Recommendation: Reparations Daily (ish)
Substack's new feature for finding writers you like, and a source for news on reparations
Hi folks! I’ll be sharing a longer piece this weekend, but today I’d like to take a moment to highlight a new Substack feature called “Recommendations.” The name is pretty to-the-point, no mysteries there: it’s just a built-in way for writers (like myself) to recommend other writers to you, our good readers, hopefully aiding you in finding other thinkers and creators that are up your alley.
I have many other Substack authors I draw from in the learning process that serves as the foundation for Unsettling, so I’m happy to have this feature. To find my recommendations, just go to Unsettling’s homepage, and see the list pinned there. I’ll be highlighting publications in regular posts as well when I add them.
Is this basically Substack’s way of reinventing the blog roll? It would appear so. But finding new things via the blog roll of my favorite writers was always a favorite pastime of mine in the earlier days of the internet. (Remember when blogs weren’t merely vehicles for advertising? Sigh…)
Anyhow, as the first pick for my Recommendations list, I’d like to point you all to Reparations Daily (ish), by Trevor Smith. While I do an occasional news roundup here—and generally aim to avoid “hot takes”—that kind of content is really the heart of Reparations Daily (ish). If you want a news digest and fast opinion on some of what’s happening in the efforts for reparations as a complement to the longer form pieces here at Unsettling, check out Trevor’s site.
And let me point you specifically to this issue from April, in which he discusses the connection between our housing crisis and reparations.
As he writes at the end:
We cannot talk about homelessness without talking about poverty, and we cannot talk about poverty without talking about capitalism, and we cannot talk about capitalism without talking about the long history of land theft and slavery in the United States.
This means we cannot talk about any of these things without having an honest conversation about what is owed and to whom — what I, and many others, would call reparations.
I think he’s got it right. The best solutions to the ongoing and growing crises of housing and homelessness will be bound up with reparative acts that challenge the outcomes of that history of land theft and slavery. And, I would add, those are the solutions that we’re going to need as we head into an era of cyclical displacement due to climate change. For a very non-newsy, long take on this, see my essay from last year:
That’s it for today! More soon.
Until then,
Meg