So I'm sitting in Barcelona, without my luggage, which sucks, but i am in Barcelona, which does not. I have long ago decided that I'm tired of talking about American politics. It's just stupid, but I can't ignore it. I want to and I can't, completely. I'd rather write about the wonderful people with whom I spent time in Seattle and the activities but I was reminded, again, that we are approaching the anniversary of the Katrina disaster, the event which for many Americans crystalized their understanding of who this administration is as well as being the event that made me start blogging. To some degree they have gotten away with it, but not completely. So for now I would like to turn your attention towards my posts from last year and the timeline of what happened and what has happened since from Think Progress.
I was approached a few months ago around the idea of collaborating to make the progressive case for reparations. I've said before that while the idea of reparations is morally appealing I don't believe in them as an immediate political project. It's not clear to me that it's possible to build a coalition around a reparative justice focused on just 13% of the population. Encouraged by a recent Twitter conversation that included economists Sandy Darrity and Darrick Hamilton where they suggested that saying reparations will never happen is cynical I've begun trying to think of them as an eventuality and lay out the steps to reaching them. Doing this has made clear that our understanding of reparations as a form of compensation to the descendants of the enslaved is not the reparative justice that we think it to be. If we were living with the kind of understanding of justice that made reparations possible we would not be a nation where war, healthcare, education, and cr
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