
Dr Kyle Mays
Fulbright Scotland Distinguished Visitor, January - July 2024
Home Institution: University of California, Los Angeles
Kyle T. Mays, PhD (he/him) is an Afro-Indigenous (Saginaw Chippewa) scholar of Afro-Indigenous history, urban studies and history, and contemporary popular culture. He is an Associate Professor of African American Studies, American Indian Studies, and History at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of four books, including An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2021), City of Dispossessions, Indigenous Peoples, African Americans, and the Creation of Modern Detroit (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022), and the forthcoming Rethinking the Red Power Movement (Routledge, 2024) with Sam Hitchmough.
Project title: “Who will pay reparations on our souls”: Landback, Reparations, and Decolonizing the University
The relationship between the dispossession of Indigenous peoples from their land and the enslavement of people of African descent, and their afterlives, serve as the crossing point between settler colonial capitalism and anti-blackness. The ideological and material foundations of US liberal democracy are a result of anti-Blackness and Indigenous bigotry. Within this political, social, and economic system, Black and Indigenous peoples have continued to push the boundaries around the themes of rights, freedom, and sovereignty, in their call for justice in the form of reparations.
Calls for reparations for African Americans has existed since the era of enslavement. Black people have always sought redress for their bondage. In 2014, noted writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an important article for The Atlantic on reparations. In Kirsten Mullen and William Darity’s book From Here to Equality (2019), they argue that the United States would have to pay the descendants of enslaved Africans between 15-21 trillion dollars for slavery and subsequent racism that impeded African Americans from building wealth. Reparations is an important topic within Black communities and a question of much debate in broader society. Indeed, in a 2021 poll, 72% of white Americans opposed reparations while 86% of African Americans supported it. Nevertheless, we know hardly anything about reparations for Native Americans.
In the era of Black Lives Matter, the United States has witnessed a reckoning with its systemic racism, class exploitation, and the limitations of liberal democracy for addressing the anti-Black racism that African Americans experience. Many believe that if we end anti-Blackness, we will all be free. This framework, while important, fails to deal with the question of Indigenous land. In other words, if Black people received reparations and that led to some form of freedom, how does that also resolve the land question? To state it even more plainly, how can we justifiably give Black people reparations without also considering how we offer reparations to Indigenous peoples in the form of a land return, given the fact that the United States has violated every treaty they have ever made with Indigenous nations? Meeting at the intersection of Black and Indigenous studies, history, and cultural studies, this project seeks to understand the relationship between individual and collective rights under liberal democracy, and the limits of reparations discourse that ignores that people of African descent were exploited on Indigenous land.