On Wednesday, Sept. 25, the Macalester history department held a panel in the Weyerhaeuser Boardroom, commemorating the final year of the United Nations’ “International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024).” The event brought together a group of five speakers, who discussed the history of systemic racism in their individual communities while speculating on the potential for reparatory justice.
Jennifer Branche, a Senior Legal Officer in the Administrative Law Division of the United Nations (U.N.), acted as the panel’s moderator. She reminded students that, according to the U.N., over two hundred million people of African descent currently live in the Americas. As such, the issue of reparations had “everything to do with all of us.” She spoke of the contemporary African diaspora as a diverse group, united by a shared identity of “descendants of ancestors, whom I would like to think of as overcomers.”
Verene Shepherd, Professor Emerita at the University of the West Indies, told the audience that the International Decade for People of African Descent was initially conceived as an event focused on reparatory justice. But that plan was abandoned after it faced opposition from U.N. member states. Despite its rocky beginnings, Shepherd described the Decade as a period of “growth” for the reparatory justice movement. She expressed gratitude that institutions had finally begun to form connections with social justice advocates, but said she ultimately felt “disappointed” by the lack of legislative action for reparations.
Still, the panelists agreed that there was no better time to take action for reparations than today. Jean-Pierre Brutus, a senior counsel in the Economic Justice Program at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, said in a pre-panel roundtable that the conversation around reparations changed in 2014. That year, author and activist Ta-Nehisi Coates published an article in The Atlantic titled “The Case for Reparations.” Brutus credited Coates with re-igniting the conversation around reparations in policy and academia, but he noted that a number of grassroots activists had been working to bring about reparatory justice long before Coates had entered the conversation.
This sentiment was echoed by Macalester alum Westenley Alcenat ’10. Alcenat, a professor of history and Africana studies at Scripps College, said that Coates inspired him to “broaden the conversation” around reparatory justice. In 2017, Alcenat published an article in Jacobin magazine titled “The Case for Haitian Reparations.” During the panel, he made an effort to re-frame the narratives which exist regarding Haiti.
“Instead of asking, ‘why is Haiti so poor?’” Alcenat said, “let’s frame the question the other way and say, ‘Why is the United States so rich?’”
Alcenat explained that American corporations had harvested most of Haiti’s reserves of guano (a precious commodity used in the production of fertilizer). He suggested that, because Haitian farmers were deprived of this resource, the island nation’s agricultural economy floundered while America’s flourished.
In discussing Haiti, Alcenat hoped to show that reparatory justice, as a project, is not exclusively American. He urged students to look at the issue of reparations through an international lens and examine the wider effects of settler-colonialism across the globe.
The final panelist, Marvin Anderson, brought the conversation to the local level. Anderson is the chair of Reconnect Rondo, a group advocating for change in St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood.
Rondo, many of whose residents are Black, had a vibrant, thriving community for decades before the construction of the freeway I-94 split it in two. This construction project, the majority of which happened in the 1960s, took out hundreds of Rondo homes and businesses, which could have been avoided completely had its planners decided to build the highway along a northern route.
Subsequent research by Macalester students helped prove to the federal government that the freeway would not have gone through Rondo if an environmental impact statement (EIS) had been applied to it. Applying an EIS became standard practice in 1970.
Today, Rondo has the lowest level of homeownership, the highest incarceration rate and the lowest mean grade-point average in St. Paul. But it hasn’t lost sight of what it had in the past, and what it would reclaim.
“[Rondo] has the will and it has the desire, and it has the moral legal justification to change the trajectory of its community,” Anderson said. Reconnect Rondo activists are hoping to create this change by building a land bridge over a section of I-94 to both reconnect the divided neighborhood and serve as a cultural and economic district and destination. Activists envision the landbridge containing over 400 homes, a cultural museum, trees and flowers and a mall-like center that would create over 1,000 jobs.
This project has been a Rondo dream since 2009. Its proponents received $6 million from the Minnesota Legislature to develop a plan for the landbridge, bringing it closer to reality.
To Anderson, this project would accomplish important reparatory work.
“We’ll be able to recreate on that Rondo community a sense of what we lost, and begin the real work [of bringing] our net negatives to net positives by providing all of the fresh food, supermarkets, pharmacies [and] the other businesses that you have to walk out and around the community to obtain today,” Anderson said.
Anderson believes that reparatory projects such as these cannot satisfy the harm that the Black community has suffered, but they can bring back some of what was taken.
“Reparations won’t do anything for that part of my soul that has been taken away from somewhere in Africa, a language that I never knew [and a] religion that I’ve never practiced,”
Anderson said. “We’ve lost all of that, and reparations will never be able to bring that back.
“Reparations is a policy that has very good intentions, and we should pursue every aspect of reparations that we deserve because of the past, of what has happened to us.
“We ask that we be given an opportunity to build our land bridge, to bring back a portion of what was taken from us when our community was destroyed, and in doing so, we’ll be on the right path. … We’ll be chipping away at this enormous barrier that was described by my colleagues on this panel: the deprivations, the sheer amount of distance between the African American and our white neighbors. That’s the right direction to go, and it’s about time.”
