​In the summer of 2020, the largest protest movement in U.S. history surged across the nation and reverberated in global demonstrations of solidarity. Voices in the streets demanded the dismantling of prisons, borders, and police, calling not for reform but for abolition, redistribution, and radical transformation. Protesters understood racism as a structural force, asking not for infrastructures of violence to be softened through better officer training or diversity workshops, but for the defunding and dismantling of policing, carceral systems, and border regimes themselves. And for a moment, it seemed as if a true racial reckoning might be underway. 

Yet the revolutionary clarity of those demands was swiftly absorbed and deflected as Amazon, Walmart, and other corporate giants declared that Black Lives Matter, branded themselves as allies, poured resources into diversity trainings, and rescripted the cry for abolition as calls for representation and more “Black faces in high places.” This is the hallmark of liberal antiracism, a politics of inclusion and interpersonal bias correction that leaves intact and untouched the machinery of racial capitalism. In contrast, the Black tradition of radical antiracism — carried forward by luminaries like W.E.B. Du Bois, Claudia Jones, Kwame Nkrumah, Cedric Robinson, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Stuart Hall, Martin Luther King, Jr., Jamil al-Amin, Robin D.G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor insists that racism is inseparable from capitalism itself, and that justice requires dismantling the structures of policing, prisons, borders, and militarism that sustain the extraction, expropriation, and exploitation of an underlying racial capitalism.

When Larry Fink, billionaire CEO of BlackRock, the largest multinational investment management company in the world, wrote a letter in 2020 to colleagues of racism as a “deep and longstanding problem in our society and must be addressed on both a personal and systemic level,” did he mean canceling his donations and corporate influence on the New York City Police Foundation?1 Terminating BlackRock’s investments in arms manufacturers like Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Boeing, Raytheon Technologies, and the military-industrial complex supplying weapons for the wars in the Middle East? Redistributing the vast wealth he manages to confront the grotesque scale of global inequality? No, his response to “systemic” racism was not to focus on systems at all, but to “talk to each other and cultivate honest, open relationships and friendships... and [build] a more diverse and inclusive firm.”2 In other words, the solution to structural racism was to double down on interpersonal bias work and liberal antiracism’s familiar script of diversity and inclusion.

Interpersonal remedies matter, but they are painfully inadequate for structural injustices. Antiracist work “within” and “among” remain necessary, but it must not be confused or substituted for the work “beyond.” The racially differentiated effect of Covid was not rooted in individual prejudice, poor health habits, lack of education, or other narratives that gaslight communities of color. Such factors may always be present, but the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on nonwhite people was structurally rooted in the political economy of racial capitalism: the exploitation of “essential” labor, precarity of housing, unequal access to healthcare, policing of lockdowns and health mandates, unchecked outbreaks within prisons and detention centers, and the scapegoating and intensification of racial discrimination. It is the structural which frames the interpersonal, as racial capitalism organizes our reality through educational apartheid, mass incarceration, segregated neighborhoods, redlining and bluelining, segmented labor markets confining workers to unequal tiers, persistent wage gaps and job insecurity, and militarized borders that inscribe violence on collective life. From the slave patrols of the plantation to the strike breaking squads of the factory, policing has always functioned to guard property and control labor. Border regimes allow capital and goods to freely move across borders, while migrant labor remains violently restricted. The vilification of migrants as terrorists, criminals, drug dealers, “illegals who are taking our jobs” and “bogus asylum seekers” rehearses the old script of colonial racial capitalism. Most forcefully, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, renowned public scholar-activist, punctuates how racism and capitalism have always been structured together:

Detention and deportation are not aberrations at the edges of racial capitalism but border violence designed to preserve a global racial division of labor. 

The violence persists not because officers or capitalists fail to examine their biases, but because the system itself requires racialized control to sustain exploitation. Racism has never been incidental to capitalism; it is one of its core operating principles. To be an antiracist, then, is not merely to change minds or diversify institutions, but to collectively expose structures that require diseased imaginations to rationalize inequality. Antiracism means dismantling the infrastructures of racial capitalism hiding in abstract financialized economies, systems of land ownership, and global trade agreements that codify and normalize extraction. Antiracism means committing to the redistribution of wealth, repairing deep inequalities inscribed upon our world for centuries, and prophetically reimagining beyond the strictures of racial capitalism where political economies serve life rather than devour it. 

1 Morris Pearl, “Dear Larry Fink: it's time to stop lavishing your wealth on the police,” Guardian, August 1, 2020.
2 Alexandra Sternlicht, “We Must Do More—What CEOs Like Tim Cook, Jamie Dimon, Larry Fink Say About Racial Inequality Protests,” Forbes, June 1, 2020.

Haiti will break your heart. I’m not the first person to say so, but I’m reminded of what Rev. Janne Eller-Isaacs used to say, that when a heart breaks open, it makes more room for love. 

Flying over the Caribbean Sea is a magnificent experience. From a distance islands like Hispaniola appear as small rocks that rise out of the vast water that surround them. It’s only when you get closer that you see the dividing line down the mountain — the Dominican Republic on the lush green side and Haiti on the denuded bare side. It’s an obvious first sign that something is not right in Haiti. As the plane comes down over Port au Prince, the vast neighborhood of makeshift homes that make up Cite Soleil (City of the Sun) appears; infamously known as the largest (and to me scariest) slum in the Western Hemisphere. 

I worked with a small nonprofit that partners with a community of nuns in Haiti for several years and have been there half a dozen times, for grant writing; to tour the education, farming, and elder care projects we support; and to lead immersion trips. When I’m asked what it is like there, I think of the deep pink-magenta bougainvillea blossoms in full bloom that won’t be denied as they wind around nasty looking razor wire atop most middle-class homes. Or the view from Kenscoff, where there is farming and trees in the mountains above Port au Prince, that belies the reality down there, where gullies throughout the city are filled with trash being picked through by a pig or goat or maybe even a child. Children who may live in a shack with no water or electricity come to school pressed, clean, and as happy and goofy as grade school kids anywhere. It’s a land of contrasts.

Haiti is a place where examining my own privilege and white superiority was inescapable; it smacks you in the face. Nothing in the United States or anywhere I’ve traveled in Europe compared to the sights, sounds, smells, and jarring car rides in Haiti. After a few trips, the stench outside the airport became familiar, but God help me if I ever get used to sights like a mother washing her baby in a puddle of water on the side of the road, an orange-haired child with the extended belly of starvation, or a toddler in an orphanage crib so devoid of hope he doesn’t cry for attention anymore. 

Though Haiti was born from revolutionary struggle against colonial oppression, the legacy of racial hierarchies endures in the form of colorism, with wealth and status disproportionately held by those with lighter complexions. Such classism remains deeply entrenched, exemplified by the system of restaveks which still exists. Yet beyond these inherited structures lies another form of racism that is largely of foreign import, brought in by the thousands of organizations and church mission programs full of white people with the best of intentions to help the poor. Many, if not most, find it nearly impossible not to compare “us” to “them,” especially when the differences can be so stark and devastating. The common reaction is, “What can we do to save them?” 
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As you’d expect, antiracism doesn’t exist in Haiti as we largely know it here. There are no workshops on intersectionality and microaggressions. The “us” versus “them” savior complex may be the most obvious racist attitude, of which I was (and often still am) guilty. When I felt my heart breaking, I looked to our Haitians partners to direct me, to tell me what was needed, and let more love into my heart to walk beside the remarkable Haitian nuns who had let me in, despite belonging to Unitarian Universalism, a religious oddity in a country where Vodou is practiced alongside Christianity. 

​Since it became seated in spring of 2024, the Saint Paul Recovery Act Community Reparations Commission has created its own bylaws; developed sub-committees, work plans, and budget; hosted community listening sessions; and set the course for its next big steps: a Harms Report and a legislative proposal. The Harms Report will underlie future recommendations for repair and redress. The contract for production is being awarded this fall, and delivery of the Harms Report to the Commission is requested by the end of 2026. 

The Slavery Disclosure and Redress Ordinance (SDRO) will likely be proposed to Saint Paul City Council this year. Slavery Disclosure acts require that companies who wish to apply for government contracts investigate their history, and that of predecessors and acquisitions, for any links to slavery and the slave trade before the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. In addition to companies that directly benefitted from the labor of enslaved persons, businesses like financial institutions and insurance companies that engaged in holding or transferring enslaved persons as assets or providing loans for their purchase, would also be required to investigate their records. Companies must then file an affidavit about their findings. Depending on how the ordinance is written, consequences for records of links to slavery must be disclosed to the municipality, and continued pursuit of a city contract might require public disclosures and hearings, programmatic support and/or financial contributions. Insufficient investigations or false affidavits could result in legal action or being barred from future contracts. 

SDROs have been enacted in other municipalities — Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, Philadelphia, and more, as well as at the state level in California, Illinois, Massachusetts, Maryland, and Connecticut. 

Members of Unity’s Racial Justice Team, and more recently the Board’s Reparations Committee, have attended monthly meetings of the Commission as a show of support and as an opportunity to develop personal and institutional relationship with the Commission. Quietly observing their policy work is a far cry from the “hard work of antiracism” as stated in our new ends, but we are preparing to learn, together with the Commission, what will be requested of white allies who commit to standing with them as their recommendations become actionable. The SDRO proposal will be the first public act of the Commission aimed at establishing accountability for historic acts of oppression that enriched the bottom line of enterprises now doing business in Saint Paul. 

We don’t know what kind of blowback the proposal might generate. The Commission will be asking for signatures of support from individuals and organizations to accompany the ordinance proposal to City Council. Most of us are probably comfortable adding a signature to a list of supporters and asking our City Councilperson to back a measure. Are we as willing to take it to the next level and ask organizations in our networks, or our workplace, to add their names in support of the SDRO? 

Learn from representatives of the Commission and Unity’s Board and Racial Justice Team at Wellspring Wednesday on October 1.