Building a Reparative Framework for Cultural Equity:

“To Fanon, culture meant only one thing — an environment shaped to help us and our children grow, shaped by ourselves against the system that enslaves us.”

In his 1969 review of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Ayi Kwei Armah — the first Black literary critic to analyze Fanon’s work on global Blackness — highlights a vision of culture as a vital environment for survival and growth rather than a mere product. A decade later, in the 1980s, Armah took a radical step toward cultural sovereignty by founding Per Ankh Publishing, an African publication collective in Popenguine, Senegal. Modeled after the ancient Egyptian “House of Life,” the cooperative was established to bypass the extractive nature of Western publishing, which Armah viewed as a form of intellectual enslavement. By refusing bank loans and operating as a community-led collective of creators and friends, Per Ankh serves as a living template for the solidarity economy and cultural stewardship discussed in this essay. It demonstrates how cultural producers can move from being “commodities” in an autocratic industry to “stewards” of their own narratives, ensuring that the economic and social value of creative work remains within the community of origin rather than being siphoned off by global capitalist gatekeepers.

For cultural producers and strategists today, this vision is the foundational pulse of cultural equity. As defined by Americans for the Arts, cultural equity embodies the values, policies, and practices that ensure all people — including those historically underrepresented based on race, class, and geography — are fairly represented in arts policy, resource distribution, and the nurturing of thriving venues for expression.

To achieve this, however, we must adopt a framework that is ancestrally necessary. This term signifies our moral and practical obligation to our forebears to address the historical injustices of settler colonialism and the legacy of chattel slavery, which continue to devalue Black life through capitalism.

Introduction: Understanding Cultural Equity in Creative Economies

As an emerging conceptual artist incorporating my urban planning and philanthropy practices centering solidarity economy, I began questioning how I articulated the purpose of my creations, their intended audience, and what sustainability meant in my ability to create art as both a cultural artifact and a means to shape culture. Here, I am reminded of the Grammy-nominated poet, lyricist, writer, and comrade Aja Monet’s words from a February 2025 episode of The Late Set podcast:

Everything about art is a process. It’s capitalism that got us fucked up on the product. But art has always been about the process, and if we could, we would give away the process to the people… because when everyone is a part of understanding the creative process, people understand their power to create things from nothing.

In 2019, I co-founded ZEAL Co-Op, a creative arts and social impact studio cooperative where we create spaces for Black artists to thrive. In 2021, a pivotal shift began. I explored cultural equity through the lens of the solidarity economy as I, along with our members, built out the cooperative. As a result, I started sharing some of the learnings from the cooperative in the publication of Solidarity Not Charity, a report highlighting how arts grantmaking can move toward building wealth and reparations for artists.

After ZEAL Co-Op debuted our flagship pop-up Who Owns Black Art? at Art Basel Miami in 2019, the exhibition landed on the front page of the New York Times Arts and Culture section, sparking commentary that proved exactly why we created it. Many of the comments came from the perspective of wealthy, predominantly white art patrons who asked, “Why is it important to build meaningful relationships with Black artists? Isn’t it enough to just buy their work and move on?” Subsequent projects, such as “Black Art Is Black Money” released by Blacktag and “Sell to Black Collectors” by visual artist Genevieve Gaignard, declared the same, noting how consumers in the market treat artists consistently in individualistic and transactional ways, rather than being responsible cultural stewards of the work.

Historically, the commodification and extraction of Black culture has been a significant barrier to equity for Black creatives. Elements of Black culture — such as music, fashion, food, and art — have been widely appropriated and commercialized without equitable compensation or recognition, often stripping them of their original context and significance. This exploitation not only diminishes the value of Black creative work but also perpetuates a system where Black artists are frequently both excluded from financial and professional opportunities in a “mainstream” settler colonial environment and incentivized to aspire to become capitalists as if that is the only viable solution for their freedom. The result is a persistent struggle for Black creatives to want to attain the same kind of recognition, respect, and compensation as their white counterparts, while simultaneously having their contributions to the mainstream colonizing culture undervalued and appropriated without credit under capitalism.

The current creative industrial complex is fundamentally compromised by autocracy, which functions as the root problem by centralizing the power to define cultural value and assign profit within a narrow circle of elite entities. This autocracy is operationalized through hierarchy — top-down, vertical structures that position major labels, museums, and galleries as unaccountable gatekeepers. These hierarchies facilitate extraction by creating bottlenecks that strip creators of their agency through contracts and other legal apparatuses and social norms, forcing them to conform to external standards of “marketability” while wealth and decision-making authority flow exclusively upward.

A Roadmap for Strategists and Producers

This piece serves as a roadmap for cultural producers and strategists to consider what it takes to subvert and/or create alternatives that opt out of harmful, autocratic approaches to creative business that have well calcified themselves in what is otherwise known as “show business.” By prioritizing strategies like redistribution of resources and ethical licensing, we can break these chains of command and transition from a “culture of appropriation” to one of stewardship, where power is redistributed equitably and practiced through collective governance that upholds our dignity and humanity.

This reparative framework for cultural equity is intended for those ready to move toward transitional justice — a process of uncovering and redressing historical wrongs. Readers should use these strategies to assess their own practices and rebuild creative ecosystems:

The Need for a Reparative Framework

A reparative framework for cultural equity is essential to address historical injustices and disparities in cultural representation, access, and resources globally in order to create a just transition in our creative economy. This framework was developed from a conversation that I had with Dreisen Heath, human rights advocate, researcher, and transitional justice practitioner who introduced to me the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights as a lens to understand how reparations can be addressed within the private sector (whereas the United Nations Basic Principles on the Right to a Remedy and Reparation is focused on the public sector — government). From this, I learned that the Creative Justice Initiative had already defined cultural equity as a concept decades prior, in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights under Article 27.

This is a framework that takes into account how the legacy of business has evolved through the transatlantic system of enslavement and colonialism, which carries the residual effects of systemic barriers that limit Black creatives’ participation in the creative economy due to capitalism devaluing and erasing their contributions with practices of cultural appropriation, extraction, and labor exploitation. By prioritizing solidarity, equity, and liberation as values beyond diversity, equity, and inclusion, this transitional justice framework for the creative industries offers guidance for those invested in repairing the harm done to these communities and fostering a just economy in our creative landscape. This framework is grounded in the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights and the Creative Value Chain frameworks resulting in a redistribution of wealth, power, and access for all. For more on these frameworks, see Appendix A below.

A redistribution of wealth is necessary to address economic disparities because historically Black people, who are the descendants of enslaved Africans and Tribal Nations in North America, have been systematically denied access to opportunities, resources, and wealth-building mechanisms. Through practices like slavery, segregation, and discriminatory policies, these groups have been deprived of creating their own sustainable mechanism for economic mobility free from the threats of neoliberalism, conservatism, and white supremacist terror, leaving them at a significant disadvantage.

A transitional justice process that achieves reparations, inclusive of funding from grants and other non-extractive financial supports, serves as an essential tool to correct these historical wrongs by directly addressing the economic gap and providing resources to empower marginalized communities. This redistribution supports fostering greater opportunities in education, entrepreneurship, health and well-being, as well as cultural preservation, ultimately promoting long-term cultural equity.

From Appropriation to Stewardship

One of the key challenges in creating reparative cultural equity is addressing how Black creative, cultural, and intellectual life has been appropriated through extraction in the global capitalist marketplace. The distinction I’m highlighting between cultural appropriation and cultural stewardship is crucial in ensuring Black creatives are justly respected and compensated for their cultural expressions. Amma Boakye-Danquah, a creative economy researcher and data strategist based in Accra, Ghana, has been instrumental in clarifying these distinctions for me. She is also a facilitator of ZEAL Co-Op’s Money Talks, Value Walks workshop.

The core of this framework lies in the distinction provided by researchers like Amma Boakye-Danquah between Cultural Appropriation and Cultural Stewardship:

Beatrice Anderson, a spiritual and mindfulness practitioner, describes “Right Stewardship” as an antidote to cultural genocide, requiring a mindset shift that honors lineage and legacy. In practice, stewardship looks like relationship networks — moving away from “cliques” that are prone to co-dependency, collusion and coercion, and toward circles that are collaborative, cooperative, and autonomously interdependent.

Breaking Gatekeeping Patterns: The Case of Idman

Unaccountable gatekeeping often forces artists to conform to stereotypical expectations of what “Black art” should be. We see the movement toward reclaiming power in artists like Idman. Idman is a Somali Canadian R&B artist and community organizer whose life path serves as a vital case study in the transition from extraction to stewardship. Initially operating under Golly Geng Entertainment — a Black queer- and trans-led music collective — Idman’s body of work taking their community organizing skillset into the entertainment industry exemplifies how “relationship networks” can provide a protective alternative to autocratic industry structures.

This commitment to creative sovereignty became a matter of transitional justice when their 2023 single, “Hate,” was interpolated without their consent in the single “Mi Corazón” by Jacob Collier and Camilo. While such extraction is a common industry practice that often erases the original creator, the issue was successfully resolved through a process that resulted in Idman receiving proper songwriting credit. This victory in transparent attribution not only rectified the initial erasure but also led to their first Grammy nomination for her contribution to Collier’s Djesse Vol. 4, proving that when stewardship is prioritized over appropriation, the artist’s legacy and economic rights are preserved.

Solidarity as the New Business Model

To sustain this shift, we must embrace alternative ownership models:

Conclusion

For audiences to support alternative models, such as worker cooperatives, collective ownership, and community patronage, for Black artists and creatives, a fundamental shift in cultural consumption and investment is necessary. First, education and awareness must be prioritized; audiences need to understand how traditional creative industries exploit Black labor and how alternative models offer ethical and sustainable solutions. This means reparative literacy through media campaigns, grassroots organizing, and direct engagement with artists who are building these systems.

Second, financial participation must be reimagined beyond transactional support. Audiences can contribute through membership-based patronage, sliding-scale subscriptions, cooperative crowdfunding, and direct investments in Black-owned creative ventures. This requires a shift from passive consumption to active co-ownership, where supporters see themselves as stakeholders in a thriving, self-sustaining creative economy.

Third, institutional and policy-level support is essential. Advocacy for public funding, tax incentives for cooperative models, and policy protections for independent Black creatives would help stabilize these systems in the long term. In California, following the statewide task force on reparations and the state’s media work, policy recommendations can be found in their section on Control over Creative, Cultural, and Intellectual Life, which addresses this issue.

Finally, audiences must embrace cultural shifts — valuing slow creation over fast mass production, prioritizing community-driven work over corporate-backed trends, and actively resisting the extraction and exploitation of Black creativity. In essence, sustainability depends on audiences becoming co-conspirators in a movement where creativity is not just consumed but nurtured, enjoyed, and preserved into perpetuity. By adopting this reparative framework, we can build the environment Ayi Kwei Armah envisioned, one where we and our children can truly grow.

Click here to read the other essays in the Why Culture Matters to Justice series.

Appendix A: The Reparative Framework for Cultural Equity Integrates the Creative Value Chain with the UN Principles on Business and Human Rights.