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Reparations

New Reparations Focus: Black Enclaves Lost To Development

May 6, 2022 Philip Marcelo, Associated Press. , , ,
Providence, Rhode Island - Terrell Osborne knows well what happens when urban renewal comes to communities of color. As a child growing up in Providence, Rhode Island, in the 1950s and 1960s, huge swaths of his neighborhood of Lippitt Hill, a center of Black life at the foot of the stately homes of the city’s elite East Side, were taken by eminent domain for redevelopment projects. Hundreds of Black families and dozens of minority small businesses across some 30 acres were bulldozed. In their place rose an apartment complex catering to downtown workers and students and faculty at nearby Brown University, as well as a shopping plaza now anchored by a Whole Foods and a Starbucks. Meanwhile, Black families like the Osbornes were scattered across the city and never compensated.

A Former Sundown Town Passed Reparations And Rent Control

April 8, 2022 Paige Oamek, In These Times. , ,
“There’s the California that people imagine, a place I would love to visit and maybe buy a house on one salary,” Mayor Daniel Lee, now running for Congress, says with a smile. “Then, there’s the actual California.” Back in 2018, when Lee was elected as Culver City’s first Black councilmember, he didn’t know about the city’s history as a “sundown town,” a reference to all-white areas that enforce segregation through local laws, intimidation and violence. It was only at the Annual Legislative Conference hosted by the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation that other Black elected officials told him their stories of taking roundabout drives in their youth to avoid the notoriously racist Culver City Police Department. The city was founded by Harry H. Culver, who advertised it in the Los Angeles Herald in 1915 as a “model little white city.”

How To Repair The Planet

February 14, 2022 William P. Jones, Dissent Magazine. , ,
The idea of paying reparations for slavery and other forms of racial injustice remains deeply controversial. Yet it has gained renewed support in liberal publications, city councils and state legislatures, and even the House of Representatives, which recently held hearings on legislation to create a commission to study and develop proposals for reparations. These developments present both a challenge and an opportunity for the left, which has been divided between recognizing the clear case for compensating victims of centuries of exploitation and abuse and concern that reparations are politically untenable and potentially detrimental to building a broad-based movement for social and economic justice.

Developing Countries Fume Over US Pressure To Alter Climate Finance

November 17, 2021 Rishika Pardikar, Toward Freedom. , , ,
Glasgow, Scotland - Speaking at the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) on November 1, U.S. President Joe Biden said he wants the United States to commit $3 billion toward helping vulnerable countries adapt to climate change. But the administration’s climate negotiators in Glasgow are pushing to keep adaptation financing inadequate. Delegations from more than 190 countries are deliberating on issues that weren’t resolved in the first week of COP26, the largest annual climate-change conference organized under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Climate finance to assist developing countries adapt to a changing world and carbon markets to trade emission reduction credits remain on the table.

Detroit Voters OK Launching Reparations Commission

November 3, 2021 Candice Williams, The Detroit News. , , ,
Detroit voters favored launching a reparations commission Tuesday, and a proposal to decriminalize psychedelic plants passed by a wide margin. Another, Proposal S, failed with 53.9% voting no to amending a section of the city charter to allow voters to push ordinances that include appropriating money. More than 80%  of voters said yes to Proposal R, which calls for the launching of a reparations commission, while 61% of voters said yes to decriminalizing psychedelic plants. Another ballot proposal to amend the city charter to allow for citizen-driven ballot initiatives tied to city spending, Proposal S found no support among nearly 54% of voters, while 46% voted yes. Proposal R asked whether Michigan’s largest city should form a committee to consider reparations for residents, 77% of whom are Black.

Glasgow Climate Talks Are, In Many Ways, ‘Harder Than Paris’

November 1, 2021 Bob Berwyn, Inside Climate News. , , ,
To many following the decades-long journey of the United Nations climate negotiations, the 26th Conference of the Parties beginning Monday in Glasgow, Scotland looks like one of the last chances to steer the planet away from the fiery wreck that warming of 2 to 3 degrees Celsius will bring. The latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change confirms that the climate is still heading that way, with no way to change course other than reducing the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. That warning was reinforced last week by a report from International Red Cross and Red Crescent societies showing that, in 2020, climate extremes like floods, wildfires, heatwaves and droughts accounted for almost all of the 30.7 billion people displaced by disasters.

Anti-Imperialism You Can Try At Home

October 30, 2021 Mattea Kramer, Tom's Dispatch. , , ,
Robin Rue Simmons had been very curious about the truth of American life as a young person. But it was only after she finished high school, left her native Evanston, Illinois, and returned as an adult — ready to buy a house in the historically Black neighborhood in which she grew up — that she delved deep into her city’s history and fully understood the policies that had kept Black residents poor while enriching their white neighbors. Of course, this isn’t the kind of history that’s taught in school, even if today’s students do sometimes learn unsavory truths about the American empire. Local history is different, perhaps because it can be especially uncomfortable to examine how that empire’s economic plunder shaped our present-day communities.

Who Will Pay For The Damage From Climate Change?

October 29, 2021 Rick Kohn, LA Progressive. , , ,
To people in developing countries, it seems clear, the wealthy countries that caused most of the problem of climate change should pay the most to adapt to it and to solve the problem.  But instead, countries like the United States lecture low low-emitting countries to do more while they extract their resources and destroy their forests. For example, Nicaragua was an outspoken critic of the Paris climate talks because they did not go far enough. It is one of the countries most impacted by climate change, yet its own greenhouse gas footprint is one of the smallest.  Nicaragua initially insisted that the Paris Accord did not reduce emissions enough (a position that was later adopted by a majority of countries and the IPCC).  Dr. Paul Oquist, Nicaraguan Minister and envoy to the talks, insisted in Paris that developing countries should receive the billions of dollars promised by the big greenhouse gas emitters to pay for greenhouse gas mitigation programs. 

Segregation And The Case For School Funding Reparations

September 15, 2021 Insider NJ. , , ,
The U.S. public school system is one of the most unequal in the industrialized world, and New Jersey is no exception, according to a new report by New Jersey Policy Perspective (NJPP). Due to racist housing practices such as “redlining” and “blockbusting,” many Black and Hispanic/Latinx students do not receive the resources they need to ensure equal educational opportunity in the Garden State. “We have long seen school funding and student outcome disparities that fall disparately by race, disadvantaging Black and Latinx communities in particular,” said Bruce Baker, Ed.D., report co-author and Professor in the Graduate School of Education at Rutgers University.

Book Argues That HBCUs Are Owed Reparations

August 24, 2021 Keenan "higz" Higgins, NewsOne. , , ,
The idea of reparations for Black people as restitution for the slavery of our ancestors is a conversation we’ve been collectively having for decades now — many different points have been made as to when and how money is actually distributed. With Adam Harris’ new book, “The State Must Provide,” that conversation is brought up once again, this time directing those funds towards the education system at historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The author, an HBCU man himself from Alabama A&M University, was inspired to make the argument after he saw the stark differences between his own predominately Black campus and the University of Alabama in Huntsville — a PWI university with a small fraction of Black students in attendance.

Protesters Demand Wealthy MP Pays Up For Family’s Slave Trade Past

July 20, 2021 Paul Lashmar, The Guardian. , ,
Protesters demanded yesterday that a Conservative MP should hand over his 621-acre sugar plantation to the people of Barbados as compensation for his family’s 200 years of slave owning and trading on the island. Richard Drax, the MP for Dorset South, has said the role of his ancestors was “deeply, deeply regrettable” but resists demands for reparations. As part of this year’s Tolpuddle Festival, a rally organised by Stand Up to Racism, Dorset, at the gates of the Drax family estate highlighted the family’s historic role in slavery. The festival celebrates the Tolpuddle Martyrs, poorly paid farm workers, who were transported in 1834 for organising trade union activities. This is the first time the festival has worked with reparation activists.

Reckoning And Reparations In Afghanistan

July 19, 2021 Kathy Kelly, The Progressive Magazine. , , ,
Earlier this week, 100 Afghan families from Bamiyan, a rural province of central Afghanistan mainly populated by the Hazara ethnic minority, fled to Kabul out of fear of attacks by Taliban militants. Over the past decade, I’ve gotten to know a grandmother who recalls fleeing Talib fighters in the 1990s, just after learning that her husband had been killed. Then, she was a young widow with five children, and for several agonizing months two of her sons were missing. I can only imagine the traumatized memories that spurred her to again flee her village today, hoping to protect her grandchildren. When it comes to inflicting miseries on innocent Afghan people, there’s plenty of blame to be shared. The Taliban have demonstrated a pattern of anticipating people who might form opposition to their eventual rule and waging “pre-emptive” attacks against journalists, human rights activists, judicial officials, advocates for women’s rights, and minority groups such as the Hazara. In places where Taliban may seem to have successfully taken over districts, they may be ruling over increasingly resentful populac

Fourth Of You Lie In Brooklyn, N.Y.

July 6, 2021 Byh Stephen Millies, Struggle La Lucha , ,
D12 held an outdoor rally today in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, N.Y., for Black liberation and the liberation of all oppressed people. Banners reading “Health care is a right! Fight! Fight! Fight!” lined the street. People gathered in front of Sistas’ Place at Frederick Douglass Square. D12 members renamed the corners of two streets named after slave owners—Jefferson and Nostrand—for Douglass.

California Reparations Committee Confronts Harms Of Slavery

June 13, 2021 Jackie Botts, Cal Matters. , , ,
For more than three decades, Black members of Congress have introduced legislation to study the lasting harms of slavery on African Americans, and propose remedies. Year after year, the federal proposal languished. Now, California is going it alone. This month, California’s first-in-the-nation task force to study reparations met for the first time, kicking off a two-year process to study the consequences of slavery and systemic racism against African Americans in California. The reparations committee of nine prominent lawyers, academics, politicians, religious and civil rights leaders — many of whom are descendants of slaves — will make formal recommendations on how the state should make reparations.

How The First US City To Fund Reparations For Black Residents Is Making Amends

March 2, 2021 Ashley Brown, Emilie de Sainte Maresville, and Allie Yang, ABC News. , , ,
Evanston, Illinois, is like a lot of American cities. The city just north of Chicago appears picturesque, updated and grand on one side -- but not far away, one can see the signs of economic and racial segregation, despite the city's proud, diverse and liberal reputation. What sets Evanston apart from other cities, however, is its groundbreaking plan to address the impact of that segregation and Black disenfranchisement: reparations. The impetus for the city's reparations resolution, first passed in 2019 and spearheaded by 5th Ward Alderman Robin Rue Simmons, is rooted partially in Rue Simmons' experience growing up Black in Evanston. "Early in my childhood I was invited to have a play date," she recalled. "My white friends never had a play date at my home."
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