Repair is the Antidote to Supremacy
Get Free on reparations organizing for true transformation
PHOTOS COURTESY OF JEMAL COUNTESS OF GETTY
Rooted in a commitment to reparations organizing, Get Free has a strategic analysis of what it will take to create a multiracial democracy for everyone. In this interview, Loam Co-Editor Kailea Loften talks to Get Free Executive Director Nicole Carty and Communications Director Anthony Vidal Torres on repair, power building, and community organizing.
Kailea: Describe what it is that Get Free does and why—we’d love a little bit of your origin story!
Nicole: Get Free is a youth-led movement to repair past harms, remove ongoing barriers to equality, and realize a future where freedom is for all.
Our work is to reckon with how the ongoing legacies of white supremacy, enslavement, and genocide still structure our society, [because it’s only through reckoning with that reality—and striving to repair past and ongoing harms—] that we can create a world in which multiracial democracy is real, people can thrive, and we are actually equal.
The origin of this project [is multifaceted] but I’ll start with when a group of us from different social movement backgrounds—such as Movement for Black Lives and Occupy— came together in 2020 to get to the root of the problems in this country. [Our guiding question was] how do we fix [our problems] in a deep and transformative way? How do we really grapple with the original sins of this country?
[Inspired by that inquiry] we formed a cadre called Project Truth Reconciliation & Reparations. We spent many years researching, developing, and strategizing on how we could make repair for these foundational harms of our country a common-sense political and public priority.
Kailea: Repair is an underlying goal of so much of what Get Free is working towards. How does Get Free define repair and/or reparations?
Anthony: One of our core beliefs at Get Free is that reparations are about the future, and that the only way for us to realize a future where freedom and equality are real is by reckoning with the legacies of enslavement and genocide.
When we were creating Get Free, we really modeled our framework of understanding reparations—which ultimately became our Repair Mandate— on past movements. For us, reparations means restoring dignity, freedom and rights to those wronged under racial, gender and economic hierarchies and inequalities; and it means returning the wealth, land and resources that rich corporations and the 1% owe communities for generations of exploitation, enslavement and genocide.
Our Repair Mandate also includes healing our communities from the ongoing trauma and impacts of laws, lies and violence designed to deny our humanity.
A big part of it is also recognizing and reckoning with the whole truth of our history and how it continues to shape our present. And finally, repair is about removing the ongoing barriers to equality and rewriting the rules of the places we call home to ensure that these wrongs that were founded in supremacy, in white supremacy, end with us today and never happen again.
Kailea: Considering the political analysis that Get Free is looking through, what is at stake right now?
Nicole: A lot is at stake right now because these systems haven't been repaired. Our reality is one of Black and Native death, of exploitation and inequality.
The faction that has prevented repair, the wealthy few who created these systems of white supremacy in the first place, are still very much at play. They are surging right now, and desperate to hold on to power.
The time for repair has always been urgent but it is even more urgent at this moment because if we don't make decisions to seriously move towards repair and reckoning, these forces are going to stand up and recalcify systems of white supremacy that are going to impact us for the rest of our lives.
And what do I mean by that? There is a MAGA movement, a white nationalist movement, that is actively working to make policies that fight discrimination illegal activity, reestablish racial hierarchy, and justify the continued stealing and exploitation of native land.
This movement is really coming for our country, our future, the mechanisms of how we make decisions. And it's serious because it knows that we're actually on the precipice right now of a transformation in this country. This is the last election in which Gen Z and millennials will not be the majority.
It's the last one, this one. And [this MAGA movement] is coming for everything right now because once that tipping point happens, once the younger generations are the majority, it’s going to be a lot harder for them to continue to bolster and re-entrench white supremacy.
If this [MAGA] faction wins, they’re going to hold onto our Supreme Court, they’re going to lock themselves into power, and they’re going to reestablish hierarchies [that will impact us] for the rest of our lives.
It's urgent here. But it’s also urgent internationally. These conversations are happening in New Zealand, in Palestine, in Israel, all over the world. And what happens here matters for what happens in other places. We have an opportunity to reckon with the impacts of colonization, of exploitation, and make a more whole, healed world. [We are at a really] powerful precipice to make an impact. And we should make one.
Kailea: Considering all of what you’ve just shared, what is Get Free’s current response to some of the most common concerns surrounding electoral organizing in 2024, noting that this is not a normal election year?
Anthony: It’s a very understandably frustrating and fraught time that we are still in. And I really resonate with and understand a lot of the concerns that so many people have with the situation that we're in in this country and what we face in this election. As Nicole had mentioned, for centuries, we have been in this contest between the forces that want to actually make this a place where freedom and equality are real, and those [forces] that want to make this a place of white supremacist rule. And we are very much in that crossroads today, and we've been in that crossroads for a few years now.
The stakes are, once again, higher than ever. And how we as Get Free see it and look at it is we can either allow this MAGA faction to bolster white supremacy and lock our generation out of power, or we, as Gen Z and Millennials, can take the reins and wield our power to make our leaders repair the harm from its foundation.
Inspired by the movements that came before us, we are utilizing strategies for bringing people together to actually wield the power we have over our elected officials in order to expose and confront and defeat the historic threat that we face.
So we're going to make an intervention to change the course of 2024. That means that we need to expose and make clear to people across the country who are angry and afraid of these different attacks on our communities, on our freedoms, on our futures that it's all part of one agenda to bolster white supremacy.
The MAGA faction has a clear interest in upholding the systems that a wealthy white few have relied on since the times of enslavement to hold on to power today. And they're moving aggressively right now because they are terrified by our generation's power, because they see—from the 2020 reckoning for Black lives to today's protests for freedom and equality in Palestine and Israel—that young people across race are fed up with a status quo that allows for millions of Black, Brown and Indigenous deaths, and are ready to live in a place where we are treated equally and are free to pursue our dreams.
For us, we want to be able to activate the millions of us who marched in 2020 and who are taking action on campuses across our country today, and wield that to actually pressure the Democratic Party, President Biden, the folks who claim to represent us.
In some ways, we've already been able to wield our power to win incredible pledges, make them pass immense legislative gains, especially around climate, for instance, and we've seen how when we don't yet have that power over those folks, they can allow injustice to happen here or abroad.
We believe we can make Biden and the Democrats commit to undoing this legacy of white supremacy – because using parties as vehicles and making leaders do what we need them to do is what past movements have done time and again.
When we look at Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D Roosevelt, Lyndon B Johnson… these were all “leaders” who didn't have a real interest in emancipation, for a New Deal, for civil rights. But the movements of their time made them make it a priority. And so for us, we know it is our task and our time to make Biden and the Democrats do what our movements demand of them. We also want to show that actually taking on MAGA, taking on this authoritarian threat, this old white supremacist campaign that we're facing— means taking on our Repair Mandate. Because repair is the antidote to supremacy.
Kailea: What I find compelling is how Get Free has created a plan for mobilization. Can you give a brief overview on how you plan on winning, and what the role of younger people in particular is at this moment?
Nicole: The first part of our strategy is tilling the field for repair. That means beginning to connect the dots between what's going on in policy, the inequalities we see, and the current movement to re-entrench white supremacy. We are making the question of our own seriousness about equality central to our campaign. [Because if we are serious] then we need to prepare.
This phase that we're in right now is about pushing these conversations on to the election. We’re not only saying that young people are here and we want real reckoning in order to make equality real, but we’re also letting Democratic leaders know that they need to get with the program by getting on board with repair. Especially if they're trying to make themselves distinct from the MAGA force that is trying to re-entrench and bolster white supremacy. Most people should feel as though repair, making equality real, actually undoing the infrastructure of discrimination—is a collective, shared effort and priority.
Phase three is really about mainstreaming repair. It’s going to kick off with us pressuring Democrats who we hopefully get into office and get onto our Repair Mandate, to take some action and prove that they are serious about making repair real.
The timing of these next few years is critical because in 2026, a wild thing is happening, and that thing is called the semi quincentennial. America is turning 250 years old, which will be a time of major reflection on how this country started, and what it wants to become.
Looking forward, we know that the question “are we going to undo inequality and supremacy?” will become all the more relevant in political consciousness as we move into this time of reflection. And so we're going to use this moment to make repair common-sense across institutions.
This brings us to our fourth phase, which is tied to the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential elections. That is really when we're going to push the Democratic Party to integrate repair as a key pillar of its agenda and flex young people's power to make them make repair a key priority. Meaning if they're not for reckoning with our founding or reckoning with the ways inequality still shows up, they're getting pushed out of our party.
The next election cycle will bring about a generational flip of our electorate. The 2024 election is the last election where millennials and Gen Z are not the plurality. That changes in 2026, and will only deepen by 2028 and 2032. We will be the strongest force in the electorate.
So what does that mean for young people? What is required of young people? Young people are already taking action against white supremacy right now. That's what's happening with Israel and Gaza, and we’ve already done this in 2020. Simply put, young people need to keep doing what they're doing by getting to the root of our problems and taking bold action that highlights the deep, transformative changes necessary for making a more equal future.
But what young people also need to do is to not disengage from the political sphere. Because the last time people did that in 1968, we ceded an entire micro generation to the rightwing Reagan neoconservatives who undid all of the progress that we had made up until that point. We have a historic opportunity to make our way, the way.
Young people need to believe and understand that we can actually take the reins of this country and use it to undo the legacy of white supremacy. We are trying to support young people in recognizing that we have power and we can flex it in order to finally get at the root of the injustices that we've been out here struggling against for so long.
Anthony: We at Get Free are really clear about not leaving any power on the table.
And that is the choice in front of our generation right now. Whether we leave power on the table or whether we continue to wield our power in our streets, in our workplaces and schools, and at our polling booths, in order to create a future that we deserve. We know that path to freedom leads to repair.
Although it’s challenging, we also have a huge opportunity in this moment in history to expose the long standing forces of white supremacy that continue to control us and give people a way forward where we can make repair a common-sense, urgent public and political priority. We are launching a new era in this country where we can not only reckon with the ongoing harms founded in enslavement and genocide, but actually put into place the pillars of a new society where freedom and equality are not just real, but unquestioned.