Are you in need of childcare, transportation, home repairs or spiritual guidance? If you’re a person of color, these benefits and more are available at the online reparations co-op. Yep, you heard me right.

Seattle-based artist, Natasha Marin created an online meeting place for white people to offer up their talents, services and resources at no cost to people of color in the name of reparations.

The concept, which began as a Facebook page, was inspired by her desire to provide comfort for people enduring divisive racial rhetoric while also grieving the loss of black men across the country at the hands of the police.

“I realized that the people I connected to were largely disheartened and powerless,” Marin said in an interview with The Washington Post. “We were being bombarded by death and fear.”

On her Facebook event page, Marin laid out her intention and posed several questions. “What if a stranger restored your belief in humanity, if only for a moment, by supporting you and allowing you to claim something you need in a material way?”

She gave a series of concrete examples of how she imagined the ‘social experiment’ might play out.

POC 6: I want to scream and cuss at someone.
White Person 6: “I volunteer as tribute. How do we set this up?”

As her initiative grew to thousands of participants, so did criticism from those who saw her efforts as nothing more than a cheap and divisive play on white guilt. While I applaud the spirit of Marin’s initiative to turn her dissatisfaction into positive, tangible actions, I find the concept of this website severely problematic for several reasons.

First, there is a very real and valid argument for compensating the decedents of slaves who built the very infrastructure of this country with free labor, who spent hundreds of years and generations toiling over cash crops that propelled and generated immense wealth. This legalized robbery of earned inheritance deserves recompense, not charity. This level of injustice can not be remedied with a free tarot card reading manicure or a car ride to work, and the acceptance of such menial forms of compensation is patronizing and woefully minimizes the reasonable call for actual reparations.

Secondly, if white allies are sincerely interested in propelling the cause of black liberation, this can be more effectively accomplished in deed and in action by lending their voices, exercising their political power and social clout in solidarity with the cause.

Finally, racism is far too complex and nuanced of a system to lay the burden of its remedy at the feet of a few individuals who happen to have been born on the privileged side of its divide. It is a systemic problem that requires institutional solutions, not free dinners and car repairs.

I won’t question the intentions behind Marin’s efforts but the application, however well intended, is extremely problematic. Connecting charitable individuals with those in need of a good deed may be a noble cause, but it is not reparations.

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Natasha Marin

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