Few podcasts or radio shows have impressed me lately as Sabrina Jacob’s KPFA interview with Margaret Kimberly. I buy a lot of books by the Radical Left and listen to even more interviews, but her March 25th, 2019 segment of A Rude Awakening made me downright jealous!
It was the first in-depth on-air discussion I’d heard that acknowledged the groundwork that needs to occur before any meaningful dialogue on equity includes Reparations. Kimberly’s an editor for The Black Agenda Report and she knows what’s she’s talking about. Her column Freedom Rider appears weekly in BAR (http://www.blackagendareport.com), and is widely reprinted elsewhere.1
But the good news is we don’t have to know “all the facts” to get started. Yes! Magazine has been covering a series on local economic development called Commonomics since October, 2013. Activist Keith Harrington and a “rabble-rousing” group Kick It Over protested the American Economics Association’s exclusionary obsession with neoclassical economics that claims that markets and competition are the best solution to economic problems, and that regulation just gets in the way. Kick It Over is promoting the need for schools to look at other ways to examine wealth and money.
Even i-D, a glossy magazine that focuses on fashion and contemporary culture, values dialogue enough to interview bell hooks on the way that class has infiltrated the movement. With her usual lazer-minded brilliance, hooks explained that many black and other people of color refuse to critique capitalism because cultural discourse is so obsessed with upward mobility and wealth.
Until public schools and universities start channeling Rick Wolff’s promotion of worker-owned, worker-managed enterprises and well-regulated public utilities, it looks like wealth-redistribution won’t be happening for a while. If so, reparations probably won’t be on the table any time soon.
So I’m proposing a simple solution. Since our champions of Liberty are still claiming “America is the land of equal opportunity,” let’s make it illegal to inherit money.
We could allow a limited amount of “wealth” (stuff with sentimental value: photos, clothing, furniture, etc.) to be passed on, and we should probably set aside $3000 per family for unexpected medical bills, car expenses, or home repairs, since only 40% of American families are prepared for such events. (Another 20% say they’d probably finance the emergency by using their credit card, or increasing their debt.)
What’s left over would go into a large “pot” to be shared equally by every child born that year. OK, maybe that’s unlikely any time soon, since 1%’s hoarding the country’s total wealth, but the proposal could definitely liven up excruciating family feasts and picnics.
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- Ms. Kimberley updates her blog frequently at http://freedomrider.blogspot.com. She lives in New York City, and can be reached via email at Margaret.Kimberley@BlackAgandaReport.com.
