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The request arrived by email, but read as if it were from another age. Would I be open, an executive assistant asked, to having tea with the president of an Ivy League university? A longtime e'minence grise, the president, still new to the job, was interested in discussing with a select group of young scholars how to guide this renowned educational institution into the twenty-first century.
At the time, such a cup of tea was not exactly my cup of tea, but I assumed correctly that I'd rarely have an opportunity like it again. So, I set aside my work on medical history, PTSD, and public health to consider that academic bastion, its roots stretching back to colonial times, and how it could best serve the world in the new century. I thought about how it had become so rich that it could afford to pay its president hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
It was almost certain that this man's predecessors had once owned slaves and I imagined that slavery was probably intertwined with the university's history in myriad ways. (It all turned out to be true.) In more recent times, the university had done work for the Department of Defense and been intimately involved in American war-making. I knew, too, that a building where I took classes had served as a site for illicit government experiments with hallucinogens. I began to make a mental inventory of other dark deeds associated with the school and the sordid history behind its grand, ivy-covered edifices. I knew vaguely of a concept then labeled "transhistorical moral justice" and a tiny bit about the nascent slavery-reparations movement and an idea started forming in my brain.
After I RSVP'd, the executive assistant asked for a brief sketch of the topics I might bring up at high tea. I realize now that I should have kept it vague and innocuous. I should have written, rather nebulously, about the ways in which the university's past could help inform its future. Instead, I sent along something about the school's many historical misdeeds and its ill-gotten "war chest"; about the need to explore its dark past, make it public, and make amends. I fear I even mentioned something about using its massive endowment to turn it into a "free university."
I sent that email sometime in 2002 or 2003, I think. I'm still waiting for a reply. Maybe the response got lost in the digital ether? Maybe the president decided not to meet with anyone and scrapped the fact-finding campaign? Maybe he gave up drinking tea? Anything's possible. Still, I've always had a sneaking suspicion that he or his courtiers decided that acknowledging the school's darker moments and making some form of restitution wasn't at least then a subject he wanted to discuss over any beverage.
Many people have an aversion to digging too deeply into the past. They would rather ignore historical pain and pretend it has no bearing on the present. They don't want to think about how modern wealth was built on the backs of long-deceased slaves and indigenous peoples. They don't want to consider who built the U.S. Capitol, or where their college's endowment comes from, or how the beach where they summered was stolen from a Black family, or on whose land they live.
Those with an aversion to warts-and-all history and an antipathy toward thinking too hard about how they've benefited from historical wrongs and structural biases baked into our present world certainly don't want to consider compensation for such sins of the past. Luckily, TomDispatch regular Mattea Kramer does. Today, she offers a deeply personal piece about reparations, racism, and "rebranding" that raises the hard questions so many who live on ill-gotten native lands in a nation founded on settler colonialism and slavery and are represented by government officials who work in a slave-constructed office building would rather not confront. Nick Turse
Anti-Imperialism You Can Try at Home
Reparations May Be One Cure for What Ails Us
Robin Rue Simmons had been very curious about the truth of American life as a young person. But it was only after she finished high school, left her native Evanston, Illinois, and returned as an adult ready to buy a house in the historically Black neighborhood in which she grew up that she delved deep into her city's history and fully understood the policies that had kept Black residents poor while enriching their white neighbors. Of course, this isn't the kind of history that's taught in school, even if today's students do sometimes learn unsavory truths about the American empire. Local history is different, perhaps because it can be especially uncomfortable to examine how that empire's economic plunder shaped our present-day communities. Yet experiencing such discomfort may be preferable to any alternative and I write this as a white person.
In 2017, Simmons ran for Evanston City Council and won. She was interested in the idea of reparations and began studying a bill that has been sitting in Congress for decades. H.R. 40, as it's called the number refers to a broken promise of the post-Civil War era that formerly enslaved people should receive 40 acres and a mule would establish a commission to examine the legacy of slavery and how restitution could be made. Federal reparations will be necessary to address this country's vast racial wealth gap that's the cumulative result of economically oppressive policies since the plantation era. Yet Simmons also knew that the federal government was hardly alone when it came to committing such injustices and here she had a visionary idea.
"I thought, I'll start with one in my community," she told me by phone. Specifically, she would seek reparations for harms caused by her own city's twentieth-century housing policies, which effectively restricted Black residents to a single neighborhood known as the 5th Ward. As Evanston's Black population grew during the Great Migration in which African Americans fled terror and oppression in the South the 5th Ward became overcrowded, and the cost of housing ballooned. By 1940, when the Home Owners Loan Corporation of the Federal Loan Bank Board drew up a map denoting the "risk" of lending in certain places, it shaded the 5th Ward red. That nationwide practice, known as redlining, indicated that the area was ineligible for the sort of loans that would help white families build intergenerational wealth. Today, whites in Evanston on average enjoy property values twice that of their Black neighbors.
By 2019, Simmons had successfully put reparations on Evanston's City Council agenda and soon won widespread support for the idea. She then led the painstaking work of gathering community input about how such redress should be made. As a result, in early December, just weeks from now, the first reparations by a municipal government will be awarded to Black residents in acknowledgement of a long history of structural racism: housing grants of $25,000 to 16 Evanston families money that can be put toward a down payment or used as mortgage assistance or for repairs on an existing home. This is just the beginning of reparations in Evanston, a small yet mighty step. Indeed, the truth is that imperial America isn't just a far-flung reality. It's as local as wherever you're reading this, which means the antidote to it can be local as well.
An Empire Rebranded
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