Reparations in Real Time

This is James “Papa Jim” Keith, my great-great-grandfather. He was born on September 15, 1871, six years after his parents were emancipated, and was the first James Keith in my bloodline born outside of slavery. He was a sharecropper forced off of his land by gun point which triggered much of his family moving to Newnan Georgia and as far away as Detroit Michigan. I carry his name. So in this essay I am not only asking an economist’s question when I write about: what value survives our contribution, what wealth compounds, what families inherit, and what an unpaid account means across generations… I am writing about a history that sits inside my own name.

I. The Question in Chicago After Angela Wells, the Human Rights Director of the Communications Workers of America, called my name , I felt the weight of the hundreds of labor organizers in the room.

I was in Chicago to receive the Benjamin L. Hooks Keeper of the Flame Award from the NAACP National Labor Committee. I had prepared remarks about labor, artificial intelligence, and the new forms of value workers produce in an economy increasingly built on information. But somewhere between my seat and the stage, I stopped thinking about the speech I had written and started thinking about the man whose name was on the award.

Benjamin Lawson Hooks had been the first Black commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission. When he arrived at the FCC in 1972, communications meant television stations, radio frequencies, broadcast licenses, telephone networks, and the enormous political question of who was allowed to own and operate the infrastructure through which Americans saw and heard one another. Hooks understood that communications systems were not neutral. Ownership shaped representation. Access shaped power. The ability to speak through the dominant communications infrastructure could help determine who was visible, who was heard, and whose interests entered the national conversation.