Mobilizing Wealth for Reparations
Monday, June 19, marked Juneteenth, the day in 1865 when enslaved African Americans in Texas were finally informed of the Emancipation Proclamation that ensured their freedom—almost 2 1/2 years after it was signed by President Abraham Lincoln.
For centuries Juneteenth was marked largely by the Black community. But in June 2021, a year after the historic racial justice uprisings sparked by George Floyd’s murder, President Joe Biden signed a proclamation declaring Juneteenth a federal holiday and calling it “a day in which we remember the moral stain and terrible toll of slavery on our country—what I’ve long called America’s original sin.”
To commemorate Juneteenth, YES! is launching a series of interviews conducted in Atlanta at a recent conference organized by the Decolonizing Wealth Project. The Alight, Align, Arise conference helped to mobilize the movement for reparations for Black Americans.
Edgar Villanueva, principal of the Decolonizing Wealth Project and Liberated Capital and author of the bestselling book, Decolonizing Wealth: Indigenous Wisdom to Heal Divides and Restore Balance, spoke with YES! Racial Justice Editor Sonali Kolhatkar in Atlanta about the conference and the movement for reparations.
This video is part of Realizing Reparations, an exclusive digital series exploring the leading edges of the reparations ecosystem—and revealing a path toward healing and reconciliation.
This series was funded by a grant from Liberated Capital, a fund of Decolonizing Wealth Project, which is led by Edgar Villanueva, of the Lumbee tribe, and works globally to disrupt the existing systems of moving and controlling capital using education and healing programs, radical reparative giving, and storytelling. Reporting and production of the series was funded by this grant, but YES! maintained full editorial control of the content published herein. Read our editorial independence policy.
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Sonali Kolhatkar
joined YES! in summer 2021, building on a long and decorated career in broadcast and print journalism. She is an award-winning multimedia journalist, and host and creator of YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali, a nationally syndicated television and radio program airing on Free Speech TV and dozens of independent and community radio stations. She is also Senior Correspondent with the Independent Media Institute’s Economy for All project where she writes a weekly column. She is the author of Rising Up: The Power of Narrative in Pursuing Racial Justice (2023) and Bleeding Afghanistan: Washington, Warlords, and the Propaganda of Silence (2005). Her forthcoming book is called Talking About Abolition (Seven Stories Press, 2025). Sonali is co-director of the nonprofit group, Afghan Women’s Mission which she helped to co-found in 2000. She has a Master’s in Astronomy from the University of Hawai’i, and two undergraduate degrees in Physics and Astronomy from the University of Texas at Austin. Sonali reflects on “My Journey From Astrophysicist to Radio Host” in her 2014 TEDx talk of the same name.
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