Campus Based: Community Engagement and Reparations

The field of community engagement in higher education has, over the past decade, taken a more critical turn, accounting for gender, race, ethnicity and intersectionality in understanding marginalization and oppression. There has also been an explicit examination of power, politics, privilege, and positionality in how community engagement partnerships and experiences are designed, and attention to social and racial justice outcomes for students and communities. Along with a more critical perspective, scholars and practitioners have reexamined the kinds of community partnerships needed to address equity, the kinds of activities students are involved with to achieve civic learning outcomes, and the kinds of projects that advance social justice in a diverse democracy committed to equity.

As part of this critical turn, community engagement programs on college campuses could get behind local reparations efforts and a national program of reparations. To do so would mean:

Political Engagement

Working to help create political conditions addressing issues of power and justice (which would mean understanding engagement as political work).

Advocacy

Doing organizing and advocacy work would mean thinking about partnerships in a different way – partners would not be receiving a social service but would be collaborators in building coalitions to support political action.

Development

Programs focused on reparations would have an opportunity to develop curriculum around racial inequality in the United States as a foundation for the advocacy work.

Engagement

The community outcome of the engagement would be measured in effectiveness of organizing and coalition building, not the performance of a service.

Organizing

As political work, students involved with this kind of community engagement would need preparation in and development of organizing skills, to build a grassroots effort.

Knowledge Sharing

This would also mean that the project will not be completed in a semester, therefore students would need to pass along their knowledge and relationships to a new group of students to continue to build the work.

The advocacy work has multiple dimensions. Internally, there could be the advocacy and organizing work to build support by the college or university administration for a national program of reparations. Simultaneously, there could be community work to build local coalitions in support of national programs for reparations, aimed at local governments, not-for-profit organizations, and corporations.

Students would study the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of the institution of slavery in the United States, the subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans.
Students would learn the skills of collaboration, of tapping the knowledge assets of those outside the university, and of navigating power and politics.

Campuses across the United States could enact community engagement practices focused on the political work of advancing a national program of reparations. In line with the call written in the text of H.R. 40, institutions of higher education, such as the multi-institutional collaboration, Universities Studying Slavery, are developing and utilizing campus-based efforts to study slavery in the founding of the academy as well as the “historical and contemporary issues dealing with race and inequality in higher education and in university communities and the complicated legacies of slavery in the modern American society”(Webpage linked above). This collaboration of 67 institutions focusing on research can be leveraged to consider systemic repair initiatives such as creating the conditions for a national program of reparations.

Community engagement would combine study with organizing and advocacy. On a campus, community engagement focused on reparations would have certain characteristics:

Land Consideration

With any program, the institutional self-examination must be completed first to understand their positionality in the historical and contemporary context, including consideration for the land the institution was founded upon.

Reparations History

In addition to the institutional history, a study is needed of the local, regional, and national history of reparations as well as truth and reconciliation attempts including H.R. 40 and the current needs to advance the bill.

Community Engagement

For a community engagement program, this could be a series of community-based internships, community-engaged courses, or co-curricular programs through which students would gain the civic skills of coalition building and advancing legislation, co-led and/or co-taught by community partners.

Dialogue

This could include a series of panels and dialogues discussing local current and historical legislation related to reparations, anti-black racism, racial economic inequality, etc. putting the community voice at the center.

Community Partnerships

To the extent that COVID-19 continues to raise concerns about the safety or feasibility of in-person direct service opportunities, opportunities to forge partnerships with leaders and organizations for campaigns, advocacy, and community organizing can be accomplished online.

Community/ Historical Context

Grounded in a historical and community context, students can mobilize locally, regionally, and nationally for a program of reparations.

Advocacy

Students who direct their advocacy inward can also begin to examine their own institutional systems and structures to understand how colleges are racialized organizations, and what can be done to create change that would be authentically reparative.

A campus goal could be to create the political conditions through advocacy and organizing such that the leadership of the campus (president, chancellor, board of trustees) issues a public statement in support of federal legislation aimed at a program of reparations. Students could then work with campus leadership to 1) encourage other institutions of higher education to declare their support, and 2) examine and address systemic racism on the home campus.