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Reparations

US Racism’s $13 Trillion Legacy Is Just The Start

New York - Around the time the United States formally abolished slavery in 1865, African Americans owned 0.5% of the United States’ wealth. Today they own under 3%, even though around 13% of the population is defined by the U.S. census as “black or African American.” This isn’t an accident of history – it’s a result of government policies and institutional bias. The interest keeps compounding. The value of income lost during slavery is staggering. The U.S. practice lasted for nearly 250 years – almost equivalent to the time from the signing of the Declaration of Independence in 1776 until today. University of Connecticut Professor Thomas Craemer estimates the present value of unpaid wages for just the 89 years after independence to be nearly $20 trillion using a 3% interest rate.

Were Chicago’s Police Torture Reparations From 5 Years Ago Implemented?

The Chicago reparations movement offers a shining example to movements across the country, and in the past few years, activists in other cities have pursued their own calls for reparations. In Little Rock, Arkansas, the family of Eugene Ellison, a man fatally shot by the police, together with the largest police violence settlement in Little Rock history, obtained an official apology from the city manager at a ceremony where a memorial bench was dedicated to Ellison. In New Orleans, the City settled 17 police violence cases that were representative of the official lawlessness that reigned before, during and after Hurricane Katrina. Mayor Mitch Landrieu announced the $13.3 million settlement at a press conference after a prayer meeting with the victims and families.

Coronavirus Is Making The Case For Black Reparations Clearer Than Ever

Mounting statistics confirm disturbing evidence of racial disparities in reported coronavirus deaths. In Wisconsin, perhaps the state with the most extreme ratio of black morbidity, black people represent 6 percent of the population and 40 percent of the deaths. Those African American deaths have occurred at a rate 700 percent higher than black people's share of the state's population. In our home state of North Carolina, black people account for 22 percent of the population but close to 40 percent of the deaths. So what explains these disproportionately large numbers of black people dying of the coronavirus? Black people are overrepresented in jobs designated as socially essential but paying low wages in transportation, food and health services, as well as child and elder care.

Evanston Will Use Recreational Marijuana Sales Tax Proceeds To Fund Local Reparations Program

Evanston aldermen on Monday approved directing all sales tax revenue collected from recreational marijuana purchases to a fund that will establish a local reparations program. Officials say the program will help the city’s black population stay in Evanston while also providing training for jobs and other benefits. “We can implement funding to directly invest in black Evanston,” said Ald. Robin Rue Simmons, 5th Ward, who proposed the reparations bill.

Reparations For Development And Justice For The Caribbean

I bring no special expertise or unique perspective to the issue of reparations. However, I am here primarily to signify my personal commitment to the fight to achieve reparatory justice. Approximately five years ago, on October 14, 2014, at the second regional conference on reparations, held at the Multipurpose Cultural Centre, a mere four months of becoming Prime Minister, the Hon PJ Patterson, who was the featured speaker said to me: “As one who belongs to the older generation of Caribbean leaders, I am here today to present that torch to a leader of the younger generation and to say: Never let that torch be extinguished.” 

America’s Last Slave Ship Could Offer A Case For Reparations

MOBILE, Ala. (AP) — Alabama steamship owner Timothy Meaher financed the last slave vessel that brought African captives to the United States, and he came out of the Civil War a wealthy man. His descendants, with land worth millions, are still part of Mobile society’s upper crust. The people whom Meaher enslaved, however, emerged from the war with freedom but little else. Census forms that documented Meaher’s postwar riches list them as laborers, housewives and farmers with nothing of value. Many of their descendants today hold working-class jobs.

The Plan For A National Homes Guarantee

Everyone living in the United States should have safe, accessible, sustainable, and permanently affordable housing: a Homes Guarantee. People’s Action, with the assistance of Democracy Collaborative policy associate Peter Gowan, has published a 20-page report outlining a bold plan to address the nation’s housing crisis. Right now, our country falls woefully short of delivering on this promise. The federal government has not made a large scale investment to address affordable housing shortages since Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal, which created public housing for civilians. Now, we need action beyond that scale. The country’s housing crisis is untenable, and it must end. We need a Homes Guarantee that will...

Reparations And The Student Debt Wars

The public college and university system in California was tuition-free during the sixties and into the seventies when the baby boomers were attending college in record numbers. Favorable budgets helped stoke the demand and new campuses were built to accommodate this explosion, propelled by an inclusive ethos special to this left-liberal era where a different breed of Democrats governed. This trend, also evident nationwide, revived the spirit of the free school movement popular in the early 19th century that encouraged the creation of literate citizens for a more vital democracy.

On Reparations, The Question Isn’t If, But When And How

For nearly 250 years, enslaved Africans and their descendants toiled on the land and in the homes of White enslavers in the United States. They planted, fed, weeded, mowed, and harvested crops that were not theirs; cared for and fed children they did not birth; and cleaned homes and tended lands they did not own. We’re all familiar with this uncomfortable but sanitized image of U.S. slavery. The harsh reality is that too many of the more than 300,000 African men, women, and children who were brought to this land for the sole purpose of providing free labor...

Will Chicago Get A Memorial To Honor The Survivors Of Police Torture?

In 2015, the Chicago City Council passed a reparations ordinance. That ordinance, the first of its kind in the country, was the city’s official acknowledgment that Jon Burge, a Chicago police commander, and detectives under his command, “systematically engaged in acts of torture, physical abuse and coercion of African American men and women at Area 2 and 3 Police Headquarters from 1972 through 1991.” The ordinance spelled out the gruesome nature of that torture—electric shock boxes or cattle prods to genitals, lips, and ears; suffocation with plastic bags; mock executions with guns; beatings with telephone books and rubber hoses...

We Have The Means To Fund Reparations. Where Is The Political Will?

Between 1983 and 2016, the median net worth for Black Americans actually went down by 50 percent. Paired with a growing Latinx population that also lags far behind whites in household wealth, the U.S.’s overall median wealth trended downward over those decades, even as median white wealth increased. These trends go hand-in-hand with the rigging of the overall economy. Over the last 30 years, the wealthiest 20 percent of households have captured almost 97.4 percent of all increases in wealth, leaving only scraps for the rest.

We Absolutely Could Give Reparations To Black People. Here’s How.

A step-by-step guide to paying the descendants of enslaved Africans. Let’s say you’re driving down the street and someone rear-ends you. You get out of your car to assess the damage. The person who hit your vehicle gets out of his car, apologizes for the damage and calls his insurance company. Eventually, you receive a check for the harm done. Now, let’s say that for years, if not generations, your family and families like yours have been damaged by your country’s political and economic system — by law and widespread practice, with the intent of benefiting families not like yours — then the checks for the harm done would be called reparations.

University Of Glasgow Commits To Pay Reparations For Profiting From African Enslavement, Providing A Model For Others To Follow

Even as those who oppose reparations argue it is unfeasible or too costly, one British university is proving that it is both possible and necessary to make amends for the enslavement and genocide of African people. While the steps made so far may not seem so substantial, this institution could provide a model for others to follow. The University of Glasgow made £200 million ($255 million) from the trans-Atlantic slave trade, according to a comprehensive report, and because of that will make reparations through a “reparative justice program” and establishing ties with the University of the West Indies.

Migrant Groups March To U.S. Consulate In Tijuana Demanding Reparations

Two groups of Central American migrants made separate marches on the U.S. Consulate in Tijuana Tuesday, demanding that they be processed through the asylum system more quickly and in greater numbers, that deportations be halted and that President Trump either let them into the country or pay them $50,000 each to go home. On the one-month anniversary of their arrival into Tijuana, caravan members are pressing the United States to take action but they are dwindling in numbers since more than 6,000 first arrived to the city’s shelters. Approximately 700 have voluntarily returned to their country of origin, 300 have been deported, and 2,500 have applied for humanitarian visas in Mexico, according to Xochtil Castillo, a caravan member who met with Mexican officials Tuesday.

Cuba Calls For Reparations For Descendants Of African Slave Trade

We support the intervention made by the Bahamas on behalf of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). Cuba engaged in negotiations and supported General Assembly resolutions 61/19 and 70/7, which commemorated the bicentenary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, designated this International Day and established the Permanent Memorial. My country attaches particular importance to the annual commemoration of the International Day of Remembrance of the Victims of Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade, a particularly sensitive issue for the Cuban people.  It would be an unforgivable historic mistake to ignore or intend to forget the past.
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