The demand for reparations is part and parcel with the legacy of the Black Radical Tradition. Voting AFF affirms Black archival practices towards an abolitionist praxis of reparations.

Troubling traditional understandings of capital, Robinson argues that ethnic and racial difference predates the development of modern economies. Racism was not just a convenient ordering system for Europeans to categorise non-Europeans, but instead, its “genesis is in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples” themselves (Robinson 2000:2). Capitalism and its attendant identity positions are not a radical departure from feudalism as traditional Marxists would understand it, but instead, capitalism emerged from feudalism and in a context already and everywhere infused with racialism (Bledsoe and Wright 2019; Kelley 2017). As a result, capitalism produced a world economic system “dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism and genocide” (Kelley 2017). European society was rife with difference, and these differences grafted onto changes in the political economy as feudalism gave way to mercantilism and colonialism. Thus, it becomes necessary to see race not epiphenomenally or as something outside of capital, but as central to the very making and unfolding of capital relations themselves. Robinson’s perspective is essential for understanding how and in what ways capital unfolds and for tracing its socio-spatial trajectories (Pulido 2017). First, by challenging the idea that racism can be reduced to class, racial capitalism opens space to understand a range of revolutionary movements and moments that Robinson identifies as the “Black Radical Tradition”. Defined as an “African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation” (Robinson 2000:73), the Black Radical Tradition sits outside of traditional understandings of revolutionary consciousness or conceptualization of change as driven by class solidarities or politics (Pulido 2006). The Black Radical Tradition is outside what many would understand as traditional ways of knowing (Woods 1998) and incorporates a range of practices that open space to understand various resistant traditions. Understandings of racial capitalism also challenge ideas about the emergence of racism and its connection to colonization; conceptions of race are central to the production of differentiated human value, which is a cornerstone of capitalism and its exploitative realities (Robinson 2000). As a result, “[r]ace is and always has been foundational to our economic and geopolitical order. Abroad colonialism was made possible through racial capitalism. In America white appropriation of black labor and red land provided two of the fundamental pillars of the nation’s wealth” (Ranganathan 2016:21). As we demonstrate, the contours of racial capitalism are central to understanding the unfolding of Lehman Brothers and the growth of their fortune and, ultimately, their downfall in the 2007 financial crisis. It also lays the foundation for broader work on reparations as an inherently geographical project that, by centring resistant traditions in Black radical thought, attends to abolitionist imaginaries of freedom. Third, racial difference is a cornerstone in making the “variegated landscapes that cultures and capital can exploit to create enhanced power and profits” (Puldio 2017:7). Perhaps Melamed (2015:77) has captured this imperative best when she writes, “[c]apital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups”. These inequalities are manifest in a range of socio-spatial practices and realities, and as a result, geography is central to the way racial capitalism unfolds. Focusing on how the current political economy comes to see deep poverty as a profit centre (Wilson et al. 2009) means seeing these realities not as accidental to the system, but instead central to the reproduction and expansion of the system itself. Understandings of racial capital necessarily shift discussions about what constitutes justice and equity and the limits and possibilities of traditional reparation claims. Understanding Reparations within a Geographic Framework Beginning from the starting point that “freedom is a place” (Gilmore 2017:227), we argue geography is central to projects related to reparations for the enslaved and their descendants. Focusing on geography, we argue, opens up space for a more sustained and potentially transformative practice around reparation debates (Gilbert and Williams 2020). Moving beyond the view that transatlantic slavery is confined to the past, or that reparations must solely focus on monetary remuneration, we outline an understanding that locates reparations within a Black Radical Tradition. Such a perspective expands the bounds of what counts as reparations, locating the debate within a broader framework focused on a set of interlocking and spatially grounded projects that seek to undermine the realities of racial capitalism and invest in Black communities in ways that strengthen and nurture Black institutions and landscapes. Arguing reparations must be, at its core, a freedom making enterprise focused on abolition practice, we contend that an expanded understanding of reparations that draws from abolition democracy is necessary (Du Bois 2004). Abolition praxis, at a basic level, is “resistance to organized abandonment” (Gilmore 2020). Abandonment, broadly defined, can refer to removing jobs, schools, institutions, factories, or communities’ benefits and can take various and distinct forms depending on the specific geographic conditions present in specific places and times (ibid.). As we outline, abandonment is not only central to the Lehman story, but is the key to understanding how capital works. As a result, we see abolition practice as the effort to “seek liberated life-ways through a commitment to radical place-making” (Heynen and Ybarra 2020). Radical place-making in relation to reparations is necessarily focused on the landscape and how abolition practice can resist abandonment and variegated landscapes of difference and posit new human-centred ways of being. To understand how abolition practice is central to reparations, we discuss what Katherine McKittrick (2014) describes as the “mathematics of black life”. Arguing the archival record of slavery is a “death sentence” and “a tomb to display a violated body, an inventory of property”, she documents the ways the archive, through ledgers, court documents, and other artifacts of dispossession, locates the “slave’s status as object-commodity, or purely economic cargo” thus foreclosing the slave subject’s humanity and reinforcing and affirming Blackness as always and everywhere dying (McKittrick 2014:17). This not only obscures the humanity of Black peoples but, in myriad ways, locates contemporary blackness within an anti-black knowledge framework that always and everywhere renders contemporary “black subjects as less than human” (McKittrick 2014:18). Saidiya Hartman (2008), in her work Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, argues that processes of abandonment, what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002:16) describes as racism’s “death-dealing displacements”, are located within a political arithmetic begun during slavery, but that continues to impact Black communities today. In other words, the abandonment of Black humanity is not only a precondition for creating differences and naturalising the abandonment of place that is at the heart of racial capital, as we illustrate through our work on Lehman Brothers, but it is the way slavery has an afterlife, the way slavery continues to structure modern workings of racism that are central to the processes of abandonment themselves (Hartman 2008). Thus the mathematics of slavery is both “a numerical moment through which anti-blackness came to underwrite post-slave emancipation promises” and a moment that un-numerically provides “the conditions through which many Black subjectivities articulated an anti-colonial practice that did not (and cannot and does not) twin the emancipatory terms that set blackness free” (McKittrick 2014:20). The duality between the actual material realities of slavery and the cost owed to the enslaved, coupled with realities that the full cost and weight owed for slavery can never be fully calculated, sits at the heart of reparations debates. Put differently, in the years after the US Civil War, efforts to collect back wages, land redistribution schemes, and efforts to provide access to educational resources were central to debates around reparations. These efforts were grounded in a kind of mathematics of redistribution that sought to make good on centuries of stolen labour and the reality that slavery had left large swaths of African American communities devoid of financial capital. Building on the insights of Katherine McKittrick and Saidiya Hartman, respectively, we argue a limit to this kind of calculation, used to compute, understand and determine a kind of actuarial accrual of wrong that animates much of the historical and contemporary understanding of reparations for the enslaved. These accountings largely leave untouched the violences inherent in a system built through anti-Black racism. As McKittrick (2014:16) argues, the accounting that stands in for traditional understandings of reparations is “filled with bodies that can only come into being vis-à-vis racial-sexual violence; the documents and ledgers and logs that narrate the brutalities of this history give birth to new world blackness as they evacuate [or to use Gilmore’s term abandon] life from blackness”. Hartman (2008) argues that the end of slavery did not bring freedom, but instead brought other modes of unfreedom into being, including incarceration, new forms of colonialism, Jim Crowism as well as the continuation of processes that obscure black humanity and central to anti-Black racism. Moreover, we argue the contemporary mathematics of reparations fails to articulate, much less directly address, the continued ways that racial capital is left inscribed in the landscape, and how racial capitalism has been reiterated through processes of abandonment and the creation of variegated landscapes of difference that come to reinforce anti-Black racism and the workings of white subjectivities (Hartman 2008; Sharpe 2010). Sharpe (2010:4) notes that, within contemporary frameworks on race, Black bodies become the knowledge bearers of abandonment, whereas white bodies are marked through an “exuberant freedom”. The duality of this dilemma, the latent spatialisations of slavery, which McKittrick (2013) points out in her work on plantation futures, and the layered and ongoing spatial manifestations of racial capitalism, which rest uneasily within and amidst each other in the current political and spatial moment, pose questions for reparative geographical approaches that cannot be dealt with enumeratively. As our work on Lehman Brothers documents and as Gilmore notes, racial capitalism is always multi-scaled and multi-dimensional. Therefore the growth of racial capitalism within the US is tied to much larger global trade processes; the foundation stones of racialised inequity in the US are always and everywhere local and global. Further, the ongoing processes of racial capitalism represented so chillingly in the ongoing violence against Black bodies, the realities of Covid-19, and the concentration of deaths within communities of colour, as well as the continued practices of voter suppression and displacement, amongst other examples, point to the need for reparations to deal with the brutal systems of racism and white supremacy still at work in enumerating, marking and spatialising differences. A geographical case for reparations, therefore, we argue, is both spatial and temporal. It raises questions not only about how to identify the interlocking ways that white supremacy works at different geographical scales and times but most importantly, is focused on strengthening and supporting those knowledge systems and practices that animate Black freedom movements and which are foundational to the freedom aspirations of Black peoples within the US. Finally, enumerative approaches to reparations have failed to recognise and respond to the myriad ways that Black people within the United States had and did resist slavery and efforts to undermine and erase Black humanity. The “embodied cultural practice of resistance” (Wright 2020:1137) found within Black communities and institutions forged a politics of resistance that not only was life-affirming but was central to the development of radical abolition politics that helped to destroy the institution of slavery itself. We argue that this focus, the resistance to erasure, needs to be central to the creation of radical politics that centre practices of reparative justice. To illustrate the geographic imperative of reparations and abolition democracy we now turn towards a discussion of the Lehman brothers.