Thirteen Thoughts on Reparations, Afropessimism, and White Supremacy, by Loren Laomina

Emerging Writer Series

Every two weeks, I will be publishing an essay from an emerging writer. This week’s essay is “Thirteen Thoughts on Reparations, Afropessimism, and white supremacy,” by Loren Laomina. Loren (they/them) writes to keep from losing their mind. When they aren’t selling their labor, they’re supporting black organizers and thinking about the ubiquity of antiblackness — how it forecloses black freedom and what it might mean to settle for black fugitivity. 

This essay was edited by Brooke Obie.

---

1. Wednesday, January 6, 2021

I am nursing a kombucha cocktail from a Spelman College wine glass and Zooming for work as terrorists overtake the Capitol. It is 4:13 p.m. when I see a white man raising the American flag high before bringing it down like an axe on someone obscured by a crush of reds and blues; angry white men in army fatigues scaling the Capitol walls and using their bodies as battering rams to break down doors; a Black officer running up the stairs, chased by a white mob; dark smoke descending around the great dome like arms enclosing an unsuspecting other from behind.

My first thought belongs less to me than to existential Blackness: If they were Black, they’d all be dead. And because I grew up watching Law & Order and other police state propaganda, I text a friend, Where are the police? She sends me a link to a tweet by Beytwicé: “Why y’all keep asking where the police at? Y’all ask where Miley’s at when Hannah’s on stage?”

2. Thursday, January 7, 2021

As we are making tuna fish sandwiches for lunch, my father casually mentions that his grandfather owned a ranch in Texas before he was driven out of the state by white terrorists. It was over a hundred acres, he says, then walks out of the kitchen with his plate, leaving me stunned and alone and confronting my ignorance of my family’s history, an ignorance of my people’s history. 

What I know of what my people have gone through in this country is a jerry-rigged edifice: there is papier mâché where there should be cement, duct-taped panels where there should be wood. My knowledge is drafty, droopy, and there are termites. Not until last summer did I learn of the straight line between slave patrols in the South and modern-day policing. I did not know that the Constitutional clauses that enshrined slavery numbered eleven, nor did I know that the Framers   tried to conceal their hypocrisy by avoiding the word “slavery.” I knew that America grew from a debt-addled colonial economy into a global goliath thanks to the relentless churn of cotton gins turned by enslaved people. But I did not know until I read Derrick A. Bell’s And We Are Not Saved that without slavery, America would have crumbled beneath the weight of what it owed to foreign powers. I knew that America became the wealthiest nation in the world because of slavery but I did not know that it owed its very survival to slavery. 

Know thyself, we are told. As a student, I sprinted through “Black history,” afraid that if I slowed to look long at our stories, ghouls would emerge from between the pages. Centuries of slavery, decades of Jim Crow, of these I sped read with clenched fists from a great emotional distance. I stuck to dates and stats, wrote papers with words like “unfortunate” and “trying” instead of “tragic” and “horrifying.” My understanding of the Black existential condition has changed over time, but there is at least one throughline: to be a Black American is to be psychically imperiled by your history. And it could not be otherwise for a people forged through the crucibles of routine rape and brutalization. Bred like mules, Black bodies battery-powered American industry for centuries. To know this is to risk going mad with rage and to not know this is to risk being a fool. It is pure absurdity, this business of knowing that knowing yourself could very well cause you to self-destruct. 

3. Friday, January 8, 2021 

4. Saturday, January 9, 2021 

Instead of arrests, which are not coming, though we haven’t the will to admit this yet, we get a trickle of new footage interspersed with liberal pundits bemoaning working class whites willing to die for a tyrant whose policies oppress them. It is Saturday evening and though I set the intention to have a weekend free of MSNBC, my parents cannot help themselves. They want to watch white liberals rail against the Capitol police and say the words “white supremacy.” And I am tired. I am tired of white elites indicting non-elite whites for being ignorant. They are not ignorant. Trump’s supporters know who their enemies are and they are us: class privileged colored folks. They know that for centuries whites of every class honored a covenant to keep the value of whiteness high by making Blackness a lynching offense and they know that white elites broke this covenant. They broke it with voting rights and civil rights and affirmative action and Black Studies departments but most importantly, they broke it with Obama, who was as sure a sign as any that the value of whiteness had declined. They know, too, that the restoration of this covenant will bring them more security than any of the items on the progressive agenda because whiteness is a wage more bankable than gold itself, a point made by Du Bois nearly a century ago. As unearned as DNA, whiteness is why working class whites prefer Trump to Bernie, tyranny to democracy, white supremacist capitalism to multiracial socialism. Socialism cannot give them the kind of security they want because the security they want is predicated on another’s insecurity. This is why there never has been (and probably never will be) a national movement built on interracial class solidarity.

5. Sunday, January 10, 2021

I am walking to the store when my friend S— calls. She wants to move to Georgia. Charles Blow’s New York Times piece urging Black folks to move en masse to the South in order to nonviolently overtake the region has captured her imagination. S— asks if I have given Blow’s proposal more thought. When I remind her that most of my communities are in the North, she is unswayed. Ask not what your communities can do for you, she says, ask what you can do for your community. 

For years, S— has been partial to what Jesse McCarthy calls Afropessimism’s exceptionality thesis, which he sums up with the opening sentence of the 2001 preface to Cornel West’s Race Matters: “Black people in the United States differ from all other modern people owing to the unprecedented levels of unregulated and unrestrained violence directed at them.”

To her mind, the centuries-long brutalization of Black folks is without analogy. Without analogy, one cannot reason. The literal unreasonableness of our suffering leads her to the impossibility of repair. I understand her point, but it’s a nonstarter for me. I cannot consider the exceptionality of Black suffering without my mind coming to a halt, which is, of course, her point. What grips me more is what McCarthy calls the immutability thesis. Championed by Derrick Bell, it is the idea that a long sober look at American history shows that “slavery did not end in 1865; it evolved.” And what’s more, it will only ever evolve, because America requires the enslavement of Black folks. Sugar to yeast. 

6. Monday, January 11, 2021 

S— starts a group text and makes her case. A friend from New York is sympathetic to the idea but her allegiance is to Harlem, West Philadelphia, Roxbury, etc. Each Black neighborhood in the North she names in a separate text. We can’t abandon them, she says. 

Another says we should take them with us.

Another says that if we all go to Georgia, they’ll do us like Tulsa. 

Like Seneca Village, another friend says. 

Like Rosewood.  

Like Anniston.

Greensboro. 

Orangeburg. 

Ocoee. 

Atlanta.

Elaine.

Flint. 

Slocum. 

Wilmington. 

Polk County. 

Thibodaux. 

Danville. 

Hamburg. 

Clinton. 

Vicksburg. 

Colfax. 

St. Bernard. 

Opelousas. 

Camilla. 

New Orleans. 

Memphis. 

Catcher.

Osage. 

7. Tuesday, January 12, 2021 

8. Wednesday, January 13, 2021 

Without asking for my permission or even notifying me, my manager BCCs me on an email to the head of Human Resources. She tells them that an incident that happened a year ago has continued to bother her, and that it is one of the reasons she is leaving the company. During last year’s performance reviews, she writes, she decided that I deserved the second highest rating, Superior Performer. 

I was instructed to lower Loren’s ranking to “Successful Performer” and add more critical comments to their review as the higher ratings were already going to other members of the team, mostly white men to my knowledge.

Unsurprisingly, Loren was bothered by this evaluation. The performance-based raise wasn't even an issue, they just wanted to be recognized for their contributions... I was unable (and honestly, unwilling) to offer them any reasonable defense of the situation, only a friendly ear.

I cannot in good conscience abide by this sort of behavior toward employees who report to me, especially employees of color. Even if this behavior was not intentionally racist, the outcome was completely unfair to a very dedicated employee and I regret that I was not successful in shielding them from it. As I hear rumblings of people of color unhappy with their treatment here, I can only wonder how many similar stories are out there. 

In two days my manager will leave the company, which is four months after the departure of the person who told her to lower my score. I am the only one who will be around for the fallout of this report. It is not lost on me that my manager thinks she has done me a favor. That she waited until she had nothing to lose to stand up for me, adding to my towering collection yet another example of a white person unwilling to do what racial justice demands unless doing so costs them nothing.

9. Thursday, January 14, 2021

I am thinking about white folks and how they worship their comfort. I am thinking about my manager, if she truly believes she is leaving because of what happened or if she is aware that this is a lie. I am wondering if I will “give her feedback” on her cowardice and complicity. I am wondering about all the hours I have spent educating and thinking about educating white folks. I am wondering about the reparations I will never receive for these hours: time stolen to enlighten my manager who failed me, and whose failure stole from me a raise. Where are the reparations for my sanity? 

10. Friday, January 15, 2021

I am washing the dishes when I recall that a famous reparationist sold my family his house in what was then a Black neighborhood in D.C. Gentrification has driven the Black folks out and now the neighborhood’s houses are worth far more because they belong to white people. I played with the famous reparationist’s daughter every day for a week as the arrangements were finalized. When my mom told me that the father of my new friend had written a book on reparations, I laughed. I was only twelve but I already knew what reparations were and I knew they were absurd. Absurd as in impossible, like leprechauns. My mom scolded me, but I left the room chuckling to myself, trying to come up with a joke to my friend about her dad being  absurd. Done with the dishes, I look up this reparationist that I knew for only a week and learn that he wrote several national bestsellers including The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks. He moved with his family to St. Kitts where he wrote Quitting America: The Departure of a Black Man from His Native Land. He is not the first reparatonist to give up and leave. To believe in reparations is a faith in two movements: understanding repayment as necessary to Black freedom in America, and then understanding that repayment will almost certainly never happen. To believe in reparations is to believe, then, that the pursuit of racial justice in America is doomed, which is why I end up at Jesse McCarthy’s piece on Afropessimism again, which takes me back to the immutability thesis and Derrick Bell, whom I’ve never read. I download Faces At The Bottom Of The Well, pressing the buy button on my kindle before I can ascertain that I have already depleted my psychic reserves for the day.  

11. Saturday, January 16, 2021

I try to rise by eight each morning because there are things I need to do to buttress my sanity, like salute the sun and sit on my mat and if I do not do them in the morning, they do not get done, but I awaken without the will to try today. Instead, I huddle up beneath my covers and turn the pages of Faces. 

The goal of racial equality is, while comforting to many whites, more illusory than real for Blacks. For too long, we have worked for substantive reform, then settled for weakly worded and poorly enforced legislation, indeterminate judicial decisions, token government positions, even holidays. I repeat. If we are to seek new goals for our struggles, we must first reassess the worth of the racial assumptions on which, without careful thought, we have presumed too much and relied on too long.

A preeminent civil rights lawyer and the first Black professor tenured by Harvard Law School, Derrick Bell is arguably the most brilliant and battle-tested scholar to give up on America. 

Black people will never gain full equality in this country. Even those herculean efforts we hail as successful will produce no more than temporary "peaks of progress," short-lived victories that slide into irrelevance as racial patterns adapt in ways that maintain white dominance. This is a hard-to-accept fact that all history verifies.

The Bell of Faces has arrived at the proverbial mountaintop of the American legal system and from that great height, seen the bounds of the possible. With hands cupped around his mouth, he yells to Black people: get out! 

I am just as moved by Bell’s arguments, which are forbidding in their acuity, as I am by his life, which is even more forbidding in its integrity. Bell began his career on the frontier of the civil rights movement’s legal battles but became disillusioned by the sacrificial use of Black children to desegregate schools. So he joined Harvard Law School and founded critical race theory. He left to become the Dean of University of Oregon’s Law School but after a few years there, he resigned in protest because the law school rejected the faculty application of an Asian-American woman whom he felt deserved the position. He returned to Harvard Law School but again left in protest because it refused to offer tenure to two professors whose work centered critical race theory. He vowed not to return until it added a Black woman to its tenured faculty and after two years of protest, Harvard fired Bell rather than cede to his demand. By then, Bell was already teaching at New York University School of Law where he mentored Kimberlé Crenshaw, the pioneering legal scholar who would go on to coin the term “intersectionality.”

There’s a mass mobilization hosted by The Movement For Black Lives that I’m supposed to attend at three. Still huddled beneath my blankets, I bring the computer into my lair and click on the webinar link. A prominent Black Congresswoman is telling the crowd that we have two years to achieve meaningful progress because we are unlikely to keep the Senate and the House. She does not sound daunted. Upbeat and caffeinated, she beams her enthusiasm at us and I turn down the brightness. “Policy is my love language,” she says. 

“Few men ever worshiped Freedom with half such unquestioning faith as did the American Negro for two centuries,” wrote Du Bois more than a century ago.  

And, as we have seen, even the laws or court decisions that abolish one form of discrimination may well allow for its appearance in another form, subtle though no less damaging... the society has managed to discriminate against Blacks as effectively under the remedy as under the prior law—more effectively really, because discrimination today is covert, harder to prove, its ill effects easier to blame on its Black victims.

On cue, a friend texts the findings from new research on antidemocratic sentiment, its headline: Many white Americans seem to be asking themselves, Why act in defense of a democracy that benefits “those people”?

12. Sunday, January 17, 2021

Black people are oppressed in America. 

Obama, Oprah, and Black people who summer at Martha’s Vineyard exist.  

Therefore, some Black people are not oppressed in America.  

If some Black people are not oppressed in America, 

Then, it is possible for Black people to not be oppressed in America.  

So goes a particular strain of liberal thinking. I too am guilty. I have pointed to my family — middle-class and educated — as proof that racial justice is around the corner. But there have always been “free” Blacks in America. Forty-one years before the Emancipation Proclamation, the American Colonization Society shipped free Blacks to a strip of land that was thirty-six miles long and three miles wide, land that is now known as Liberia. The American Colonization Society was established for this purpose. Its founders feared that by their mere presence, free Blacks would incite enslaved Blacks to revolt. By 1867, the society had shipped more than 13,000 Black people to Liberia, some of whom would go on to enslave other Black people in the territory. 

America requires the oppression of Black people. 

Obama, Oprah, and Black people who summer at Martha’s Vineyard exist. 

Therefore the oppression of Black people does not preclude exceptions. 

If some Black people are not oppressed in America, 

Then the oppression and the exceptions are mutually supportive. 

13. Monday, January 18, 2021 

I am trying to imagine what white people must give up when the parable of the rich young prince comes to me. The prince runs up to Jesus, kneels before him, and asks what he must do to gain eternal life. Jesus tells him to keep the commandments. The prince says he has already kept all of them. He asks, "What do I still lack?" Jesus tells the prince to sell his possessions, give everything to the poor, and follow Jesus. The prince is stunned. He walks away sad because he has great wealth. Watching him leave, Jesus pronounces to his audience: It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.