Abstract
Rasheedah Phillips is a queer housing advocate, parent, writer, interdisciplinary artist, and cultural producer. Phillips' writing and artwork has appeared in The Funambulist Magazine, e-flux Architecture, Flash Art Magazine, Philadelphia Inquirer, Recess Arts, and more. Phillips is the founder of The AfroFuturist Affair, founding member of Metropolarity Queer Speculative Fiction Collective, co-founder of Black Quantum Futurism, co-creator of the award winning Community Futures Lab, and creator of the Time Zone Protocols, Black Women Temporal Portal, and Black Time Belt projects. As part of BQF and as a solo artist, Phillips has been awarded a CERN Artists Residency, Vera List Center Fellowship, A Blade of Grass Fellowship, and a Velocity Fund Fellowship, among others. Phillips has exhibited, presented, been in residence, and performed at Institute of Contemporary Art London, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Serpentine Gallery, Red Bull Arts, Chicago Architecture Biennial, Akademie Solitude, Manifesta 13 Biennale, documenta fifteen, and more.
V. Mitch McEwen: We started this issue of JAE with a number of questions. But now we’re wondering if architects can even respond to the questions we have in mind. It’s important that this issue includes folks who are outside of the discipline because some of the answers to the questions might undo the discipline. It’s not a surprise that architecture is complicit with the regimes that make reparations necessary. There’s a consistency from plantations to colonialism.
So to start it off, Rasheedah, I want to ask about pedagogy. In a number of your projects there’s a pedagogical element that is outside of the university. So maybe the first question to start with is: what model of pedagogies are you deploying?
Rasheedah Phillips: Most of my career has been spent representing people who are facing eviction and housing displacement. So I would say the pedagogy in Black Quantum Futurism comes from my perspective, which is married with my perspective as a housing advocate and housing policy expert. My pedagogy is very much informed by both of those aspects. But I think the categories that I’m thinking through when working are definitely about time itself and the future. I think about the ways that access to housing and land has been racialized and the ways that access to time and the future has been racialized, and how those two things connect.
This idea of ‘spatial reparations’ has been a framework I have been working on, as well as an idea called ‘housing futures.’ But spatial reparations itself is defined in a number of ways. The National African American Reparations Commission defines spatial reparations as a restorative and reparative geography of social, economic, and political opportunity, particularly for those displaced and dispossessed by American slavery and their descendants. So for me, I find that idea of spatial reparations to be a helpful way of framing this.
The history of housing in America is very racialized. And how housing has worked to cut people off from both space and time. Thinking about spatial reparations alongside this idea of temporal reparations are the two frameworks that I’ve been working with. When it comes to how Black people gain access to the so-called future, the future for me is inextricably tied with their ability to access housing and land on which to live and survive and thrive.
Another definition of reparations that I look to is from a group of organizers and advocates who are part of the "Homes Guarantee" platform, which thinks about housing reparations as a reparative framework that should start by calculating the loss of the families as a consequence of native genocide and removal, child slavery, state-sanctioned terrorism, and deed restrictions. That’s another definition and a framework that helps me tie in all of those different considerations around how housing and space and land have been racialized and cut off from access.
McEwen: Your artistic practice works on temporal reparations as a companion project. How has your deep knowledge of racialized spaces in America led to your interest in the space-time continuum? In Black Quantum Futures?
Phillips: It’s definitely informed by that. But I would say it’s a very nonlinear relationship between my research and studies around time and space. I would actually say my research on time came even before I was doing work on housing. I write science fiction as well. I’ve written time-travel fiction since I was a kid. I’ve always had this deep philosophical interest in time, and a deep awareness of the construction of time as a political construct, as a construct that is very much dictated by society and culture. All these different things informed my practice, even before I had awareness of the long history of housing and space, exclusion, and all those things.
So it’s a very nonlinear relationship. I will say that researching things like Jim Crow laws, for example, that are typically thought about and talked about as exclusion from space, has a temporal component attached to it. So when you’re looking at things that people were segregated from, it was not always feasible to build two movie theaters, for example, right? And so you’re excluding based on time. So it’s very much intertwined.
We can’t measure time in the same way that we can measure space. Reading Thomas Jefferson's speech about Manifest Destiny, he was talking about the future. With Manifest Destiny, they are physicalizing the future through space, and they’re saying that we’re going to stake our claims for the future so that our legacy will stand throughout time. In Manifest Destiny, they’re sort of positioning themselves on earth as God’s counterpoint and God, as well as a clockmaker. And so the people on earth are holding time and holding the future in this way.
So for me, it’s all very much intertwined. And so when I’m thinking about space, I automatically think about time.
McEwen: Can we transition into gentrification? What I want to bring up here is the archive that you generated for the timezone protocols. Could you talk through that? Can we look at that project as an example of a reparations project in the structure of time?
Phillips: Yeah, that’s deep. I’ve never thought about it that way. But the way you just posed it. Absolutely. I mean, it is. It is striving for that, even if it’s not explicitly stated as a whole.
That project is really getting at the ubiquity in which we treat time, and trying to unravel the political nature of it and the construct of it, and deconstruct all the things that we have been told that really influence how we move through the world, and what we feel is possible in the world as humans, as people, as Black people. All these things are so often mediated by time, it’s become an invisible factor. We’re talking about futures when we’re talking about all these different things, the construct that we’re working from was one that was designed without our permission, without any permission.
In 1884, twenty-five white men sat down in a room in Washington, D.C. Then the next month, they went to the Berlin Conference, splitting up Africa like a cake. That project is about how we, as Black people, utilize archives. It’s not just about documenting history or this linear way of thinking about archival materials, but it is, I think, how we as Black people tend to use the archives in this very active, living way that allows us to speculate in ways that we aren’t able to. If we’re just going off of recorded history, and the people who control the general archives that we’re allowed to access or even not allowed to access. Yeah. So I… yes, I like your framing.
Cruz Garcia: Building on the question of the archive and pedagogy, I’m interested in your approach to how writing and fiction and time travel become a political act. Because we live in a time in which it is illegal to access history, to teach history in school becomes a political act. My question is more about alternative futures, like the futurisms that are not part of this white futurity of Manifest Destiny and its tools.
In what way do you have to construct new tools to be able to access those futures? When I look at it, it is so difficult to classify it, because it’s such a complete spatial practice with architecture, urbanism, and law. All of them also have ramifications of the plantation economy. How do you approach the media that you work with? How do you instrumentalize the tools and strategies of dissemination and engagement to construct those futures that perhaps, in the traditional, more conventional or even disciplinary way, would be very difficult to imagine? What are your strategies as a model of practice that approaches reparations, but also that challenges the legacy of the plantation economy and the blueprint of the conventional office infrastructure?
Phillips: That’s a really deep question that I don’t know that I’ll be able to answer fully. But I think just to start, the way that we approach it is by throwing out our assumptions of the world, and the base-level understanding of how we think about reality, and what constitutes what we believe is possible in the world. We should start from there. And I know that it feels very abstract, but that’s where it starts with me. If I don’t assume that time runs linearly or that I’m running out of time, or that time is equated with money, or that my value as a human being is embedded in time and money, then that just opens up so much for me in terms of what is possible, and how I’m going to construct the tools that I need to survive in a world that does believe that when I don’t believe that.
So that’s where it starts. Some of the tools are going to be physical tools. As a housing advocate I’m dealing with housing crises day in and day out, working with something that is material and physical. At the same time, I want to construct tools that deal with the longer-term work in the metaphysical because all of those different things are embedded in systems we have to deal with, and that we’re caught up in.
An example that I like to give around how I think about policy work and how I build finance and policy work: understanding that, for example, someone who’s being evicted is dealing with five different levels of time in every given moment. They’re dealing with the time of the court, and what time they have to be in court, or when they hear their name called, and if they hear their name called. If they don’t hear their name called, and if they arrive five minutes late, they’re being evicted in thirty days. And so how do I deal with and have tools that can have this long-term way of thinking about time?
And so I have to navigate that world, and part of that is like, yes, I can represent this person in court, and I can deal with the immediate crisis. As a person building policy, I can bring in Afrofuturist ways of thinking and constructing time, and I can build a policy that has as a base a way of opening a time in the past, for example, like eviction records, a person who’s been a victim has this record that then follows them for the rest of their lives, and keeps them out of housing. I can construct a law that opens up that past, and brings in a different sense of time.
McEwen: It’s really striking that you’re doing policy work in addition to on-the-ground housing eviction representation at the legal level, and then also doing your Black Quantum Futures artistic practice. It’s almost as if everything that architecture has screwed up, you’re working on all that at the same time.
Garcia: It also builds on the tradition that if you’re doing something amazing as a Black practitioner, you must be completely overqualified and overworking. You cannot just be a lawyer. You cannot just be an architect. You cannot just be an artist. You always have to be extremely smart, and diverse in the pluralistic sense of engaging with the world, because your experience, material or otherwise, shows that there’s no other way to engage with these issues because it’s about the legal system and beyond. So you cannot have the freedom to practice if you’re not also making policy. Your practice is evidence that it’s all connected.
When people say “I just want to talk about architecture, but you bring politics into the discussion.” Well, this shows that architecture is the materialization of politics. In a way your practice with all its manifestations is a model or a prototype of what we should all be striving to do if we really are interested in engaging with the complexity of these questions.
McEwen: I want to use that to pivot to this question, Cruz. This is the question that I think began our collaboration for this issue, which is really about how the fuel of gentrification ignites the engine of reparations.
Rasheedah, I’ve been working on and writing about urban renewal in the neighborhood that I grew up in, Southwest DC, and how it oddly begins the legal structure of urban renewal for the whole country. It’s the first Supreme Court case for urban renewal. It’s a neighborhood that got built out really in the ‘60s but it was planned in the ’40s. Alongside writing about this specific neighborhood, I kept wanting to write about outer space. There are these parallels, like the Challenger which exploded when I was a kid. I relate this to the history of Pruitt Igoe exploding. The more that I think about it, the more I think that outer space and urban renewal go hand in hand. The first American imagining of going to outer space are happening when Black neighborhoods are getting blown up.
Then I got more into it. I read evidence about this program Operation Paperclip, where Nazi scientists from the German V-2 rocket program got recruited to join NASA. They brought these chambers and methods from the Holocaust to spacecraft. Those were the first space experiments.
Garcia: Wait! Wait! What is this? What is this? What is this?
McEwen: Operation Paperclip brought over thousands of Nazi scientists. A number of them worked for NASA.
The “father of Space Medicine,” Hubertus Strughold, was one of the key scientists in the Dachau concentration camp.Footnote1 He was doing crazy experiments there with oxygen. So he brought the same techniques to the US in Operation Paperclip. He got folks from Peru to do this oxygen deprivation before he got the Houston version of a NASA lab. He had these anti-oxygen chambers, and scientists were like, “We’re trying to fly rockets. Why do you have these chambers in the basement?”
And he was like “No, no, no! This is a trip to the Moon.” The chambers he was building at NASA were based on the chambers he had used in Germany in the concentration camp, but he was able to write this new future for it, to say it was a trip to the Moon and build the science around it. So that’s the beginning of space medicine. You don’t have space medicine without the Holocaust.
Garcia: But also you don’t have the Holocaust race laws without the blueprint of the American plantation, which the Nazis were also studying. That’s also well documented,Footnote2 so it’s like a back and forth, between the miscegenation and antisemitic laws.
McEwen: Some of the Nazi party members even went to universities in the south to study American antimiscegenation law. So with all of that in the background, then: what happens after the fuel of gentrification ignites the engine of reparation?
Phillips: I would love to know a little bit more about what you’re thinking with that question, because there’s two ways that I could interpret it. When you say ignite the engine of reparations, that could either be a good thing or bad thing.
To respond to what you were saying [about outer space] that’s something that I also looked at. I did a project called Black Space Agency, where I was looking at 1968, and the Fair Housing Act, and the Space Race that was happening that year. I learned that one of the first Black-owned aerospace companies was built in Philadelphia, in North Philly where I’m from. It was built by a church called Zion Baptist Church and the space company was called Progress Aerospace Enterprises. They built this warehouse in Philly that housed both the space company and this garment factory that they also started. This church also started one of the first affordable housing projects in Philadelphia, which still stands. They also built the first Black-owned supermarket plaza, Progress Plaza, which still stands today. So I was just looking at all the threads coming together around this, and then exploring that narrative—that Black people didn’t engage with the conversation around the space race happening at that time, and just all the interesting things they were doing, like Stokely Carmichael and all these wild people just talking about the contradictions. And that’s what you’re saying, about how you have to destroy Black neighborhoods in order to get to the Moon, and how you have to very intentionally disinvest from Black neighborhoods in order to get to the Moon.
I was really interested in engaging with all the different ways this church approached the idea of space, both on the ground in terms of buying this housing, starting this company that’s employing young Black men and Black women in the community. But then understanding how Americans see progress. They were interested in going to the moon and wanting to be a part of that, as well as creating and building this company. The Reverend John Sullivan wanted to see something on the moon that a Black man made. He was interested in having his parts that these young Black youth were building go into these rocket ships, so that just was reminding me of that.
And then Black people were protesting what was happening, like NASA for instance donated parts from spaceships back into housing like this was supposed to make housing more efficient and green, as a way to quell the protests and complaints coming from the Black community. So that was also a project that they did where they were putting that NASA technology back into public housing.
McEwen: At the policy level, it feels very much like there’s a back-and-forth between NASA and the urban environment around privatization. One of the things that led to the Challenger failure with the O-rings was that the shuttle was being designed and constructed to be reusable, so that space could be privatized, basically for pharmaceutical companies that didn’t want to be under any (national) laws while they were doing their research.
I think it’s interesting you’re bringing up the Black church because the Black church is such a site of the imaginary, right? I mean the Promised Land: the idea that this is one level of reality, that we actually can organize to get to another level of reality. I think of the Promised Land in the Black church as a theology for a collective future that constantly needs to be embodied and organized in order to get to freedom.
Phillips: Yes.
McEwen: So I guess one way of thinking about this question is, we’re bringing up outer space within the question of gentrification and reparations. But there’s also the question of liberation. Right? How do we get free? Where does freedom happen? I want to relate this to the archive again, looking at some of your projects. I want to be specific. I want to reference a specific project of yours, MMERE DANE. Could you talk about this project? Because if I understand correctly, it’s sort of like an archive, in a way, but it’s also a sort of time travel of Black space, of these Black free towns. Could you explain how it works?
Phillips: That project was basically me being really fascinated with freedom, colonies and Black settlements throughout the United States. And us, not as a general society having any access to this information, or like we have it, it’s out there, but we don’t really engage with it. I didn’t learn about this stuff in school at all, or even until I was an adult. I was extremely fascinated in how there was all this visual evidence of these towns, and how there’s archives of Black folks standing in front of their homes.
But when we’re shown pictures and images, and we’re talking about folks in the past, it’s always associated with trauma. It’s always associated with the lack of agency with slavery. So I am extremely fascinated that there’s hundreds of these towns we don’t hear stories about. How much of a lesson are these towns for us today, right? Because we’re so cut off again, like we’re so constrained for what we feel is possible. I, as a person, have never felt empowered to go out and build a community with my folks. That is not something I ever really felt was possible until I came across these towns. I liked learning about them and what that did to the imagination, and how it immediately expanded the realm of possibility.
So, anyway, just thinking about time, I created this project in a sense to think about, what if all these towns existed? If we’re thinking about this from an Afrofuturist time perspective, or a Black-time perspective, or from an African perspective, those towns still exist. Those people still exist. They’re not dead. They’re just on a different temporal plane, or, if we have a creative approach to thinking about the past and the past still being alive, thinking about these channels as still existing and still in communication on this sort of Black time belt. Taking inspiration from the Black Belt which has this connection around the soil and the black soil.
I was interested in building a full archive of these towns. I was interested if these towns had a town charter, a charter of Black Time Bell Charter, that they all abided by, and time moves differently in these towns, you know. I’m also writing some short fiction stories around each of the towns.
Just thinking about how if we’re taking seriously the notion that Black people experience time differently, and how we move through time differently. We have different practices and different ways of observing time. How, then, does time operate in these communities, and then how does that affect the actual physical reality of what that community might have looked like or does look like? So that’s sort of the vision behind it. I’m going to continue building this site out.
McEwen: That makes me think about different interpretations of reparations. One of the things that we were tossing around is the idea that gentrification might be a model for a form of reparations just running in reverse, in the wrong direction for equity. In these urban patterns of taking and displacing, we witness the pattern of gentrification through a simple capitalist property framework combined with wealth transfer. I mean, white households have literally ten times as much wealth as a Black household just on average. So I mean, if you run that through a capitalist framework, there’s just certain patterns that are going to repeat, and that one of the ways of looking at that is as a basic pattern that’s constituted by wealth transfer. At some basic level, you could actually reverse engineer a kind of reparations just by looking at these patterns.
Garcia: They have the instructions. They know how eminent domain works. They know how to expropriate. They know how to declare a vacancy. What if these things are applied the other way?
McEwen: I don’t know if the “they” here is white America or architects. Right? I mean, that’s sort of a slippery thing. How can architectural institutions work towards reparations? What possibilities do you see?
Phillips: Starting off by understanding the harms, grappling with and being specific about the ways the built environment and architecture has directly harmed, has perpetuated harm, has continued harm, asking also, how has architecture segregated and how has it continued to redline communities and to cut them off? You can use any number of examples. What comes to mind for me are visible examples of segregation that are in Philadelphia, where I’m from. And then a place like St. Louis where the houses look different, everything looks different, depending on what street you are on or neighborhood you are in.
I mentioned earlier how our paradigms are deeply, deeply entrenched in colonialist worldviews and morality that we get impacted by. I’m not going to say there’s a solution to dealing with that, but understanding and grappling with how the practices and the tools are rooted in these worldviews is important. What’s the saying? You can’t use the master's tools to dismantle the master’s house. You can’t…
You can try, but it’s not going to be effective and long-term. And then grappling with the ways that buildings are treated as more important than people who inhabit them and utilize them, which I think just goes back to the previous thing of grappling with the practices and underlying values and moralities that are part of them. And then the last thing: what are they repairing? And how are they prepared to do that repair? And what are the ethics involved in that repair?
The whole thing around decolonization, it’s not specific. Anybody can use it and just say “I’m de-colonizing something,” when they’re actually just using the same worldviews and approaches. However, if we’re talking about, for example, an Indigenous approach to treating the built environment, it’s a whole different paradigm. It’s going to be a whole different set of tools.
McEwen: Cruz, anything to follow up on there?
Garcia: I’m just thinking about the complexity of those systems. It brings me back again to that multitasking, multidimensional character of your work. It is not possible to address those things if you don’t engage them from a multiscalar and multidirectional point of view, which in a way, makes more and more sense to me—the fact that you are in a collective that uses quantum as a mechanism.
Because quantum defies the laws of physics in the way that you could know that you’re in point A, and then you move to point B, and we could track the journey to get there. But now it’s almost like you need to be some form of particles that disappear and appear somewhere else, and engage with all those forms of extraction and dismembering and legislation, and so on, which brings me then to the question of the name. Is that the reason why quantum physics is the best way to think about these questions?
And maybe even thinking about the question of reparations, because gentrification goes in one direction. But maybe reparations is not really the opposite of gentrification, because maybe it’s not linear and is not like something that goes in a measurable way. Rather, it is something that is really chaotic, and is responding to many different ways of reconstructing.
Phillips: That’s very accurate in terms of why, Black Quantum Futurism, and thinking about all the ways in which often quantum physics is talked about or relegated to its own field, as something that you can’t observe. It’s how small things behave. It’s like no, that’s not true. You can actually observe and interact. And also again, the approach that’s underlying quantum physics has to be radically different from classical physics or classical science in order for it to even exist or justify the results that people are saying.
I think this explains why I approach things the way that I do, because I do feel that, for example, me working in housing is not siloed from working in architecture. That’s not how life works. That’s not even consistent with reality in any way, shape or form. But it goes back to this underlying way of how white supremacy has conditioned us to think we have to memorize everything, even going back down to how we think about how we see things, and how we visualize things, and how things have to be illuminated in this way for us to see it, which calls for a separation and individualization of matter, and people and beings and things. There’s no recognition of how things are entangled and influence each other, you know.
That’s why I study a lot of different things, so that I understand how I’m situated in reality. I think it is often hard for people to visualize futures that are different, and that don’t include the same old shit, and are just only enhanced by shiny technology. It’s because they’re still thinking with the same worldview and paradigm—and not to say I’m special and I’ve figured it out. But I’m constantly questioning and aware and challenging reality, and trying to find a way to make it work with the reality I have to live in, where I work in labor all fucking day because I still have a kid. I still have a house. I have all these things.
So yeah, it’s like that. And also I don’t want to reconcile it either. I think tension is good, and I think again, that also goes back to world views where tension is not good and conflict is bad, and we should never have conflict, and so we try to squelch it out as much as possible. But when we’re working in a world where tension is good, and tension is generative. Tension is how my culture deals with decisions. It opens up a whole new level of tools and approaches and ways to deal with situations.
Garcia: This is incredible. I keep thinking about how there’s a new term being born here: quantum reparations. This may challenge the logic and classical understanding of economics and matter.
There was something that you were saying that was really enlightening in the way that there is that lazy argument, mostly by white philosophers, that says it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than to imagine the end of capitalism. And the answer is no. It’s not easier, because we know many other ways to live that are not the capitalist way. And we try to show you, but every time we try to show you, you kill us, you dismantle the project. You impose your system.
But there’s a completely different field of epistemologies and ways of existing, and maybe as we are coming to the end of the discussion, the question is: in that future, or futures of quantum reparations, what is our role, as we are all aware, in the multiplicity and in the radically different ways of approaching the sort of universality of things that we need to be doing? What does it look like, for example, the education of people that are going to be engaging with these ways? When young people are thinking about what they want to be when they grow up, are they going to be just architects? Not anymore, they’re also going to be lawyers. In that future where we are part of quantum fields, and quantum people that are working towards quantum reparations…
Phillips: My mind is blown, so I don’t know what else to say, but yes, that’s fucking brilliant. Yes.
McEwen: This question seems to be the core of much of your work. What are the futurisms that amend Black and Indigenous people?
Phillips: I thought about this question a little bit, specifically about the point of amending. I’m not positive that we can reconstruct the world but what I do like to think about is how we build anew and then utilize the patterns and foundations that we have for the new. It’s almost like what you were just saying about this reversal, and not necessarily being able to reverse things, although you know that’s up for question too. And when we think about what’s possible, I think we’re not going to be able to just reverse back to something. I think we tend to romanticize our Indigenous ancestors as well. We don’t know what was going on, and how they were thinking about or treating people. Was it necessarily better in terms of how they approached it?
But I think there’s definitely lessons that we can pick out, and things that we know are more consistent with our thriving, and more consistent with our DNA, and more consistent with how we’re constructed as beings in the world. For me, again, the question is thinking about how is it possible to make it into the future, or to connect with our past in a meaningful way, without shelter? And for me, that has to be the start in terms of also thinking about how to keep memory. How do we even access memory? If we don’t have accessible, affordable housing, we’re constantly worried about shelter and more than basic needs. Without that, we can’t access memory in the way that we need to.
For me the foundation is housing—not to be cheesy, but it is foundational in the sense of how people can even start to envision something different and better. And again, if you’re insecure about your housing, which many of us are, most look like us. You don’t have the space or time to vision, dream, think about something different because you’re constantly running to catch up, and you’re constantly having your time truncated in this way, or minimized or devalued.
So that’s for me where it starts: housing. I try not to visualize anything, specifically understanding that I’m one person. It’s more about our values, and how we can create different futures with our different values that challenge the assumptions that we already have about what it means to make a new world or reenvision the world, throw all that shit out, and just start anew, and that’s in part what the timezone protocols were about.
Again, I can’t be the one person envisioning it, because then we would have a bunch of individual utopias. So for me the project is always a communal act when we’re envisioning a new world, and that means we have to grapple with tensions, and with very different visions of how we want the world to be and that’s not going to resolve itself in a year, or with some one policy, or some fucking program, or whatever. This is life for all of us, let's work to pass it on to the next generation in a way that is packaged for them to be able to pick it up if they want to.
But just to say that, yeah, futurisms of our own making. I also think about the temporal reparations, and what type of reparations? What it looks like, and the inherentness of time, and the idea of repair, and the idea of how the repair has to reach back in time, how it has to also reach forward in these ways that you know we don’t always think about. That’s what I’m thinking of.
McEwen: I love it. I mean to start to summarize a bit, it seems like this notion of quantum reparations that we’re getting from your work in this lens is that housing is at the core to create time, right? The possibility of this communal time that’s required to envision the world anew.Footnote3
Notes
1 See Khalid Elhassan, "10 Nazi War Criminals Who Escaped Justice Because They Were Useful to the US," History Collection, April 16, 2018, https://historycollection.com/10-nazi-war-criminals-who-escaped-justice-because-they-were-useful-to-the-us/6/
2 See Isabel Wilkerson, Caste: The Origins of our Discontents (New York, NY: Random House, 2020)
3 See Elhassan, "10 Nazi War Criminals" and Aditya Aladangady and Akila Forde, "Wealth Inequality and the Racial Wealth Gap," in Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, FEDS Notes, October 22, 2021, https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/wealth-inequality-and-the-racial-wealth-gap-20211022.html#:∼:text=In%20%20the%20United%20States%2C%20%20the,percent%20as%20much%20net%20wealth.