A statement by Pan-African Community Action
D.C. Mayor Bowser’s “Draft Racial Equity Action Plan” (REAP) is a public relations document which reflects a continued commitment to the systemic foundations of racial inequities. As a follow-up to the empty gesture of painting the words “Black Lives Matter” on 800 16th Street Northwest, Washington, DC and declaring that space “Black Lives Matter Plaza”, the REAP suggests that the state structures which maintain settler colonialism and capitalism can be a remedy for racial inequity.
“It is our charge and our responsibility to put in place policies that are intentional about ending structural racism and reversing the legacies of policies that intentionally locked Black and brown Washingtonians out of opportunity and the ability to build wealth,” Bowser said when announcing the REAP on November 16, 2022 as a first for D.C. of such a plan.
REAP is a process that is intended to result in actions that the city government will take to close racial equity gaps; such as employing staff who understand and are committed to eliminating racial and ethnic inequities; meaningfully engaging the community in government decision-making processes; and strengthening community partnerships around racially equitable hiring, promotion, and retention practices.
Bowser’s use of the term “legacies'' denotes policies which perpetuate racial inequities are mere relics of the past that are not tied to the corporate genuflecting promotion of gentrification which Mayor Bowser herself has ledthroughout her terms in office.
Pan-African Community Action (PACA) contends that white supremacy and neoliberal capitalism are contemporary root causes for persistent racial inequities. And at their core is the intra-community violence that disproportionately plagues Black and Brown communities as a reflection of the despair and frustration it produces.
Invariably, the D.C. government’s responses to the people’s despair and frustration has been no different than the state responses in other major U.S. cities; criminalization, increased policing, and mass incarceration. In 2021Bowser “quietly replaced an older white police chief with a younger Black successor” and pushed “for money to build up Metropolitan Police Department staffing, currently at 3,500, to 4,000 officers over the next decade.”
REAP, proposed as a 2023 to 2025 blueprint, is supposed to address in three years for D.C. alone what is the result of centuries of racial capitalism on a national scale. And it is to do so not by exposing, renouncing and rejecting capitalism, but by embracing it.
Management of this effort will fall under D.C.’s Office of Racial Equity (ORE), one of several such offices that have cropped up across the U.S. in compliance with federal executive order 13985. The “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government” was signed by “shoot’em in the leg”, 1994 crime bill-Biden on his first day in office as POTUS.
This executive order and its liberal accessories are the disingenuous response by the U.S. oligarchy to nearly a decade of unrest and rebellions, starting with the murder of Trayvon Martin, that saw a zenith after the murder of George Floyd and the exposing of the crisis of capitalism by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Local and federal politicians, responsible for the racist, anti-working class oppression and repression meted out against the people, have positioned themselves to be the arbiters of redress for the systemic injustices that define Americanism. In the process they have hijacked the speech of the movement, utilizing concepts like “structural racism”, “the most impacted”, and “applying a… lens” denoting a specific group. Classic elite capture.
Even the multinational investment bank Goldman Sachs is in on the act, with its “ Posted in Position Papers on Nov 29, 2022