A team of experts based out of the University of Michigan are working to ensure a “just future” for Black and Native communities in the form of reparations.
The University of Michigan Center for Social Solutions is almost a year into research for the project “Crafting Democratic Futures: Situating Colleges and Universities in Community-based Reparations Solutions.” The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded a $5M grant to the center and nine institutional partners last year as part of the Foundation’s ‘Just Futures’ initiative.
The deaths of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor, two African Americans who were shot and killed by police, was the spark that fueled the project, according to Earl Lewis, founding director of the center and principal investigator for the project at the University of Michigan.
“It’s hard for us to have the kind of racial healing that was called for after the death of George Floyd and Breanna Taylor, among others, without deeply delving into the ways in which history complicates how we go about healing and who should be healed,” Lewis said.
Reparations is compensation to Native Americans and African Americans for America’s history of genocide, slavery, housing discrimination, mass incarceration and more. The topic has become a larger conversation recently with the rise of social justice movements like Black Lives Matter.
Keith Williams, chair of the Michigan Democratic Party Black Caucus, said that the country could never fully repay Black citizens for what has happened throughout history, but reparations is a start.
“Reparations has a lot of components to it, the psychological, the physical and the reality of it,” Williams said. “It’s going to take some time.”
Reparations could come in the form of money, a national apology, education, housing or healthcare programs.
This project looks at the history of different geographical communities across the U.S. that represent the various groups that have ties to a reparations claim. From there, they can decide what reparations would best suit the needs of those affected.
“I think repair, redress, acknowledgement and accountability are in the spirit of repair and trying to break the cycle of intergenerational harm,” said Jessica Cruz, managing director for the center’s Mellon Foundation grant.
In Michigan, the key areas the project focuses on are Flint, metro-Detroit and the Ann Arbor/Ypsilanti area.
By partnering with these communities, the university is helping identify issues in need of repair such as home ownership, entrepreneurship, education, workforce development and infrastructure. The team will also work with the U-M Musical Society to deploy artistic resources to further the conversation and serve as a call to action.
“We’re trying not to go into the community saying listen ‘What we’re going to focus on is this’… but really let it come up authentically and genuine in the discussion with the community led by community fellows,” Cruz said.
Lauren Hood is the community fellow for the Crafting Democratic Futures project in Detroit and chair of the Detroit Planning Commission. She was selected to serve as a fellow for her work on previous reparations projects, including the working group that helped draft the resolution on the city of Detroit’s November ballot to create a Reparations Task Force.
Her role as community fellow is to help keep Detroiters engaged as local input is vital to the success of the project.
“There might be ways we’re not even thinking of,” Hood said. “We just want to ask Black folks what they want.”
Hood also said institutions and businesses who were advocating for Black Lives Matter in the aftermath of Floyd and Taylor’s deaths should be involved to show that they’re making a conscious effort toward social justice.
“They need to be engaged in that conversation,” Hood said. “If you’re going to make a public declaration, then we’re going to hold you accountable.”
She said she hopes conversations in the community continue to be held in a very intentional way and that Detroit can be used as an example for other majority black cities. However, she said there has been pushback from some who don’t want their success to be seen as the result of getting a “free handout.”
“A lot of Black folks are very prideful,” Hood said.
The controversy surrounding reparations as being a “free handout” is something Cruz said she’s seen in the work they’ve done for the project so far. She mentioned how another community fellow was hesitant to join the project before learning reparations meant more than just a cash payment.
“He didn’t feel that that can repair the harm that had been done to folks that have been forced to attend Indian boarding schools,” Cruz said. “He wanted something more in line with the services and something that could impact entire generations.”
Project organizers see Crafting Democratic Futures potentially becoming a blueprint for future communities to use in order to make their own strides towards reparations, similar to Evanston, Ill. which became the first U.S. city to make reparations available to its Black residents this year.
“We hope that this is indeed replicable and scalable, that at the end of the day, once we’re done with this, that we’ll have a model that can be replicated elsewhere in the nation,” Lewis said. “That over time, it will scale where we have multiple communities around the country, engaging in a social process, a similar set of dialogues, heading to a similar set of solutions.”
The Crafting Democratic Futures project will take a total of three years to complete. Other institutional partners working on the project include Concordia College in Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, WQED Multimedia in Pennsylvania, Connecticut College in Connecticut, Rutgers University-Newark in New Jersey, Wofford College in South Carolina, Wesleyan College in Connecticut, Emory University in Georgia and Spelman College in Georgia.
