Black reparations and indigenous decolonization compliment each other – builds strategic alliances AND challenges Eurocentric frameworks through a principle of relationality

Symone Baptiste: Thank you, Bill. This brings me to my next question: the idea of a universal demand, and the argument that we shouldn’t be fighting for something unless it’s a “universal” demand because it’s too divisive. What do you have to say to that argument? Is it worth a fight if you might not be part of the oppressed group that you’re fighting for? Is there still relevancy to that demand even if it is not a universal demand and how can someone who is not a part of that oppressed group see themselves in the fight and see it as still a benefit to them to fight for something like reparations or restitution?

Dina Gilio-Whitaker: However we talk about justice in a settler state like the United States, everything is still happening on Indigenous lands. We cannot lose sight of that, whatever we talk about, whether it’s Black reparations, whether it’s justice for different kinds of colonized peoples, it still occurs within the context of the state. And all of that is within the history of lands, most of which the state stole from Indigenous peoples who still maintain claims to those lands.

So, how do we imagine structures of justice or imparting justice while keeping that in context? How do we build an ethic that takes into account that history, that respects Indigenous land tenure, that seeks to return land to Native people? Because that can’t be off the table.

We can say that settler people, we accept that they’re not going back to their countries, to Europe or wherever they came from. So we all have to live here and imagine a better kind of future for all of us. But how do we do that while also building a relationship to the land that is authentic, that respects the environment, that doesn’t continue to use it in extractive ways that doesn’t exploit it for capitalist purposes?

How are we accountable to each other and how are we accountable to that history? How do people of color talk about justice in ways that aren’t complicit with settler colonialism? That’s what concerns me. And all too often, these conversations about justice for other people of color bypass that history and the reality of us still being here on stolen land in the middle of people who are completely dispossessed of their homelands. To me, that’s the real challenge. How do we build a movement of justice that supports each other while not continuing to perpetuate the structure of settler colonialism?

I think that’s the hardest question. To be honest, I think that as a country, we are much more willing and able to talk about racism, using racial injustice and justice as the framework for resolving these historical processes, then we are able to talk about what it means to be in a country built on genocide and stolen land. I think we’re nowhere near having that conversation, but that’s the conversation we need to be having.

Bill Fletcher Jr.: I’m in total agreement. And I just wanna elaborate two points. One is about universal demands, that you were raising Symone. Some on the left believe that there’s this great thing that will bring us all together, and people would just look at this demand and say “Yes! Regardless of anything else, this will bring us all together.” It doesn’t work that way. There are universal demands in a sense that there are great demands like Medicare for All and housing for all, etc. All those things are important.

But the reality of US history is that every demand that’s been won has been won and seen through the prism of race. And implemented in one way or another through the prism of race, whether it’s voting rights or housing or whatever. So if you don’t factor that in in the nature of the demand, you’re cruising for a bruising. So that’s one point.

The second point relates directly to what Dina was raising. And it’s a very difficult and emotional point in some ways for me. I sort of became very politicized in reading W.E.B. Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction in America, published in 1935, still in print, still an incredible book that breaks down all of these myths related to Reconstruction and shows how important a moment it was in US history. The problem though, was a problem that I felt reluctant to raise for a very long time, because I mean, who am I to critique Du Bois? You don’t critique genius.

But when you read Black Reconstruction in America, one of the issues is that one is left to the possible conclusion that had Reconstruction succeeded, we would have had a democratic Republic in the United States. And I realized that Du Bois was not factoring in that while Reconstruction was going on, US troops, some of the same troops that had fought to destroy the Confederacy, for example led by Philip Sheridan, were going to war with Western tribes, annihilating them. At the same time that Reconstruction was going on, you had the consolidation of the annexation of Northern Mexico. So the question that that raised is essentially: how could you have a democracy, if in reality you still have the annexation and you still have genocide being committed against the Indigenous?

The answer is you couldn’t. Unless Reconstruction had in fact triggered a broader movement, in fact a revolutionary movement, which it could very well have under certain circumstances, it would not have brought forth a democratic Republic, even under capitalism. I think that we on the left in the 21st century have to take to heart what Dina is raising. And many of us in the African American movement have to really think about this when we have raised the issue of self determination and land, because yes, I would argue we are absolutely entitled to land and it’s part of the demand for reparations. But hold your horses for a second because the reality was we were enslaved here on land that wasn’t ours. It wasn’t that we were enslaved in Nigeria, or in Guinea-Bissau and achieved national liberation, we were grabbed, we were stolen from the continent and brought here enslaved, became a people, an African American people, but on land that wasn’t originally ours.

And this makes this whole self-determination fight much more complex than many of us have been willing to admit.

Symone Baptiste: Thank you so much, Bill, for bringing that context to the conversation. I wanted to give time for any final remarks from both of you. What are the takeaways, what are some resources on the subject, and where  can people find some of your own work on the subject?

Bill Fletcher Jr.: This has been a pleasure and an honor. I want to emphasize this point I was raising before and underline it: The experience of racialized populations, which shares much in common, but they also have many differences.

We should neither exaggerate the differences nor ignore the differences. We have to recognize those things that we share in common and fights against racism and national oppression, but also hold up our respect of histories and understand how complex our histories are, vis-a-vis one another.

There is this impulse that has been propagated under the settler state to say to the oppressed that we’re in this constant game of musical chairs, where there’s always one less chair than our people playing. Therefore the fight is for whoever can grab that chair first. That’s not the game we’re prepared to play. We’re going to change the number of chairs and we’re going to change the music. 

There’s this different framework among racialized populations that we’ve got to appreciate, that anti-Black racism is not the same as the racism that’s carried out against the Indigenous, which is not the same as racism carried out against Puerto Ricans, etc. But that doesn’t mean that any of these trumps the other. I think that this allows us to really think strategically in terms of the kind of alliances that need to be built. And it also says to us that this framework needs to be central to the way that the left thinks of its role as an emancipatory project that our politics have to be fundamentally emancipatory. And that is a fight for consistent democracy, for self determination, for repairing the damage that has been done, for not ignoring the history, but not operating on the basis of guilt. Instead, operating on a basis of: we have a responsibility and socialism should be our way of putting into practice repairing the damage that has been done to this planet and to its people.

Dina Gilio-Whitaker: To add to what Bill was saying, in Indian country, in Indigenous societies, we have different worldviews, we have different epistemology than that of the Eurocentric settler state that we live in. In the United States, we often say it’s a rights based society. We’re always fixated on our rights, our individual rights. But it’s the opposite in Indigenous societies.

For Native societies, it is based on a worldview of relationality, of our relationship to each other, of our relationship to the earth, to the natural world, to our ecosystems. And what that means is that it’s a society, they are societies based on responsibility. So the orientation is not fixated on what our rights are, but on what our responsibilities are. And so this is one of the things that I was trying to convey earlier about Indigenous knowledge and what it has to teach our country, to teach the world really, and how Indigenous knowledge can guide us to a survivable future and stronger relationships with each other.

We have to understand that that’s what accountability is. That’s what we don’t have anywhere in the consciousness of the United States. There’s no real sense of accountability, certainly not to the land or to each other. So, I think that is one of the lessons that can be imparted, and it can show how we join together to imagine a different kind of a future.