Healing Black Futures

Financial justice is an important element of the movement for reparations, given this country’s history of slavery and the many years of Black codes and Jim Crow laws, which effectively blocked Black economic progress for generations. As a result, Black wealth is now just 1/10th that of white wealth. 

Now, financial advisors are developing reparative strategies to heal our capital markets of these structural inequities.

Repairing what’s broken requires both an understanding of current finance, banking and credit policy as well as grounding in an afro-futuristic vision of what’s possible.

Our guest today is Enith Williams, Founder and Managing Director of the Reparations Finance Lab, a financial service non-profit that seeks to engage capital markets to design innovative financial products and processes that will deliver Reparative Capital to the descendants of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Enith Williams founded and manages the Reparations Finance Lab after an international career in economic and social development and finance. She has held senior positions as an international banker with Merrill Lynch in New York City and with the Government of Jamaica, where she worked with the Planning Institute of Jamaica and the Jamaica Investment Promotions Agency, Jampro. Early in her career, she was a program associate, with the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation where she worked on a multi-stakeholder program to address homelessness in New York City. She then moved on to work with the New York City Housing Partnership in its groundbreaking program to engage with local entrepreneurs to secure their participation in the economic revitalization that was underway in Central Harlem and the South Bronx in the early 1990s. As a native of Jamaica, and an immigrant to the United States, Enith has lived and worked in both countries throughout her professional career and has seen and experienced first-hand the impact of the capital markets and financial decision making on economically disadvantaged individuals, communities and countries.

She hopes to utilize this unique insight into crafting a new area of exploration at 17 Asset Management around closing the Black-White wealth gap by reconnecting the history and economics of the African Slave Trade, and the involvement of the global financial markets in that endeavor.

Transportation and Infrastructure justice is an important element of the movement for reparations, given this country’s history of bisecting and destroying communities of color through the construction of highways, light rail and other transportation systems. Now, generations later, Black urbanists are bringing a reparative lens to urban planning that literally heals the scars of racism in urban cities, undoing decades of structural exclusion.

Repairing what’s broken requires both an understanding of current transportation and infrastructure policy as well as grounding in an afro-futuristic vision of what’s possible.

Our guest today is Kristen Jeffers, founder and editor-in-chief of the Black Urbanist, a muti-media platform exploring the urbanist movement. Kristen centers urbanism at the interaction of Black, queer, feminist theory.

She holds a Master of Public Affairs focused on community and economic development from the University of North Carolina Greensboro, and a Bachelor of Arts in communication with a concentration in public relations from North Carolina State University. She has presented at the annual gatherings of the Congress for New Urbanism, YIMBYTown, Walk Bike Places, CityWorksXpo, APA Virginia, NACTO, and to communities around the US and Canada, using her personal story to illustrate what land use and planning really means and really does, plus encourage practitioners, both young and old in best practices. She is a Streetsblog Network member and has also contributed articles to CityLab, Greater Greater Washington, [Greensboro] News & Record, Yes! Weekly, Grist, Next City, Better! Towns and Cities, Triad City Beat,  Urban Escapee, and Urbanful and appeared on several NPR affiliate stations (KCUR, WAMU, and WUNC)  as a commentator and expert.

Restoring Black access to indigenous African spiritual traditions is an important element of the movement for reparations, given this country’s history of using faith to subjugate Black people during and after the enslavement era.

Repairing what’s broken requires both an understanding of this history as well as a vision of the liberation that’s possible when African spiritual traditions are restored.

Our guest today is ritualist, healer and poet Joy Tabernacle Kmt.

When we think about the different ways that African American spirituality has been shaped by the institutions of slavery, it's important for us to interrogate our relationship with organized religion. 

We know that Christian leaders relied on biblical passages to build the case for the superiority of the white race and support the institution of slavery. They supported the infrastructure of slavery as well. Many church structures were built by enslaved people, religious institutions owned slaves and invested in ship building and other elements of slave trading voyages.

Joy KMT is a healer, poet, and ritual artist. She has received fellowships from MacDowell, VONA, and Callaloo. She is published in multiple journals, anthologies and magazines, including Black Quantum Futurism Volume 1 and 2, Black Girl Dangerous, The Feminist Wire, Nepantla, Adrienne, Pluck! The Journal of Affrilachian Arts & Culture, Blackberry, a magazine, Backbone Press, Fledgling Rag, Sugared Water, and others.

She works from the possibility of the personal to be collectively transformational. Her work often blends the magical with the reality of living at the crossroads of multiplicities. She is the producer of Her Voice: The Stories, Tales and Myths of Women of Color which premiered in the Sunstar Music Festival and Testify: A Black Womanhood Series. Her poetry has appeared in Check The Rhyme: An Anthology of Female Emcees and Poets, Amistad: Howard’s Literary Journal, Black Girl Dangerous, Blood Lotus, an Online Literary Journal, Backbone Poetry Journal, The Feminist Wire, Pluck! the Affrilachian Journal of Arts and Culture, Fledgling Rag, Near Kin: Words and Art inspired by Octavia Butler, and is forthcoming in Sugared Water.

See also:
Hoodoo Society

Housing justice is an important element of the movement for reparations, given this country’s history of housing discrimination, including redlining, credit and appraisal fraud, blockbusting and many other discriminatory practices.  Repairing what’s broken requires both an understanding of current housing policy as well as grounding in an afro-futuristic vision of what’s possible.

Our guest today is Rasheedah Phillips. 

Rasheedah is the Director of Housing at Policy Link, a national research and action institute advancing racial and economic equity. She leads their national advocacy efforts to support the growing tenants’ rights, housing and land use movements. Rasheedah collaborates with grassroots partners, movement leaders, industry and government to envision an equitable future and housing for all.  Rasheedah is also an interdisciplinary Afrofuturist artist and cultural producer. 

Food justice is an important element of the movement for reparations; it necessitates both access to land and economic redress in a variety of forms, given the historic connections much of our farmlands have to slavery, sharecropping and other injustices.

Food justice includes redress for Black farmers, the development of urban agriculture projects and neighborhood kitchens, and programs that demystify food production and model healthy ways of preparing food.  

Our guest today is Damien Thompson, PhD. 

Damien is a Sustainable Food System Specialization Lead in the Masters of Environment graduate program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Dr. Thompson also holds a Certificate in Advanced Permaculture Design. He is a farmer and a designer of biodiverse food producing landscapes. In 2018 Dr. Thompson co-founded Frontline Farming, a Denver-based BIPOC and women-led non-profit farming organization, whose mission is to create greater equity across the food system and to support and create greater leadership and access for women and people of color. ecosystems, build biodiversity, and support cultural diversity. He centers racial equity as a key organizing principle of his work. Welcome Dr. Thompson to Liberated Black Futures.

With host Asia Dorsey