Private Property and the Sacred Commons

Unless we are Indigenous to the land on which we live, we are all living on #StolenLand. Critiquing stolen land due to colonial violence and its everyday existence isn't having practical strategies and business curriculum for how to transition to the #SacredCommons.

If those first lines made you squirm in discomfort, just you wait. This post speaks to creating a viable business curriculum for financial reparations and decolonization on a world scale. Us poor Brown and Black folk? We're the global majority, yet we win due to morality and the universal arc of justice, not numerical superiority. We'll win there too.

First, some context and definitions.

The Sacred Commons is Earth, Mother Nature, and Climate Opportunity as seen from the standpoint of her actively decolonizing children. It is not the "Commons" of England, a legal term which Garrett Hardin demoted in his 1968 work, The Tragedy of the Commons. The Sacred Commons is the future, if deserve it.

Climate change is here, and colonialism never left. Really, we can unite in beloved community or perish in bands of mean, angry people. That's why I say climate opportunity, not climate catastrophe, though I include the horrors, disasters, extinctions.

As for private property? Please. Our body odor isn't private. Our porn searches aren't private. What we pee, poop, and flush isn't private. E-waste isn't private. Our medical options for birth control and abortion aren't private, much less our access to them. Air and marine pollution isn't private. All of this stuff of so-called private property — deodorant, computers, bathrooms, etc — is as public as can be, even if said property is being hidden like the sexual predator president's tax returns.

I write those words from the standpoint of Borikén, the world's oldest colony that Spanish colonizers renamed Puerto Rico. Some rich port. I write them a year and a half after Huracán María and just months before hurricane season returns.

I write these words as an intern with a real estate professional, a dear friend and mentor, whose livelihood rests on renting apartments via Airbnb and selling parcels of land and built homes to people, some local and many foreign. For the most part, the foreigners are Americans who have zero ancestral ties to this lovely archipelago.

I write them while sitting in my living quarters, which is a small apartment in public housing in a hidden valley on Borikén. My former husband is a sexual predator. He works at Google. The company is protecting him and many other sexual predators. Andy Rubin got the big one, the biggest payout, but how many other people's predation is preserved in their Google files?

I live in what I call "public hiding." I've been the target of hackers since I found out about my ex's sexual predation. I won't be quiet, and there's no reason for me to be. What the company is sitting on is way worse that what I know, and what I know is the stuff of horror movies.

Being in Borikén is the best medicine ever, but heaven help us: this year, the number of people with mobile phones is projected to surpass 5 billion. We all know the tech was designed for excessive use, if not plain addiction. If you didn't, here's some info from Business Insider.

My personal experiences have made me all the more critical of private property and corporate confidentiality agreements as business concepts, and I teach reparations and global decolonization to this tune.

I write these words as a mean, angry person, but only on some days. Most days, I sing songs of freedom and teach people how to design and elevate a business dedicated to radical self-love, beloved community, and true love for Mother Nature. My field is called Prophetic Economics.* The method I teach is called Decolonial Bizness World.

Here's how I generally define reparations: it is a heartfelt, financial apology. It means making formal political and economic amends for violence such as ethnic cleansing, slavery, or sexual predation. Reparations involve accepting that history happened. A rape victim will always have been raped. No apology can restore our murdered ancestors to life. Reparations aim to heal broken relationships.

People engaged in the work of reparations understand that some relationships won't feel good. Yes, white people, I'm talking about you and to you. But I'm not just talking about white people. I'm also talking about people who own land under the guise of private property and promote border patrols and baby jail. Many of those border policing people are Brown and Black. That said, I'm mostly speaking about white people descended from colonizers.

Decolonization requires dismantling colonialism: borders, reservations, prisons. Private property is border maintenance on small scale. Decolonization cannot happen without financial reparations, especially given climate change. There is no way that we can heal our sacred waters, for example, without appropriating the necessary financial and monetary resources from those who claim to "own" them.

A decolonized existence is happy at heart. Are you happy, truly happy?

Decolonial Bizness World is a method of business creation that starts at the heart with radical self-love. It was made for divas, homies, refugees, and the world's Native Peoples and for people who see our healing as their salvation. Decolonial Bizness World is a regenerative medicine wheel.

It is rather pretty and not at all boring like colonialist business school.

When I guide people through this approach to business creation, I use the symbol of a flying saucer to denote a social enterprise. And the captain of that ship? She often looks like heaven in heels. Or she's more like me these days, wearing brown boots made to smash the racist patriarchy.

I teach that a decolonial enterprise elevates on three pillars of light.

A first pillar of light emanates power that is honest to reality as it exists. Here, power means a plan for transparent divestment from everyday violence like rape culture and border militarization. In today's companies, power tends to 1. further entrench settler colonialism, racism, and global capitalism, which are misogynist and homophobic to the core and 2. derive from the global oil and gas regime.

Power isn't just a term for energy derived from fossils. Power is social, cultural, spiritual. It is always sexual in nature.

How do we work with natural, living energies such as sexual tension? How can we power our companies for liberation, becoming antiracist, feminist, and queer in everyday operations? Here, I'm speaking to policies and everyday company culture.

It isn't enough to have a stated policy against professional sexual harassment. That's bogus, and there are decades of research and a global movement of many names that illustrate that misogyny is official work culture: #MeToo. #NiUnaMenos. #NotMe. What is your plan for actively exiting, even excising, misogyny and white supremacy in your business?

The goal isn't to "outlaw" sexuality or its abuse by everyday predators. It is to use natural energies to change the culture, honoring the leadership of survivors, not human resource professionals. We want to end these f*cking shenanigans, so what are you learning from these awful times of exposure? What can you teach to guard against further eruptions?

What if you have been abused by bosses and human resource departments? How can your social enterprise ensure that such actions never happen again? What do you need to put in place to weather trauma triggers? This question is especially important to people who live complex trauma everyday. I do. So do many other people.

Dismantling white supremacy isn't a wish you put in an official memorandum. It is a cultural shift. #SeVaACaer: that's what many of us say about the racist patriarchy, and we mean it. We mean it when we are pale of skin, when we wear our hijab or head wrap, when we refuse to put on blush, lipstick, deodorant for the comfort of people who can conform to the racist status quo.

But what does all this mean in the context of your decolonial business? Only you can answer that, and you won't be answering it as one single person, the #CEO. You'll be practicing the dismantling of the #RacistPatriarchy with each transaction and in the messy context of #BelovedCommunity. We’re not there yet — that promised land of beloved community — we’re here facing down racist cops, sexual predators, and climate catastrophe. If that's your business case, what is your exit strategy from violence that masquerades as leadership these days at companies such as Tesla, Google, Facebook, but also "our own" work at places like UndocuMedia?

Sexual and racial healing is a business imperative, a prime directive for #decolonization and #reparations, that exists as public revelations of violence happen daily.

Power also emanates from the sun, wind, or deepest earth reserves like dead bones.

How can your ship, your social enterprise, elevate as it articulates and moves towards a divestment from fossil economics? Let's be literal: how do you plan to light the rooms of your home, office, boardroom as we transition to ecological regeneration versus fossil extraction? What does transit mean and require in your actual business: a walk, a bus, a bike, a car, a weekly flight, a seasonal migration? The questions reflect the people and the emerging social enterprise; these are just ideas. The goal isn't to "offset" or "#ShutItDown" but to culturally, ecologically regenerate.

The central pillar is radiating your spiritual directive to promote radical self-love, beloved community, and true love for Mother Nature, meaning regenerative agriculture. In short, the Sacred Commons. What does self-love feel like at work? How, in actual operations, is your ship going to shine the value of beloved community, which means a world founded on racial justice, peace, and shared wealth, on others? What will your social enterprise do to regenerate the global ecosystem of Earth?

The third pillar denotes your formal legal status such as a B-Corp or solidarity cooperative, now and moving forward. Will yours be like the Star Trek Enterprise in formal business structure and everyday command operations, perhaps a B-Corp or LLC, or more like mine, a lone ship that flies as part of shifting renegade formations that will, in time, come together as a solidarity cooperative?

I always remind people that what we have been and are now as people and business visionaries isn't what we'll become. In the world of business, we have far more options available to us than what colonial B schools teach.

Options for incorporation are deeply variable — locally, nationally, globally.

What if we don't have papers as in recognized citizenship to nation-states such as the United States or Lebanon? Or what if we live under historic, everyday occupation? What if we are one of those women who has been raped at the hands of state agents such as border patrol?

These are actual business considerations, and sometimes our answer today isn't what we will need in time, so let's look at the broad range of options for business creation.

The Sacred Commons is returning to a more balanced planetary ecosystem that provides food, water, and shelter for all creatures, even the tick, and honors natural migration. Technology is part of the process, hence the lovely flying saucer. The destiny of Earthseed, wrote Octavia Butler, is to take root among the stars.

Business visionaries can sing songs of freedom for the Sacred Commons and across the Cosmos. See those full red lips at the top of Decolonial Bizness World? They're for singing your solution statements. My solution? It's decolonizing social enterprise one business at a time.

Curious about the entire method? A podcast is soon to start. A book is soon to fly off the shelves and screens and into your human heart. But, here's a short description to tide you over:

#DecolonialBiznessWorld is spoken, using stories and symbols. It takes one to three hours to learn. Three hours sure beats two years in racist business school. It doesn't even require a desk, digital device, or book. Once you learn the method, it is yours to keep, share, change, visualize.

It takes 28 steps to design a business dedicated to reparations and decolonization and 49 steps to calculate the costs of violence and organize a formal campaign for financial reparations, which can serve to fund your work.

Decolonial Bizness World starts at the heart in order to internalize the aspects of living systems that racism, capitalism, and settler colonialism have pillaged in the quest for profit and endless expansion. As we move forward, we work in a sacred spiral, counter-western clockwise. The spiral is an ancient symbol for wisdom. It is a scroll and serpent that always circles the Sacred Commons.

Seven is a sacred number of Native peoples, speaking to the four directions, Father Sky, Mother Earth, and the sacred spirit you embody. Lakota tradition honors 28 as the sacred number for prayer for people entering lodge, 49 is the number for those seeking healing. Seven is also sacred to peoples of the book, namely Jews, Muslims, and Christians. Biblical tradition upholds seven as the year of rest for the earth, our Mother. 49 is the year of Jubilee when debts are forgiven and prisoners are freed.

Sounds like the Sacred Commons to me. You can read more about the method and field of prophetic economics here. More to come soon-soon.

I'm practicing pitches against private property here.

*Prophetic economics is an emerging academic field that draws upon indigenous prophecies from around the world, calling in the sacred teachings of Jews, Kemet, Taíno, Hindus, Achuar, Lakota, Muslims, Wiccans, Buddhists, and Christians, as well as traditional development economics and business education, to help us welcome climate change and transition the global economic system as we need to.