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The Cost of Putting Harriet Tubman on American Money
I regret to inform you that the politicians are at it again
Once again they’re talking about putting Harriet Tubman on money. What sense does this make? What purpose? Can we not think of a better way to honor someone’s legacy, someone’s work, someone’s life than to place her on money?
How about if we collectively and unceasingly worked toward the liberation of Harriet Tubman’s daughters and sons, her progeny? To do that would mean a dismantling of the systems that bond us to begin with. A dismantling of white supremacy for one — not just a verbal rebuke of it, but a floor-to-ceiling teardown. To do that would mean to dismantle the systems that trapped Harriet Tubman in bondage to begin with: an obsessive adherence to profit so deep that it justifies enslaving, beating, dehumanizing, and killing a people simply to increase margins. Prioritizing money over community, family, home. Treating nothing as sacred except wealth.
To work toward the liberation of Harriet Tubman’s afterbearers would mean reparations. Not just for the centuries of stolen labor, but for the centuries of economic disadvantage, redlining, mob violence, poll taxes, lynchings, white supremacy, and racism in schools, government, all institutions. Reparations for crack, for COINTELPRO, for mass incarceration.
To work toward the liberation of Harriet Tubman’s afterbearers would mean prioritizing, above all, the liberation of Black women, it would mean treating Black Feminism as, to quote the Combahee River Collective’s 1977 statement “the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous oppressions that all women of color face.”
To work toward the liberation of Harriet Tubman’s afterbearers would mean that everyone had health care, that no one had to choose between raising their children or working for rent money, between physical safety or food on the table. It would mean that no Black person would have to make peace with the possibility that they may be killed while unarmed, by the police forces we…
