Advancing Anti-Racist International Development through Transnational Reparations and Family Reconfiguration
Note: In this essay, K. Melchor Quick Hall responds to T.D. Harper-Shipman’s central questions for this forum, “A Different Type of Extraction: Remove Race from International Development Theory and Practice.” Curator of this forum, Harper-Shipman has asked colleagues: “Race, we know, is an inexorable touchstone of international development theory and practice. Is it possible, then, to extract racism and all its vestiges from international development and value what remains? Or are race and development so infused, that one cannot exist without the other? How do we begin or finish attempts to replace development with more just models for wealth redistribution?”
Contributors to this special forum have been offered the opportunity to provide an informal and short response to some of the most challenging questions of our day regarding racism and international development. Although I have had the prompt for months, I have restarted the essay several times. Refusing to engage in the struggle towards an adequate response leaves one vulnerable to the adoption of colonial and racist development patterns of others. In the spirit of revolutionary risk-taking, I reflect on some of the reasons why the questions posed are so difficult before offering some radical possibilities for advancing towards a solution.
Developing Racism and Racist Developments
The concept of “development” in the field of international relations is a critical separator. It separates the haves from the have-nots, the developed countries from the developing ones, the colonizers from the colonized. Large-scale international studies use “development” metrics, such as gross domestic product, to categorize groups of countries. In this model, there is no attention to the desirable characteristics of so-called developing countries. In that sense, the categories are sticky. There is something so powerful about these labels they refuse attention to the lack of national public health or education systems in developed countries such as the US. How can a country be developed with such basic elements of what one would expect in a social contract between a state and its citizens? If we understand that the construction of racialized categories has everything to do with relationships of power and control, it is easy to see the racism embedded in systems of (especially financial) control, wielded by global agencies, such as The World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, that force developing countries to follow a narrow and straight path toward their neoliberal exploitation by the developed world.
Extraction as Process Rather than Product
Particularly given the history of the discipline of international relations, there can be no serious challenge to the argument that the theory and practice of development has deeply racist roots. Returning to the query about the total extraction of racism from development, it is impossible for development to be without its racist roots, even if it manages to branch out beyond them. Instead of focusing on the end goal of development that has no vestiges of racism, I prefer (partly for practical reasons) to focus on the importance of cultivating development processes that move us in the right (i.e., less racist) direction. Development must be faced because it asks the world’s most critical questions regarding human survival. That it has been largely taken over by elitist rhetoric, rather than controlled by the world’s majority, is a travesty that should be taken up by development scholars and practitioners alike. I continue in that vein.
A Country Line Dance
In international relations courses, students learn that countries are self-interested, competitive actors that operate in a system of anarchy. They are not generous or charitable. Countries do not have the goal of redistributing wealth in an equitable fashion. Similar to the requisite corporate social responsibility projects of an oil company or the diversity and inclusion office of a university, development projects are designed to support the greater strategic interests of a country. Further, the assistance is always designed in ways that maintain the balance of power that is the status quo. The unnatural order that is the hierarchy among states is preserved, as development is constructed in ways that are linear and limited. A country does not help another to become more powerful or developed than itself in the performative dance that is undergirded by political and economic self-interest. This is why so-called development leaves intact (and often deepens) developed countries’ control over and extraction of developing country resources.
The (Large-Scale) Heart of Development
Thus far, I have focused on large-scale development of countries. This is not to say that there are not smaller “grassroots” initiatives. It is to suggest that the we learn something about what is at the heart of the concept of development by attending to what kind of development requires no modifying adjective. Grassroots development, which rises from the community base, is the exception to the rule. These smaller, local initiatives are dwarfed by the large infrastructure projects funded by development banks. These high–cost development projects (e.g., highways, electrical grids, and water systems) bind countries into agreements that require them to allow foreigners (and their interests) to guide the political and economic paths of countries.
Two Provocative proposals
For the purposes of moving toward a response to the queries posed, I assume that development (theory and practice) focuses on large-scale infrastructure and that racial constructions are historically and geographically contextualized in ways that cannot be reduced to questions of phenotype. (See the “Stripping Away the Body: Prospects for Reimagining the Body” special forum in International Studies Review for more on race beyond phenotype.) Mechanisms of inheritance, legislated differently across countries and regions, constitute one of the most racist institutions in existence because they ensure the stability of power structures created through war, capitalism, and (neo)imperialism, as well as maintain and expand wealth disparities and inequities globally. Below, I make two provocative proposals aimed at groups and individuals interested in moving toward anti-racist development models, which must undermine conventional notions of family (and tribe) that have been served by inheritance. In the remaining sections of this essay, I elaborate on the following two proposals.
Groups interested in alternative structures of development can create irrevocable trusts and binding power share agreements that transfer resources in the direction of need, across borders, in the opposite direction of colonization, imperial conquest, and resource extraction.
Individuals can reconfigure their families in ways that cut across country borders and ensure that individuals with the least resources have access to the finances and resources of individuals with the most wealth through feminist matrimony and radical child adoption.
After spending much of this essay discussing states, I have provided two possible solutions, neither of which centers state actors. As a transnational Black feminist scholar-activist, I am a reluctant international relations scholar. Ultimately, I believe in the power of the people. If people can be convinced of a path of collective action, we can engage in redistributive, anti-racist development.
Building Transnational (Irrevocable) Trusts and Making Reparations
We need a transnational movement committed to global wealth, natural resource, and power redistribution. Redistribution should respond to the historical relationship of the communities and countries involved, aiming to address past harm. Because these agreements follow the resource accumulation patterns of a global elite, they could be invoked anywhere in the world. Through binding agreements and irrevocable trusts, these shifts in resources should be made irreversible, responding to the political and economic history, as well as privileging communal forms of shared resource stewardship. These agreements would differ from conventional philanthropic work because of the attention to power and control. When the resource privileged entity joins the agreement, they immediately and irrevocably enter into a more equitable relationship with the other party. The model is based on binding relationships of equitable power informing resource management and redistribution.
The proposal also differs from the work of “effective altruists” who put their money behind a few “high impact” development projects. This personal and political proposal rejects the idea that one’s personal circumstances are prior to or beyond development considerations. Effective altruists begin their impact calculations after they have met the needs of their (blood) families. Generally speaking, they are not foregoing cancer treatment for their own children to save entire villages, even though they might recommend that the philanthropic community not pay for some other child’s chemotherapy based on costs, because we can “save more lives” with the same money being directed elsewhere. Inconsistencies based on family (and tribe) draw attention to the importance of the reconfiguration of family.
Reconfiguring Family through Feminist Matrimony and Radical Child Adoption
How we define our families is critical to determining who gets access to our resources, while we are alive and after our deaths. In encouraging individuals to reconfigure their families, I am honoring the classic feminist saying: “The personal is the political.”
Life partnering decisions are often based on faith and religion, business and finances, friendship and compatibility, or sexuality and intimacy. Here I am suggesting that we can make life partnering decisions that respond to the politics of our country, and provide resource access for individuals from communities that have been targeted by the exploitative and extractive policies of our home country. Marriage is recognized across countries as a legitimizing mechanism for resource sharing, and has the potential to result in wealth redistribution across countries and/or immigrant communities. In particular, I am advocating for a kind of feminist consciousness in partnering that roots in shared values that challenge racism, misogyny, and (neo)imperialism.
In addition to life partnering decisions, we can think about child adoption that does not mirror development narratives by removing children from one (developing) environment and placing them in a (developed) home environment. Instead, we can think about radical (or rooted) development that allows children to remain in a particular cultural context, even as adults from other cultures and countries take greater responsibility for their care. This kind of adoption means that relationships are built among adults across country contexts, in ways that bind us in commitments to care for children globally who require access to resources.
Concluding Thoughts
Harper-Shipman has challenged us to an honest and courageous reckoning with the racist past and present of international development. Although it would be impossible to detach development from its racist roots, I do believe that we can repair some of the damage by making reparations through transnational irrevocable trusts. Further, I think we can build an anti-racist future for development theory and practice by reconfiguring our families through feminist matrimony that embraces transnational and political partnering as well as radical child adoption that provides resources to the children (and families) in countries that are most exploited in contemporary (under)development structures. These partial and imperfect solutions embrace the personal as political, encouraging individuals and group to live out their values.
-K. Melchor Quick Hall
K. Melchor Quick Hall (she/her/hers) is the author of Naminga Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Writing in Darkness and the co-editor, with Gwyn Kirk, of Mapping Gendered Ecologies: Engaging withand beyond Ecowomanism and Ecofeminism. As a 2021 - 2022 Rodman A. Rockefeller Centennial Fellow, she is leading a transnational Black women's food sovereignty project that is connecting women's local food production in Honduras and Tanzania. Hall is also the Interim Executive Director of African American Education & Research Organization (AAERO) and Melchor-Quick Meeting House (MQMH), both organizations founded by her mother, as well as a Resident Scholar at Brandeis University’s Women’s Studies Research Center.
