In Our Case for Reparations
San Francisco Bay View | March 21, 2023
Speech delivered at San Francisco City Hall
In March 2023, Afatasi delivered In Our Case for Reparations on the steps of San Francisco City Hall during a public rally for reparations. The address was subsequently published by the San Francisco Bay View.
Speaking as an artist, futurist and generational San Franciscan, Afatasi traced her own family history through sharecropping, the Great Migration, military service, redlining and displacement to examine how historical harms accumulate across generations. She connected that history to the dramatic decline of San Francisco’s longstanding community and argued for reparations as a response to both historic and continuing harms.
The address documents an early foundation of what Afatasi would later formalize as Fine Arts for Reparations—her philosophy of artistic responsibility as a fine artist emerging from and working within a community experiencing displacement and cultural decline.
Fine Arts for Reparations begins with a responsibility Afatasi places upon her own practice: that making beautiful objects cannot be separated from the work of repairing, restoring, preserving and regenerating the community from which the artist and the work emerge. Through monument-making, genealogy, archival research, cultural ritual, education and advocacy, Afatasi considers how the resources and tools of a fine-arts practice can return knowledge, memory, representation and cultural infrastructure to the community.
The philosophy also centers self-determination. Building independent artistic and economic systems allows Afatasi to sustain her practice while protecting her ability to advocate for her community without making that responsibility dependent upon institutional approval or patronage.
In Our Case for Reparations therefore represents more than an earlier public statement on reparations. It documents part of the intellectual and personal trajectory that would develop into Fine Arts for Reparations: a belief that, while her community is being diminished, her artistic practice cannot remain separate from the work of restoring it.