Reparations Summer is a blueprint for wealth redistribution strategy that is woven together by the Black Queer and Trans healers and wisdom keepers of Drinking Gourd. We are organizing people with access to wealth into new models of philanthropy rooted in Afro-Indigenous values and ways of being. We are building true collaboration across the separation created by racism, capitalism, patriarchy, war, and enslavement, while all decisions are made by the Afro-Indigenous collective of Drinking Gourd.
As part of this movement building work, people with access to wealth apply to be part of our political education and lineage healing apprenticeship program, Reparations Mystery School. The Reparations apprentices support the organizing of the Reparations Summer campaign and the return of wealth to build self-determining, self-sustaining economies and sanctuary.
Black movements and our ancestors have issued a clarion call of Reparations Now over several generations, but there has been little collective change to how new economies are resourced from the ground up. Reparations Summer is a call to make that change now through a wealth redistribution campaign rooted in repair and rematriation of colonized land.
Reparations Summer brings people together into a new Juneteenth tradition: redistributing mass amounts of wealth to Black land-based projects.
Drinking Gourd grows local Black infrastructures and harvests self-determining and self-sustaining economies. We provide a model for how Reparations can be grounded in the work of personal and collective evolution, healing with land, political education, and a long-term commitment to transformation and organizing.
There is nothing new under the sun, but there are other suns.
We believe that transforming land ownership, building interdependent economies, and building power for Black self-determination in tandem with indigenous sovereignty will set us free. We also believe that creating Black land infrastructure requires a commitment to deep relationship building and decolonial praxis over an extended period of time. As we move mass resources, we need to be in alignment on what that infrastructure is – to make sure we do not recreate the system that enslaved us.
We center Black Radical Feminism, Abolition, Decolonization, and Radical Afro-Ecology as frameworks that teach us how to move with each other and how to move towards restoration and repair with land and ecosystems. We are working towards a vision rooted in collectivism and cooperation, deep democracy, and intergenerational leadership. Through our praxis we build community accountability, power, regenerating wealth, and new economic paradigms that meet the needs and amplify the vision of our communities.
“Never forget where we came from and always praise the bridges that carried us over”
We stand on the shoulders of movement leaders and organizations that came before us. Fannie Lou Hamer, Marcus Garvey, Huey Newton, Queen Nanny of the Jamaican Maroons, Cecille Fatiman, Harriet Tubman and Malcolm X are a few of the movement ancestors who guide our vision. From the rebellions our enslaved ancestors led, to The Black Panther Party, from the work of the Alabama Communists and the Harlem Cooperatives during the Great Depression, to the visionary and foundational work of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, we build on a visionary legacy guided by our ancestors.
We are also grounded in the wisdom of our contemporary moment, including Transformative Justice and the work of Black feminist and Abolitionist leaders, theories and spaces of practice.
