 Thank you for joining us for this discussion of reparations from high perspectives or the conversation that will engage in here is in large part the fruit of study and consultation that have taken place among members of the ABS African studies working group. I'm Derek Smith, and I'm joined by doctors June Thomas and guy mount. And today we are representing for our working group collaborators who have primarily been Jerry peak. Val Carnegie, Laili Mapparion, Louie Venters, Sahar Satar Zabe, and Jamar Wheeler. And over the course of the last year, our group has had the opportunity to meet on a monthly basis in order to walk a path toward unity of thought regarding discourse on reparations. And in order for us to walk this path we engage in a series or engage with a series of key texts in the discourse, representing a variety of what we might call Africana perspectives on reparations. And in our discussions of these texts, we employed a kind of like a sifting methodology, which we made efforts to analyze the discourse in light of insights from the high writings and community experience. And we developed small writing pieces that are actually going to contribute to the we could call the curriculum of an ABS weekend seminar on reparations that will take place this summer. And all these efforts, the consultation of the working group, the summer seminar, and even this presentation are part of a general learning process, I would say, that's being cultivated by the Association for behind studies. In the year 2013 letter, the Universal House of Justice offered guidance to the Association and which it was in which it suggested that that intellectual inquiry could be advanced through pointed attention to collaborative initiatives. In the specific language of the House of Justice in this regard they say a number of small seminars could be held to assist individuals from certain professions or academic disciplines to examine some aspect of the discourse of their field. Students could be selected and a group of participants with experience because share articles prepare papers and consult on contemporary perspectives and related by concepts. Special interest groups such as philosophy or religious studies could have gatherings to intensify their efforts. So that communications or follow up meetings could be arranged to increase the effectiveness of the participation of these groups of individuals and aspects of the discourse in their chosen fields and quote. You know what we're sharing today reflects a modest effort by the Africana Studies working group to respond to this guidance. And in the past year we've organized our efforts around the reparations discourse, in part because the universal justice has recently explained that the Baha'i community needs to be able to offer quote, as a unified body, it's considered perspective on issues that weigh on my minds and spirits of those with whom it interacts and quote. And so today you know we felt that you know many minds and spirits are considering the issue of reparations in our working group hopes to contribute to the development of a, you know, a considered by high perspective on that issue. And of course the ideas that we're presenting here are not meant to be definitive, and they don't represent a Baha'i stance on reparations, rather their reflections that have in part emerged from our working group, and it may be helpful to others, as they think through the reparations discourse and with that, you know, I'll turn it over to Dr. Thomas to sort of share some of her thoughts that came out of our process. So thanks Derek. First of all, it has been a wonderful opportunity to meet with like minded scholars over a year, and to talk about this issue. I would like to point out that not all of us are experts in reparations, but I think what unified us was a decided devotion to the idea of social justice, especially for people of African descent. And what some of us have been doing for most of our professional lives is writing about injustice or thinking about that, or working with people as counselors or therapists, who are traumatized by that. So to bring us together in a group with people who are conscious of the importance of interpreting current events and current challenges from the perspective of the Baha'i revelation was really refreshing and I very much appreciated that. In addition, we were able to educate ourselves about a really pivotal issue, which is, given all of this injustice that African American people have suffered, what about reparations, or what can we do in terms of reparative justice. And so that's what we've been focused on, but from the perspective of how does this play out from the insights that we gain from the Baha'i revelation. So just a couple of words about what the dialogue is. There are people that have been working for years on this idea of the need to pay reparations, or to compensate in some way emotional or in terms of reconciliation. There are people who have lived their lives handicapped in some way by the legacy of enslavement. We read some of those sources, we talked about what their ideas were, and I'd just like to cover just a couple of those people and just kind of explain what they're saying. And then we can go on to talk about what are some of the shortcomings as well. For example, there is a well known scholar who published an essay in 2014, which actually won a national prize. And in this essay, he said that reparations was an extremely important topic, and that the nation needed to, to figure out how to compensate for all of the suffering that African Americans had been subject to over the last 150 odd years, or 300 years actually. So, this essay was extremely moving, it was published in the Atlantic Monthly, it began to generate a small audience of people who were not scholars but interested in this topic. It's possible that 2014 essay was really important in terms of getting the attention of the average American citizen to this topic. The stories were very affecting about people and communities that had suffered over the years, such as those that had suffered from massacres, and it was, was really a wonderful piece. I think one of the issues that we discussed after we read that piece was the limitation of the kind of reparation that's addressed in such pieces. So, this idea of, are we really talking about material compensation for what has been a huge loss, not just physically and materially, but also in terms of emotions in terms of psychology in terms of family strength, so many different factors. So, that was one of the first things we discussed was, can we really rely on this limited perspective, even though it's popularizing a very just cause, can we really rely on their interpretation of what is a just cause. Another person, another scholar that has been very active in this field has been William Darity. William Darity is probably one of the best known scholars of reparations, except for a few of us, not many of us were familiar with this work. I'm sure a guy was but not everyone was. But that was very illuminating for me. He, among other things explained that reparations should at least look at several phases of injustice. One is the phase of enslavement. The other is the effects of jump crawl or legalized racial segregation. And the third is general discrimination. So that was very helpful because that helps us to see that there are different levels so when people talk about compensation for enslavement. That's only a part of the problem. And so that has limitations. I really appreciated that discussion and some of the other discussions because in my own work as an urban planner, I have been aware of and thinking about and writing about injustices such as the Federal Home Administration loans, or the HLC loans which discriminated on homeowners, or urban renewal, which cleared out black communities. That was the stuff of injustice from my own field. But I think this particular investigation really broaden my insights into what really was the problem because it talked about things such as the Tulsa massacre, the 100 or so other massacres that took place in the years after the Civil War. The Social Security Program, which I had not thought about. These other, the other New Deal program. So it broadened my perspective in terms of the nature of injustice, but it didn't answer this question. What do we need to do that is genuine reform? What does the, what does Baha'u'llah's revelation tell us about the limitations of material compensation? And what should we be doing instead? So that's a few, maybe just a few ideas and maybe Derek could talk to us a little bit more about Baha'u'llah's vision. Thanks so much, June. As you mentioned, I feel somewhat similar to you in that I don't think of myself as being deeply studied on the issue of reparations. But in consultations of the working group, I felt as though I was able really to develop a few thoughts, particularly on popular discourse on reparations and how they can be considered from a Baha'i perspective. You know, our consultations around the pieces that you mentioned from quotes and from Derrity helped me to sort of consider some of these things. And one thing, especially when you're reading someone like quotes is that it occurred to me that even for those who are deeply in favor or deeply opposed to reparations, I feel like there's little discussion of practical questions of implementation. You know, like, how do you actually carry this out? And I think that that's okay, right? And for now, maybe, you know, the discourse primarily in the popular realm revolves around the concept of reparations of self. And like from an Africana perspective, a lot of that discourse involves demonstration that justice, which of course is a foundational principle of revelation of Baha'u'llah, that justice warrants that reparations should be paid to the descendants of those who have endured grievous harms in the making of the New World and in the making of America in particular. So from a Baha'i perspective, it seems that we need to think about this relationship between justice and harm and historical harm and contemporary restitution. And so one of the texts that came to light in our consultation around these issues was Baha'u'llah's tablet on the right of the people. And now this is a really fascinating text that hasn't been authoritatively translated into English, but which deals with principles of individual rights and justice. And in it, Baha'u'llah offers a really interesting example of an individual who steals the seeds of another. And the person was committed to theft, then plants those seeds, and then those seeds grow into fruitful trees. And Baha'u'llah indicates that a just ruler would look at that situation and surely say that the fruit of the abundant tree that is owned by the individual who stole the seeds, that those fruit are actually owed to the person from whom the seeds were stolen. Right. And so for those interested in the reparations discourse is an intriguing tablet because the stolen seeds might be considered a powerful analogy for the stolen labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants in America. And I say that the fruit of the stolen labor of that stolen labor of African people and African descendants in America has been prodigious, and the justice then demands that some large portion of that fruit should be returned to the descendants of those whose labor was robbed. However, right, it should be pointed out that the tablet of the right of people has a deeply spiritual dimension also right and encourages us to think about the possibility of spiritual restitution and the possibility that material harms could be repaired through spiritual means, and these, as June was alluding to these were important elements in our consultations and things that we've been still working with and thinking through. And also, I shouldn't point out that in the tablet of the right of the people, Bahá'u'lláh is addressing the rights of individuals, and not necessarily communities and of course says nothing about the right of communities whose ancestors have experienced unjust deprivation and oppression. But all that said, the tablet of the rights of individuals is a really valuable source for those who want to learn about, you know, what kind of distinctive contributions could Bahá'u'llh's make to the perspective to the discourse on reparations. And all just a couple more thoughts and in our consultations, one of the things that emerged for me was like the limitation of popular American discourse on reparations in that much of that discourse is limited to the boundary of the nation state, meaning that although this historical harm of new world colonization and the enslavement projects that went along with that were hemispheric or global in scope, the reparation in America tends to put aside that fact and, you know, put aside that and not think so much about the fact that harms of the past are being experienced acutely by descendants of enslaved people in South America and the Caribbean and parts of Africa that were, you know, colonized and so forth. And so while it may be pragmatic to think about reparations projects by beginning with the political unit of the nation, from a conceptual standpoint, it seems that we can't think explicitly about reparations without thinking about those who bear the brunt of historical harms in places beyond American borders. And so some of the reading that we did in that vein came from important historians like a Gerald Horn, and then other people who, you know, who are thinking about reparations from the Caribbean and the African perspective, you know, so that was really illuminating for me. And of course, once we start to think on the global level. Once we start to honor the idea that, you know, there is some merit to reparations and it might be global in scope, right. Then we come to realize how massive the project of true reparations might be, we start to realize that deep justice would require basically a reordering of political and economic relations between nations. I mean, this then points to the need of what some scholars are starting to call world building projects. And so what was exciting for me was to come across, you know, people who are doing work at the foremost of the reparations who truly recognize the need for a new world order. And I thought that this was very resonant with behind conceptions and in fact, so so one of the scholars that really stood out to me was that they came and I came upon and consultation with one of the other scholars in the in the working group was a family title, and he has this book called reconsidering reparations with things about the intersection between climate change and the reparations discourse, and he is really offering up this perspective of what we need is a world building project that totally reconceptualizes human relations at all levels. And to me, this was really helped me to begin to understand the project of the worldwide Baha'i community as a world building project, and then think about the way in which this world building project of the Baha'i community inspired by the revelation of Baha'u'llah needs to draw from the discourse on reparations which is taking place in a really sort of fascinating exciting way in the foremost of that sort of field of study the reaches of that of that study. And, you know, in our working group, one of the people who really helped guide us and nurture our thinking was Guy Mount there. And he is, you know, he has thought about this perhaps more than anyone else in the working group and has some really wonderful ideas that as I said helped me to really deepen my understanding of reparations but not only that to think about like what it means to be involved in this project of world building that the Baha'i community is embarking on right now was really helpful to be in the working group and to have the contributions of someone like Guy there as well so I'm going to turn it over to Guy to kind of take us through some of his ideas. Cool. Thanks Derek and thanks June and yeah just echoing the love and just absolute joy it's been to be part of this working group. It's something that I've kind of been not knowing I was missing right until I came across it. And it was the way that I kind of came to reparations and thinking about it was I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, and I was part of the team helped found the team that uncovered the University of Chicago is historical ties to slavery. This is at the moment when kind of Georgetown University Harvard Yale Brown all the other elite universities were starting to think about and reckon with on one degree or another their ties to slavery with various conceptualizations of reparations with with various kind of political different kinds of people taking the helm of defining that kind of process and thinking about it that way. And so I immediately got on the ground I was also very involved kind of as an activist on the ground with labor organizing with Black Lives Matter with Occupy Wall Street so I came to reparations kind of from an activist position, and found there's been a long standing kind of tradition of communities of activist work around reparations that you could historically trace back to emancipation to the colonial period to Africa itself in terms of conceptions of reparations, etc. But the work I was doing on the ground with organizations like and Cobra with organizations like Black Lives Matter to kind of think through what reparations would mean in our case on the south side of Chicago where a powerful elite institution was literally founded by a slave that has an enormous endowment that simply would not exist without the labor of enslaved people as a university that had also contributed immensely to segregation had materially supported redlining and challenges to ending segregation. I was a really bad actor in a lot of ways that I was part of right I was I was a student a grad student at this university that needed to do some reparative work that needed to make this right in some ways and one of the baseline. I think definitions of reparations is kind of to make things are right to think about how do you set wrongs are right. But what I realized and what I was always trying to reach out to behind communities I was involved in my kind of local high community trying to get people interested in vitamin events. And it was weird behinds were kind of standoffish about this right it was kind of like well you're talking material repair and as behinds we need to be doing the spiritual work I'm all yeah yeah yeah let's do all that together right there's a reason that the material and the spiritual are interbound in so many ways in the Bahá'í writings and this could be an avenue through which we can we can do that and so the one thing I noticed really quickly and I'm again glad I found this group because I was able to then think and go back to some of the Bahá'í writings that I hopefully can share with you guys in a second here and and kind of put those and synthesize those with some of the more, for lack of a better word, secular activist writings and scholarship that I was kind of familiar with so I could juxtapose two of those in a second. I'd like to do that and the first is from Tana Hasi Coates who June mentioned and Derek mentioned as someone who really renewed interest in reparations that had really been happening for her many many generations through an organization called and Cobra, which is the coalition of blacks for reparations in America that actually has a quite an international presence they were part of the Durban campaign to declare slavery a crime against humanity for example, they're very tied in with the care calm movement for reparations so they're a US based black organization that has really a broad I think international picture that Derek is kind of calling us to think about and so they were a natural kind of ally for us kind of early on. So they've been doing that work for years the Republic of New Africa is where they kind of came out of back in the 70s. But Tana Hasi Coates this 2014 article really put it back on the map in a lot of ways for the general American public and Tana Hasi Coates is a friend of mine is fantastic writer amazing thinker amazing scholar historian I've kind of have been really really really really blessed to kind of be able to learn from him, and, but he's an avowed atheist, but even an avowed atheist when he starts thinking about reparations I want to quote from that piece that 2014 piece and have you think about what the process of as Derek is saying, he's turning the world remaking the world transforming the world. What just that process or a commitment to that process for an atheist like coats. What does that mean for him. Here's what he says towards the end of that piece he says quote, what I'm talking about is more than for past injustices, more than a handout, a payoff hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I'm talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. So you have someone, an about atheist, one of the best thinkers I think of our generation actually and certainly one of the best writers, who's very careful with his words he doesn't use a word like spiritual for no reason. Right. He's thinking conceptualizing reparations and saying the material is necessary. No one would deny that right these are. And Cobra for example says we're done making the case for reparations the case is made by black history, black history is the case for reparations. The case has been made. What we need now is to think about and conceptualize what that's going to look like. And you have coach saying a spiritual renewal is a way to conceptualize reparations you can conceptualize reparations as a spiritual renewal. I also want to quote from Bahá'u'lláh. So if that's kind of the spiritual angle coming from an atheist I then want to take kind of maybe a material revolutionary approach that I see coming out of the high text of high scripture. So this is from gems of Bahá'u'lláh of divine mysteries page 62 this is Bahá'u'lláh now saying quote, he sounds very much like a revolutionary in the vein that you would more expect perhaps coats to be right. Bahá'u'lláh says quote, for it is indeed within the power of him who changes the who changes the earth into another earth to transform all that dwell and move there on. Wherefore marvel not at how he turneth darkness into light, light into darkness, ignorance into knowledge, air into guidance, death into life and life into death. It is in this station that the law of transformation take effect. So, while I've been kind of engaged in kind of secular ways to conceptualize reparations as a permanent revolution, for example, so one of the phrases that I've kind of thought through and really advocated for how do we think of reparations. It's not hush money it's not a payoff it's not simply material. It's a permanent revolution. It's a total transformation, a world making project, as Derek has mentioned. What Bahá'u'lláh is saying is that it's part of what I'm interpreting here as Bahá'u'lláh's law of transformation. So what would it mean to turn error into guidance, just to taking that one phrase from him and think about in the context of reparations for slavery. It was an error, right, not in the sense it was an accident right but in the sense that it wasn't injustice right it's a very intentional injustice, this horrific institution that really made the modern world in so many ways and that that extraction of black pain to transform that black pain into the wealth that built the modern world. It was an error in the sense that it was wrong, right. It's not wrong but wrong on the list. What would it mean to take that error and turn it into guidance through a law of transformation. So I think the ideas, the concepts, the way to conceptualize reparations are there in the Bahá'u'lláh writings. In some ways you could imagine the entire Bahá'u'lláh project as a reparative, restorative, transformative project where the world is going to be made a new. We have to keep these things from the old world order. We know the old world order is going to collapse a new world order is going to be built up into its place. But what does that look like for descendants of enslaved peoples what does that look like when the old world order has these vestiges of slavery that are still present in the modern world and then if we're not careful, we're going to drag those things into the next world. We're going to drag those injustices drag those inequalities and grab and drag those conceptualizations of the world into into the new world or next world sorry I muted myself there. Maybe someone telling me I'm talking too long already. But yeah anyway those are just some thoughts and some places to look but I think this law of transformation in the Bahá'u'lláh writings I think give us license to think about entering the discourse on reparations which I think it's my rough take on where the kind of discourse is it's very muddled right now right there's some really cutting edge thinkers who are conceptualizing reparations and some really sophisticated amazing ways. The one name we haven't mentioned is Fania Davis and Fania Davis, who we talked about in. She's the sister of Angela Davis. She has heard some of her work she has a great book on reparations that she's written really tiny very legible book called I think a racial history of restorative or reparative justice. She thinks about reparations as a way of being in the world. That's one of her conceptualizations right reparations a way of being in the world if you see a harm that's happened. If you harm someone fix that right make that right if you didn't cause it fix that right heal those that have been harmed find out ways to meet the needs of the people who has been harmed and her rendering is that what reparations really are about or identifying who has been harmed. What the needs of those people are who have been harmed as defined by the people themselves, right the people themselves who have been harmed say I've been harmed and I have this need that has arisen from this harm. And then answering the question, who will be responsible who will take responsibility for healing that harm, and you don't have to be the person who caused the harm to repair that harm we do it all the time, actually, both as a society, as well as individual someone's heard the natural human inclination I think the best of the human condition is to help the person who's been harmed and figure out a way to make that happen. But if you've been harmed, right, it doesn't mean you can't help yourself, right, it doesn't mean you're waiting it doesn't mean as coach is saying to some kind of a handout. No, right this is saying look I've been harmed, and I have needs, and let's get together and fix these needs doesn't make this happen right let's make the world new transform things blah blah blah. So anyway, just some initial thoughts and hopefully we can keep keep going. Yeah, this is really illuminating and I really appreciate what you've offered us here. Also June, thank you so much for your contributions here and as you can tell, if you've been listening to our presentations here. The discourse that we were able to cultivate within the context of the working group was really rich and we're confident that it's going to lead us into. You know the capacity to articulate ideas about reparations from a high perspective with a kind of acuity and precision that we haven't had yet and so this is a working process we're learning as we go. We're just really excited to be involved in this and it's been a pleasure to be in conversation with you for just a few minutes June and guy and look forward to continuing this in the future. Many many thanks. Thanks everybody. Thanks for organizing this.