With reparations, there is the issue of who pays. Do African countries owe reparations to Black Americans? After all, Harvard’s director of the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, Henry Louis Gates, wrote that 90% of those enslaved and shipped to the New World were sold by Africans to European slavers. All whites? Only whites? Nonwhites? Are payments owed before the United States became a country?
Evanston is the first city in the United States to officially establish reparations for Black people. The city committed to pay $10M over the next decade in an attempt to repay Black residents, according to the report. The first phase of this initiative includes eligible Blacks being paid up to $25K to be used specifically towards housing.
In an interview with Axios on HBO, Richmond reminded viewers that Biden continues to support House Resolution 40, a piece of legislation resubmitted last year by Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) which would create a “reparations commission.”
h/t Marvin
Anxious to get himself back in the spotlight, President Obama came out of his lair, and for the first time, touted support for reparations for black people, owing to the U.S. history of slavery.
Former President Barack Obama told his podcast co-host, Bruce Springsteen, that he would have liked to pursue reparations for slavery as part of his presidential agenda, but that the “politics of white resistance” made the issue a “non-starter.”
h/t Marvin
The Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act was reintroduced in the new session of Congress and now has 162 Democratic co-sponsors in the House and 17 Democratic co-sponsors in the Senate. The Senate version was introduced by New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker. The bill was first introduced by former Michigan Democratic Rep. John Conyers in 1989.
The legislation seeks to “address the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery.” The 13 colonies were under the control of Great Britain until the U.S. gained its independence in 1776.
The Zinn Education Project, a progressive network that develops teaching resources, sent an email to its 125,000 followers on Wednesday recommending a lesson plan in which students craft their own reparations legislation. The email says the activity will help students reflect on “what a path toward justice might look like” following the riots. It also compares the Capitol riots to the Civil War and claims that following the war, the United States cared more about “traitorous Confederates” than African Americans.
Vote reparations would empower us to replace oppressive institutions with life-affirming structures of equality.
