Digging Deeper into Black Liberation: Webinar Summary
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On July 9, 2020, Palestine Legal hosted a webinar on “Digging Deeper into Black Liberation: Land, Reparations & Development."
The event came in the context of Palestine Legal’s campaign to support three Black-led organizations in the context of the ongoing uprisings against systemic racism: Law for Black Lives, National Bail Out, and the National Black Food and Justice Alliance.
Below are some highlights from each speaker with some edits for written clarity:
Kristian Davis Bailey, Palestine Legal’s communications manager and co-founder of Black for Palestine, opened the conversation by connecting the Palestinian liberation struggle to the struggle for Black liberation:
“Our understanding as an organization that supports people fighting for freedom from racism and colonialism in Palestine is that we also are on territory that is marked and rooted in racism and colonialism. We therefore have a responsibility to support struggles against racism and colonialism in this territory.”
He challenged viewers to go deeper into their understanding of what the Black struggle is and what Black Liberation looks like:
“The streets that we protest on, the streets that Black people are killed on, are all streets that were built on Indigenous territory, and they’re all streets that are steeped in centuries of anti-Black racism and systemic violence. So we can’t talk about liberation for Black people if we’re not talking about land.”
Randolph Carr, acting executive director for the National Black Food and Justice Alliance, which formed following the Ferguson uprising as a way to coordinate national work around Black land and food, explained:
“This phrase around self-determination—that it’s not solely about racism, but it's about the process of self-determination—is how we view power and the way in which we connected to global struggles.”
Carr described a continuum of struggle among the Black movement that is easy to narrow to police violence or civil rights. “When we make too narrow or make too abstract our demands, we lose sight of what self-determination actually allows for,” Carr explained.
He described the importance of looking back at history:
“What we often picture as the Civil Rights Movement—the story, the narrative we tell—is too narrow. It leaves us thinking that what we are after is some kind of reform particularly in the lens of state violence. It leaves us thinking that once we have those reforms, we have solved the mystery of what it means to be free.
Carr cited a quote from Malcolm X as animating the politics of the Alliance: “Land is the basis of freedom, justice and equality.” According to Carr and the Alliance, it is through land as the basis for freedom, justice and equality that Black people can reach some of their political goals.
“Land has long animated Black freedom dreams,” he said.
Carr impressed the importance of rooting our understanding of freedom struggles in the context of land: “We cannot abstract the place where we are from the dreams and visions of what we hope to build.”
He described the historical periods of Black land ownership, from its peak of 15 million acres in 1910 to 1 million acres today, and how land ownership has enabled Black freedom struggles.
Carr highlighted that land ownership is necessary for Black liberation but must be understood as a step in the process, not the end. Through land ownership, other liberatory goals can be reached:
“Land is simply the basis for freedom, justice and equality. It is the starting point.”
Ed Whitfield, a writer and community activist on reparations and Black economic development, broke down the need and case for reparations:
“There were communities of people who had for hundreds of years lived and worked on land in parts of the South that they didn't own. And not only did they not own the land, they were typically owned themselves by the people who had the land. The war ended they were given nothing, nothing at all.”
Whitfield described a conversation of Black ministers at the end of the war on what freedom meant for Black people:
“They said that they understood that what slavery had been was when one person took from somebody else the fruit of their labor, and the freedom that they wanted—that they understood to have been granted by the Emancipation Proclamation—would allow them to work and retain the fruit of their own labor.”
“They just wanted to be able to work and retain the fruit of their own labor and they said that the best way to do that would be to have some land, and they could work it, and they could provide for themselves and their families and have something left to take care of their community.”
“Freedom is our ability to benefit from the product of our own labor.”
Based on this, Whitfield made clear that reparations must be much more robust than a check from the federal government:
“Every time I’m talking about reparations, I’m talking about reparations in the context of funding for the development of our community that’s sustainable and allows us to be the productive people that we’re capable of being. And it’s absolutely due. It’s due now.”
Whitfield also spoke to the idea that food sovereignty is an absolute necessity for Black liberation:
“We have to be able to feed our own community, and when you're denied the opportunity to feed your own community, your whole life is in the hands of somebody else who may or may not care anything about you. You don't let anyone control you like that. So food sovereignty is a crucially important part of any kind of liberatory motion.”
Akua Deirdre Smith, an organizer with the BlackOut Collective and Black Land and Power, also framed Black liberation in terms of land:
“If we're talking about liberation, ultimately we need land as an essential piece of that. Being able to create a generative capacity for our people, for our communities, is an essential part of our liberation.”
“Black communities need self-determining capacity in order for us to build power.”
Smith addressed the need to repair the damage of colonialism against Black and Indigenous peoples, whose needs are sometimes pitted against each other:
“We need to understand that one of the tenets of colonization and the empire that has been built since is anti-Blackness. And how anti-Blackness operates is invisiblizing all kinds of things that would give Black folks any right to be self-determining.”
“At the time of colonization, we had African indigenous people, and we had Indigenous folks of the Americas. And when we’re talking about stolen land, we’re talking about the displacement of people – the removal of people from their land to a new place. That happened both over the Transatlantic Slave Trade and also happened through the Trail of Tears and within North America.”
“There’s also the displacement of cultural, spiritual, and economic laws about how the people and land would be governed.”
Smith called for a practice of decolonization to repair people, land, and relationships harmed by colonization:
“Within our politic, the entire notion of ownership needs to be abolished, and yet we find ourselves in a system wherein Black communities need self-determining capacity in order for us to build power.”
Respecting and rebuilding indigenous practices of land stewardship are crucial to this process, Smith explained: “It would not liberate us to recolonize land.”
Smith stressed that solidarity be tangible:
“Solidarity must include material shifts. When someone says, ‘I’m in solidarity,’ that’s a great thing to express from your heart, but if that’s not actually changing the actual conditions of my people, it doesn’t mean much to me.”
Smith also discussed the Reparations Summer project, which seeks to connect the idea of wealth redistribution and necessary reparations.
Following the opening remarks, Kristian Davis Bailey identified some common narratives between the Black and Palestinian struggles, including land loss over time, the denial of an ability to bear the fruits of their land and labor, and living under colonial concepts of land ownership as opposed to indigenous notions of land stewardship practiced by indigenous Palestinians and Africans.
Director Dima Khalidi then joined to close out the conversation. She expressed a resonance with conversations about communal food sovereignty and self-determination as a Palestinian thinking about the First Intifada, where there were efforts to grow food and school children communally in the midst of a popular uprising.
Khalidi stressed the importance of Black and Palestinian people determining their own futures:
“Part of what is so powerful about this is the fact that this is really Black led. This is about Black people deciding and determining and demanding what they want and need. I think the same has to go in the Palestinian case as well. Palestinians have to be the ones who demand and decide what they need in their own self-determination.”
The full video is archived on Facebook: