When people talk about racial justice, they often frame it in the negative — things we have to stop, systems we need to dismantle. These things are absolutely necessary. But they’re not sufficient.

#JusticeForGeorgeFloyd
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Why is it that white liberals often present an obstacle to progress? Because in their minds, equality under the law — on paper — did the trick. Civil Rights were secured, right?

What they don’t understand is a truth that a look at disparities among whites would reveal.

A common tactic to wave off condemnations of the police is to point to the number of white people who are killed by cops every year.

What this dismissal fails to observe is what these white victims of police violence have in common: they’re poor.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/585152/people-shot-to-death-by-us-police-by-race/

Racism explains the disporportionate amount of police violence against black people. But it doesn’t tell the entire story.

To wit: why is it that, regardless of race, police can expect to get away with killing poor people?

Lack of wealth and power on the part of their victims.

Don’t get me wrong: this isn’t purely a class-based analysis.

The lack of wealth, and thus power, in the black community is the result of racism. Black Wall Street was destroyed for a reason.

White liberals think ending racism is a matter of changing hearts and writing laws.

These things help, yes. But while they confer sympathy and a legal grounding for progress, they cannot do the work.

The only thing that displaces power is power.

Cops go out of their way to protect middle-class and rich people, because those people have the power to hold them directly accountable.

While on paper, legal equality confers that same accountability to poor people, it does not confer the same power.

What every well-meaning politician in this country needs to understand is that the only way to permanently end this cycle of racist violence is to give black people real, not theoretical, power.

That means money: lots of it.

Not welfare.

— Wealth. —

Capital that grows.

I confess I’ve long thought that Reparations wouldn’t solve the root problems. And depending on how they are provided, they might not. But I understand now that the point of Reparations isn’t to undo the past, but to build the future. Black people are owed an equity stake.

A healthy, regulated market economy is a non-zero sum game. Putting trillions of dollars of capital — not fucking welfare — into black people’s hands would benefit white people, too. It benefits everyone. It would actually help knit America together... for the first time.

For legal equality to be real, every citizen needs a measure of sovereignty that goes beyond the right to vote. They also need the material means to defend those rights, and to secure their own happiness. Otherwise, the law is about as useful as code without an electron flow.

Browse Black Twitter on a given day and you’ll see their priorities: they want to succeed, to grow wealth, and to pass an inheritance to their children. But Capitalism requires capital to play the game. That basic income guarantee is the responsibilty of the state.

Reparations would be an angel investment in black Americans; an affirmation of their excellence and potential, not yet another apology. Universal basic income would be a further investment in every single American, an equal promise of economic liberty made to all.

Enact Reparations + UBI and you tip the balance of power. Give black people the ability to wield the economic engine and they can directly oversee criminal justice reform, not just vote and hope for the best.

We can make this country a place where everyone has real power, real wealth, real freedom.

We’ve long understood that race is a fiction.

Wealth is the only thing that can rewrite the story.

Give black people money.

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