The young white terrorist who drove over 200 miles to murder 11 innocent black people as they shopped in Buffalo, NY, wrote “here’s your compensation” on his gun.
This chilling threat from an 18-year-old, poisoned by white supremacy, reverberated throughout the burgeoning slavery reparations movement in the United States at a time in history that was enjoying unprecedented momentum All over the country.
He also emphasized how the reparations movement is not only about reparative justice for the crimes of slavery, but is at the forefront of the ongoing struggle against white supremacy and structural racism in America.
Reparations for the crimes of chattel slavery in the US are a central part of the ongoing social and racial justice movements that have grown in the post-George Floyd era.
In October 2021, 62 percent of American adults—including 54 percent of white Americans, 83 percent of Black Americans, and 71 percent of Latino Americans—told researchers with the Gallup Center on Black Voices that the government should take action to reduce it. the continuing effects of slavery. Now, cities, states, and federal elected officials are showing support for reparations research and a variety of reparations programs and initiatives.
Headlines Delivered to Your Inbox
Compensation for black Americans would not be the first such payments made in US history. To see also : Opinion: Boston’s checkered history with its greatest sports icon. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed a bill that encouraged the US government to pay $20,000 compensation to “each surviving Japanese citizen or legal resident of Japanese ancestry who was imprisoned” during World War II because of “racial prejudice , wartime hysteria, and lack of political leadership” as an accompanying excuse.
In 1989, when Congressman John Conyers Jr., a black Democrat from Detroit, first introduced a bill calling for a study to examine the need for federal compensation and their potential impact, that bill became HR40 finally, recognition of that promise of land. The bill died that year as a version of it would do in every session of Congress since.
After Conyers died in 2019, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, took up the baton and has provided tireless and inspired leadership to the movement ever since.
NEVER PAUSED
The nation never stopped to study slavery and its effects in detail, Lee says. The current iteration of the HR40 does exactly that. Read also : The Best Sci-Fi TV Shows on Prime Video. First of all there would be hearings, she says, from which would come an official response from the US government that would be carefully designed.
But Lee says she need look no further than the halls of Congress to understand how much work is needed to overcome obstacles to reparations for black Americans.
In 2019, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican from Kentucky, and a direct descendant of slaveholders, dismissed the idea as essentially necessary. “We’ve already enacted civil rights laws,” McConnell said, and “we’ve elected an African American president.”
Then came the summer of 2020. By the end of the following year, HR40 had amassed a record 215 correspondents and professional supporters.
In 2021, HR40 voted out of a House committee and was eligible for debate and a binding vote on the House floor. But Democratic leaders in the house, including House Majority Leader James Clyburn, have not acted to bring his promise closer to fruition.
Recently, US Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ) led a group of senators urging President Biden to establish a Presidential Commission to study and issue recommendations regarding a national apology and reparations for African Americans.
And while federal action is still theoretical, concrete local action has already begun in reality.
There are at least 11 municipalities that have carried out a compensation process. California is the first government to go statewide with this process, but Illinois is quickly following on its heels.
Over 300 civil and human rights groups across the country are supporting the HR40 campaigns as are the Japanese American and Asian American communities.
Many elite universities (Harvard, Georgetown, Brown) have taken an interest in the reparations movement by increasing their work on the nature and history of slavery in the US and across the Americas and by taking a self-critical look at the appropriateness of their institutions in profiting from the enslavement of Africans.
WEALTH GAP
A report by the California Compensation Task Force released a few weeks ago found that practices and policies in the state had “caused harm, which occurs over a lifetime and widens over generations, resulting in the current wealth gap between Black and white Americans” . See the article : Black Girl Magic Digital Summit premieres on Amazon Prime Video on August 27.
That finding will help form the basis of a second report expected next year, which will focus on today’s solutions.
In the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Ill., city officials have already launched a compensation initiative. They will fund the program with what city officials said is the first $10 million in the city’s share of revenue from the sale of legal cannabis.
Today, modern reparations movements in the Caribbean and the United States have evolved along a global, Pan-African trajectory and have engaged the large diaspora communities of African descent in Britain, Canada and in Europe.
The National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) was launched in April 2015, two years after CARICOM heads of government established their Caribbean Reparations Commission. Over the past six years, the two bodies have worked closely on a number of compensation initiatives.
The reparations movements in Africa and Latin America are also growing in scope and impact across both continents. Namibia is demanding reparations from its former colonial power, Germany, for genocidal attacks in the early 20th century. Activists in the Democratic Republic of Congo are demanding reparations from Belgium, its former European colony, to name a few examples.
In early August, the Ghanaian government hosted a reparations summit in Accra that drew reparations activists and advocates from around the world as well as several heads of state in Africa and the Caribbean and high-ranking officials from the African Union.
That summit was immediately followed by a reparations summit in Barbados at the Cave Hill campus of the University of the West Indies.
Contrary to the traditional narrative, slavery was not the “original sin” of America. It is the “original crime” of America, This violent crime is one of the greatest and most horrific abuses in the entire history of human civilization. Justice was never done to the victims of this crime, no reparations were made to the black bodies who were often beaten and battered and contributed to the foundation of capitalism in the US.
On July 4th of this year, America celebrated 246 years as an independent and sovereign nation, and also marked 246 years of slavery on its soil. This remarkable historical appearance should give us all pause for thought as we try to imagine an America of a future of peace, justice, and equal opportunity for all its citizens, an America that will finally honor its great debt to its black citizens.
Dr. Don Rojas is the director of communications and international relations for NAARC. Send feedback to reparation.research@uwimona.edu.jm or info@reparationscomm.org.
