The aff invests in a broader reparative economy to create revolutionary societal change.

Imagining Anew: Reparative Futures. In the concluding section, I discuss the guidance that the two examples discussed above can provide for churches attempting to address questions of reparations, redress, and restitution for their participation in the system of slavery in the United States. Instead of a straightforward exchange of money that does little to disrupt the existing racial and economic power dynamics between Black and white Americans, I envision repair as an extended, transformational, and relational process that affects all involved. Similarly, I argue that racism is too often seen as an issue that primarily or exclusively pertains to Black people. White Christian frameworks that have historically been used to evaluate and describe race are therefore challenged as I argue for an ethical analysis of racism that relies on relationality, materiality, and the primacy of whiteness within systems of racial capitalism. I trace parts of the history of reparations movements within churches in the interest of following the courses and developments of theological claims about reparation for the institution of chattel slavery. It is deeply instructive– for me personally, for congregations engaged in the work of repair, for local organizers of demands for repair– to better understand some of the contours of legacy and the weight of history in relation to claims for economic and racial redress in the United States. Over the last ten years, calls for reparations have grown louder and louder in the public sphere in the United States. In 2014, journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates published “The Case for Reparations,” a long-form article exploring the histories of reparations movements in the United States, plantation capitalism’s continued exploitation of Black land and labor, and again elevating the call for reparations for racism in the national conversation.53 Cities, nonprofits, individual churches, and sometimes entire denominations are taking ethical and material stances on the issue of repair, redress, and reparations for the economic sins of white supremacy and racial capitalism. Since the widespread protests in the summer of 2020 in response to the police murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and other victims, this reckoning with the legacies of racial and economic injustice has grown especially prominent in some Christian institutions. Because of the prominence and possibilities of such calls for repair, I see the work of this research as vital to bettering church-based reparative efforts. It matters how reparations are approached. Charity models may reify existing economic disparities without challenging the economic, political, theological, and social dynamics that have created and maintained plantation capitalism in the first place. In most of the examples of reparations programs that exist in the United States, the congregation, organization, or municipality first spends time conducting research and partaking in collective political education in order to identify specific historical legacies and ongoing instances of racial injustice, displacement, urban renewal, housing segregation, or other instances of harm in which they as a group or congregation are implicated. Many historically and majority white churches throughout the United States are engaging in collective political education and action on the issue of redress for chattel slavery and racism.54 Congregations vary in both their identifications of historical racial injustices and in their approaches towards repentance and repair. Definitions of reparations vary widely– some churches establish housing programs, some do direct payments to descendants of enslaved Africans, some make donations to nonprofits that serve the Black community, others establish pension funds for Black parishioners. These differences offer a vital point of departure for how to approach education, conversation, and action around issues of economic and racial justice. While no amount of money can undo the twin legacies of enslavement and colonization with which we live in the United States, wealth redistribution through church-based reparations programs focuses on first formally acknowledging collective responsibility for the history of wrongdoing that many white and Christian institutions have enabled in the United States. A theology of reparations based in deep solidarity needs to attend deeply to matters of the interdependence of life on earth. This task can only be done by using the tools of class analysis that does not self-reflexively or carelessly limit itself to whiteness and maleness. Rieger writes, “a theology in the Capitalocene needs to develop the theological concerns for interconnectedness and interdependence in relation to the topic of solidarity as it grows out of collective experiences of exploitation and extraction and an analysis of class.”55 While religion and theology have both been a core part of the problem of slavery, economic oppression, and ecological destruction, they have also been a key part of struggles against those same forms of oppression and exploitation. In the last chapter of their book A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things, Raj Patel and Jason Moore argue for the importance of developing an intellectual and cosmological shift beyond the epistemologies and ecologies of capitalism. They argue that capitalism needs to be understood “as a world-ecology of power, capital, and nature helps us see how deeply each half of these is embedded in the other, how mightily the powerful have worked to police the sharp boundaries between them, and how forcefully those boundaries have been contested.”56 Plantation capitalism is not merely an economic system; it shapes visions of the divine, understandings of the human, and all the relationships between the human and other than human world. Patel and Moore continue in that same chapter to define “reparation ecology” as a radical vision of the future which may be able to provide for such a shift in theology, cosmology, and economy. Reparation ecology is a reimagination of the world-ecology of plantation capitalism that is grounded in addressing the material realities of its histories, which requires recognition, reparation, redistribution, reimagination, and recreation all in turn.57 While considering demands for reparations, it is important to recognize that they also include requests beyond money, namely the removal of important aspects of life (such as housing, healthcare, and education) from the totalizing conditions of the market. Reparation ecology involves reevaluating what justice, humanity, and nature all imply. Theology can be and has been developed such that theological conceptions of justice, liberation and deep solidarity create both resistance against and alternatives to the matrices of domination that are embedded in plantation capitalism. Reparative theologies should engage with histories of resistance and theories of change that think beyond the logics of plantation capitalism. Therefore, reparations are not an issue of charity, but an issue of justice. In early 2023, Peter Jarrett-Schell released the book Reparations: A Plan for Churches, which argues for the importance of reparations beyond moral imperatives. He writes that this debt should be paid, not out of obligation, but rather “for its potential to help break the Episcopal Church from the gilded shackles of white supremacy that have defined our history. Until reparations are paid, they will define our future as well.”58 The shift implied by a reparation ecology requires examining the legacies of European knowledge production within theological understandings of humanity and the divine. Dealing with questions of race, capitalism, and colonialism in an essay titled “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” Sylvia Wynter offers a challenge to her readers: she calls to find ways to ethically unsettle systems of knowledge that rationalize European coloniality and plantation capitalism while making white supremacy commonsense.59 These include theological systems, educational systems, and social systems. Reparations are one step in a larger disruption of the dominant ways of being and knowing in the world, confined by the logics of plantation capitalism. Part of the work of reparations, as understood through Patel and Moore’s conceptualization of reparative ecology, is to unsettle the commonsense interactions of capitalism: continued experiences of exploitation and extraction based on race and access to capital. Our present normative modes of collectively living in and knowing the world keep this system as is, and present the system of plantation capitalism as normal, natural, and unalterable. Research, writing, and teaching are tools to be used in the task of unsettling recursive colonial systems of knowledge and creating breaches– spaces for new ways of living in and with the world to form. Racial and economic oppression is not a natural phenomenon but rather, like the global capitalist system, is manufactured and maintained by the work of human hands. It can be undone by the work of human hands. That is what a theology of reparations calls on us to do: to engage in the process of repair, develop connections of deep solidarity, and think beyond the logics of plantation capitalism.