OPINION: We can use our current soul-searching to look again at the idea of collective black action and ownership. A 2017 report found the median net worth for non-immigrant black American households in the Boston region was just $8.
Underlying the recent unrest sweeping U.S. cities over police brutality is a fundamental inequity in wealth, land and power that has circumscribed black lives since the end of slavery in the U.S.
An expanded concept of the “black commons” — based on shared economic, cultural and digital resources as well as land —– could act as one means of redress. As professors in urban planning and landscape architecture, our research suggests that such a concept could be a part of undoing the racist legacy of chattel slavery by encouraging economic development and creating communal wealth.
Discriminatory practices have also affected who owns property as well as land. In 2017, the racial homeownership gap was at its highest level for 50 years, with 79.1% of white Americans owning a home compared to 41.8% of black Americans. This gap is even larger than it was when racist housing practices such as redlining — which denied black residents credit to buy or renovate property — were legal.
Freedom farms Land ownership today could look very different. The idea of collective ownership has a long history in the United States. Even during slavery, a piece of ground was granted by slave masters for enslaved African subsistence farming. The Jamaican social theorist Sylvia Wynter called this land “the plot.”
This idea of a black commons as a means of economic empowerment formed a focus of W.E.B. DuBois’s 1907 “Economic Co-operation Among Negro Americans.” DuBois believed that the extreme segregation of the Jim Crow era made it necessary to ground economic empowerment in the cultural bonds between black people and that this could be achieved through cooperative ownership.
The nonprofit Schumacher Center for a New Economics is working to rejuvenate the idea of black commons. In a 2018 statement, the center proposed to adopt a community land trust structure “to serve as a national vehicle to amass purchased and gifted lands in a black commons with the specific purpose of facilitating low-cost access for black Americans hitherto without such access.”
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