BALTIMORE — A reparations official appointed by Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott has a history of making politically and racially charged comments, an analysis by Spotlight on Maryland found.
Ray Winbush is a research professor and the director of the Institute for Urban Research at Morgan State University. His scholarship focuses on “developmental stages in Black males, public policy and its connection to compensatory justice,” among other topics.
Winbush was one of several individuals appointed to the new Baltimore Community Reinvestment and Reparations Commission last week. The commission will be responsible for making recommendations about how to spend tax revenue acquired through the sale of legalized cannabis with a focus on “communities that have been disproportionately impacted by the enforcement of the cannabis prohibition.”
“Our Community Reinvestment and Reparations Commission is tasked with two things: determining for which purposes these funds can be used, and directing the expenditure of funding to community-based organizations for services and programs intended to benefit our hardest hit communities in accordance with state law,” Mayor Scott told AFRO last week.
Winbush’s Facebook page includes several uses of coded references to white people, including terms like “weyet,” “wipipo” and “ybois.”
“Weyet women are the oil that keeps the machinery of white supremacy running smoothly,” he wrote in one post.
Winbush wrote on X that he refuses to celebrate what he calls “Thankstaking,” claiming white people need to celebrate the Nat Turner slave rebellion before he considers celebrating the holiday.
“I’ll ‘celebrate’ Thankstaking when white folks celebrate Nat Turner’s Rebellion,” Winbush wrote in 2021.
When reached for comment about the remark, Winbush told Spotlight on Maryland via email his quotes had been misinterpreted.
“You also took the quote out of context—something that Sinclair constantly does in its continued support of its white-wing agenda,” he wrote. “I said that I would start celebrating ‘Thanksgiving’ when white people start celebrating Nat Turner’s revolt when he slaughtered 60 + white people. They won’t do that, and I won’t ‘celebrate’ the slaughter of Indigenous people.”
“It will influence my work on the CRRC just the same way your ideology influences your work with a white-wing broadcasting corporation,” he added.
Winbush added he does not condone racial violence, but declined an interview request to elaborate on his stance when pressed by Spotlight on Maryland.
“I never talk to conservative media over the phone, since they mis/distort what I say,” Winbush wrote. “I always talk to truth-speaking media.”
Winbush is the author of “The Warrior Method,” a 2001 book in which he described his brother Harold “Windy” Winbush’s conviction for manslaughter. Harold, according to the book, attacked a patient at a state mental hospital where he worked after the patient directed racial slurs at him.
“My brother lost control, and the years of rage that he’d kept so tightly reined in slipped,” Ray wrote of his brother. “I make no excuses for Windy.”
“Windy did what many black men—who have simply been pushed too far—think about doing, but thankfully rarely do,” he added.
That book also described Black men who “directly engage white supremacist systems” as “warriors.”
“Viewed by some whites and blacks as troublemakers, they see justice as a core value in their lives and speak out against various forms of racial injustice,” he wrote of these individuals.
When sharing a painting of the Haitian Revolution via Facebook, Winbush included a quote from French psychiatrist Frantz Fanon which reads “killing a European is killing two birds with one stone, eliminating in one go oppressor and oppressed: leaving one man dead and the other man free.”
Another quote shared by Winbush, which he attributed to Erriel Roberson, encourages African people to use a sword to cut the jugular of “the beast.”
“We must come like a thief in the night, a cancer that has defeated the body before the mind knows,” the quote reads. “Only this is no cancer, it is truth and justice, it is swift and ‘sharper than any two-edged sword.’ The beast must blink once and find us around its throat, the jugular already cut. Move on African people, move on!”
An additional statement directed at Los Angeles police, which Winbush attributed to James Forman, reads “if I had my way, I have thought many times in the years since then, I would line these criminals against the wall and coolly, coldly, with calculated aim, shoot all of them through the icy blue of their murderous eyes.”
Mayor Scott’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment from Spotlight on Maryland as to whether it is aware of Winbush’s statements and if they reflect the views of the committee.
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