Is the political opposition to reparations for the American ancestors of enslaved Africans simply semantic? Imagining a policy called the “Black New Deal” to accomplish reparations, LIL INTERNET ended up pre-empting Donald Trump’s own capitalist rebranding of the concept: The Platinum Plan. Reparations, Black New Deals, and Platinum Plans still do not exist for Black Americans—it seems an opposition deeper than semantics or branding exists. Oh yeah, white supremacy.
LIL INTERNET: Still one of the most, like eeriest glitches-in-the-matrix in my lifetime was the [Stephen] Paddock shooting. One more ad thing, though, is another one I saw that was branding Trump as supporting the “kooks and the crazies.” And I think that's actually really effective. Because, you know, I think he refuses to abandon or disparage his base at all. Yeah. And it's so easy to drum up a perception of his base as including all the “kooks and crazies”—and there's a lot of them. I think that from now till the election, every TopSoil I'm going to say that this is a thing Democrats should be hammering. But I think Trump as supporter of the kooks and the crazies is really effective.
I have one more note. So as soon as I thought of it, I looked it [the Black New Deal] up on Twitter, and somebody had just started an organization around it. And then on the website, apparently, it involves Silicon Valley in some way. It might just be like a Black capitalist thing. But I really think like branding, proposing a Black New Deal, makes a lot of sense for this time, right?
Daniel Keller: As opposed to “reparations,” it’s a better way of framing it.
LI: And as opposed to “abolish the police,” right? Or even “defund the police.”
DK: A new deal! I mean, Trump loves deals, he loves new deals, right?
LI: It kinda covers, reparations, and all of it all together, which actually, to me, also is like actually the approach that needs to happen to end a lot of the problems that Black Americans are facing, right? It took hundreds of years to get Black Americans into this position. It's gonna take a long time and a lot of systemic changes to get them out of this position, right? Like, I mean, de-redlining, economic exclusion, right, like all of the forms of exclusion, like anti-
Carly Busta: Mentorship, or these kinds of things too –
LI: ...like getting guns out of the fucking hood, like, de-ghettoizing in terms of [helping] the [Black] population spread out to more suburban [areas], or out of the sort of urban centers that generate cultures of violence.
