Photo by Alfo Medeiros
Liberation Ventures, an organization committed to advancing racial repair and healing, offers grants to outside organizations that promote racial repair. Its second round of grants totaled $2.2 million. This funding is directed towards supporting grassroots organizations within the Black-led reparations movement. But the organization reportedly does not support lineage-based reparations.
According to the group’s website, grant recipients “include a diverse array of organizations involved in various sectors such as arts and culture, technology, organizing and advocacy, local and state campaigns, technical assistance, education and awareness, journalism, and research.” The selection process considered the organizations’ impact, future plans, relational values, and their roles within the ecosystem.”
The lack of grants to lineage-based reparations organizations has angered some.
“We should all be outraged that Liberation Ventures—a nonprofit with no #ADOS grassroots support & millions in white dollars—is deciding who is eligible for reparations & how that conversation/advocacy is framed. Their aim isn’t reparations, but to replace #ADOSAF in this space,” tweeted American Descendants of Slavery co-founder Yvette Carnell. ADOS is adamant that reparations should only be issued to Blacks in America you can trace their ancestors to an African-American slave.
Carnell also tweeted about Liberation Ventures’ structure of grant gifting. “
“Column 3–Liberation Ventures has extremely vague language about not funding organizations that ‘publicly attack’ other orgs/individuals in the reparations space. And this, ladies & gentlemen, is how a non #ADOS organization is using their money to silence & co-opt us.”
Reparations advocates like Carnell and Dr. William Darity, are pro-lineage-based reparations. Duke University professor and economist Darity co-authored the book “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century” with A. Kirsten Mullen.
Darity recently tweeted, “If you self-identify as black and your ancestor was enslaved in the United States, you are eligible for reparations on the criteria @IrstenKMullen and I have in mind. It doesn’t matter what the “race” was of your ancestor, as long as they were subjected to U.S. slavery.”
Some of the organizations Liberation Ventures has supported, according to their website, are: African American Education & Research Organization at Melchor-Quick Meeting House, Black Veterans Project, The Brownsville Project, Canopy Collective, Center for Jubilee Reconciliation and Healing, Equity and Transformation, Kinfolk, and The New Jersey Institute for Social Justice. There seems to be no plans to alter its stance on supporting lineage-based reparations organizations, even though some legal scholars argue lineage-based reparations would be the most viable.
Reparations based on lineage have a better chance of overcoming political and legal challenges, according to Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the University of California Berkeley Law School.
Photo by Alfo Medeiros: https://www.pexels.com/photo/grayscale-photo-of-soldiers-holding-flags-and-banner-on-the-street-12267861/
