THREAD—Overdue #reparations is the key to closing the racial wealth gap | by @SandyDarity mlk50.com/overdue-repara…
@SandyDarity The United States "can ill afford to remain stranded in the mire of injustice, perpetually refusing to resolve the fundamental, historic national dilemma facing all Americans.
"For too long, the nation has refused to take steps to solve an unethical predicament of its own making — the problem of the unequal status of black and white Americans.
"A policy of reparations is a set of compensatory policies for grievous injustice. The three goals of a reparations plan should be 1. acknowledgement 2. redress and 3. closure.
"1. Acknowledgement is the admission of responsibility for the atrocity (or atrocities) by the culpable party, incorporating an apology. The admission must also be accompanied by a guarantee to make restitution in as rapid a fashion as possible.
"2. Redress is the provision of restitution, typically in the form of monetary compensation — as it has been in the cases of Germany’s reparations program on behalf of victims of the Holocaust and the U.S. reparations program on behalf of Japanese Americans incarcerated in WWII.
"3.Closure means the agreement by the victimized community and the culpable party that the debt has been paid. The victims would make no further group-specific claims on the culpable party, unless new atrocities took place.
"A plan for black reparations in the U.S. must fulfill specific principles, and those principles must inform, organically, the deliberations of the Commission to Study and Develop Reparations for African-Americans.
"In addition to the three central aims of a reparations program described above — acknowledgement, redress and closure — there are six principles that must be met:
"1. With respect to black reparations, the U.S. government is the culpable party that must meet the obligation of awarding restitution to those eligible for reparations.
"2. The government is culpable for not providing compensation over the course of 150 years since the end of the Civil War for enslaved blacks, their heirs and their descendants.
"3. The government also is culpable for maintaining the legal and authority framework that sanctioned slavery, legal segregation and continues to permit ongoing racist practices.
"4. Eligibility for reparations for African-Americans must apply specifically to those black Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S.
5. Black reparations must be designed, at minimum, to eliminate the racial wealth gap.
5. Black reparations must be designed, at minimum, to eliminate the racial wealth gap.
"6. Black reparations also must include a systematic plan to maintain historical memory of the conditions that motivated the inauguration of the program of restitution.
"With respect to the claim for black reparations, the U.S. stands as the culpable party. The current text of HR40 makes note of '[t]he role which the federal and state governments of the U.S. supported the institution of slavery in constitutional and statutory provisions,'
"...'the federal and state laws that discriminated against formerly enslaved Africans and their descendants who were deemed U.S. citizens from 1868 to the present,” and 'other forms of discrimination in the public and private sectors against freed African slaves ...
"... and their descendants who were deemed U.S. citizens from 1868 to the present, including redlining, educational funding discrepancies, and predatory financial practices.'
"Indeed, to the extent that federal laws and their enforcement take precedence over state government and private- sector actions, the failure of the federal government to prohibit discriminatory actions by non-federal entities reinforces national responsibility for restitution.
"Moreover, the federal government abandoned the opportunity to provide immediate compensation to those persons formerly enslaved upon emancipation. The freedmen had been promised allotments of at least 40 acres of land.
"There is some ambiguity whether this was intended to be 40 acres per family of four or per individual, but even if we take the more conservative condition—40 acres per family—the allocation would have amounted to 40 million acres for the 4 million persons newly emancipated.
"This allocation never took place, and in the subsequent 150 years there has been no act of restitution for the formerly enslaved or their descendants. This is not because the descendants of slavery have been silent on this score.
""It is because their efforts to this point, actively, have been opposed and blocked. The commission to be established under HR40 represents an opportunity, finally, to develop a reparations program that will address the nation’s unmet obligations.
"The case for black reparations must be anchored on three phases of grievous injustice inflicted upon enslaved blacks and their descendants. First is the atrocity of slavery itself.
"Second are the atrocities exercised during the nearly century-long period of legal segregation in the U.S. (the “Jim Crow” era).
"Third are the legacy effects of slavery and Jim Crow, compounded by ongoing racism manifest in persistent health disparities, labor market discrimination, mass incarceration, police executions of unarmed blacks (de facto lynchings), black voter suppression...
"... and the general deprivation of equal well-being with all Americans. Therefore, it is a misnomer to refer to 'slavery reparations,' since black reparations must encompass the harms imposed throughout American history to the present moment on black descendants of U.S. slavery.
"It is precisely that unique community that should be the recipients of reparations: black American descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S."
