of inequality, economic or otherwise. Racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia all exist in social relations as quasi-autonomous but also interlocking phenomena that serve to stratify and oppress marginalized people in innumerable ways (see Crenshaw 1989). While forms of racism, sexism, homophobia, and transphobia do often negatively impact a person’s socioeconomic status, the effects of these structures and practices cannot be reduced to socioeconomic measures, nor can they be solved or propitiated though monetary restitution. The histories of slavery, white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity have innumerable effects on people of color, women, and LGBTQ people, leaving deep-seated scars that cannot be redressed by throwing money at the problem. To give one example of how deep the problems lie in historically marginalized communities, Sharpe (2016) explains how African Americans grapple with the afterlives of slavery, in what she calls the Wake. The Wake can be understood as the conceptual frame for living blackness in remembrance of the African diaspora and in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery. Sharpe (2016) uses the word Wake with multiple meanings to get at the multiplicity of ways of living and being in the shadows of dark histories of oppression and violence. The primary image she uses is of the track left on the water’s surface by a ship. One can visualize this as African Americans living in the midst of that wake, being tossed and turned by the currents of history, always fighting against the waves with no real respite. She also describes the Wake as a form of grief, a ritual of mourning, or being in the line of the recoil of a gun (Sharpe 2016, 11, 8). It is also a form of political consciousness (i.e. wakefulness) that recognizes the “continuous and evolving present of slavery’s yet unresolved unfolding” (Sharpe 2016, 14). Sharpe (2016) uses this imagery and plays with the word to describe the African American experience in modern history as living in the Wake—from four hundred years of the slave trade to the legalized discrimination of Jim Crow to colorblind racism and the New Jim Crow of mass incarceration (Alexander 2010). A UBI scheme can only minimally address the burdens of history for diasporic Africans (See Commander 2017, Hartman 2008). Similar histories and lived experiences can be examined and explained for other marginalized groups such as women and LGBTQ people, and those at the intersections of multiple identities (Crenshaw 1989). Though the experiences of each are qualitatively different, a kind of wake, a continuous turbulence and precarity, is experienced by all marginalized people. This reveals how experiences of marginality in modern society are not limited to strictly economic or class concerns, nor could they be solved by alleviating economic hardship. The pain runs deeper than that. Lived experiences cannot be measured or quantified. Therefore, the quantitative redistribution of money across society can ameliorate the struggle for material needs but cannot alone address the qualitatively distinct lived realities of marginality that have been produced by hundreds of years of white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. This is important to remember in tempering the occasionally utopian expectations placed on UBI by some of its proponents (Bregman 2017, Srnicek & Williams 2015, van der Veen & Van Parijs 1986).