Reminder: My Civic Workout is seeking guest writers! If there’s a topic you or your organization wants to help us cover, email us at info@mycivicworkout.com.
A number of candidates seeking the Democratic presidential nomination have voiced their support for an increasingly mainstream position among Democrats: paying reparations to black Americans. Today, let’s talk about how the United States was built on the backs of slaves, how the Founding Fathers embedded the inequality of black people in the Constitution, and how the federal government built up the wealth of the white middle class during the New Deal, promoting redlining and other modes of racial segregation. Let’s talk about police killings of unarmed black people and mass incarceration. Let’s talk about reparations.
Since the end of slavery, black people have sought reparation for the wages and wealth systematically diverted from them to their owners. Freedwoman Callie House was a reparations organizer imprisoned for her efforts in 1917. Listen to historian Mary Frances Berry discuss the early days of the reparations movement, which is documented in her book, My Face Is Black Is True: Callie House and the Struggle for Ex-Slave Reparations.
In the House of Representatives, H.R. 40 proposes to set up a commission to study proposals for reparations. It has been introduced every Congressional session since 1989. In his 2014 piece “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates quotes Nkechi Taifa, a founder of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America: “As John Conyers has said, we study everything. We study the water, the air. We can’t even study the issue? This bill does not authorize one red cent to anyone.” Call your representative and senators to voice your support for a national reparations commission.
In Tears We Cannot Stop, Georgetown professor Michael Eric Dyson encourages white people to think creatively about paying reparations: “You can pay for messages for working class folk. You can choose five black children to sponsor on an annual trip to the local zoo…” This week, we encourage all our readers, but especially our white readers looking to pay some reparations, to bail out black mothers for Mother’s Day. These women are in pretrial detention; lack of funds to post bail is the only reason they are incarcerated. Learn more here, and contribute here.
White Americans don’t need to wait on the federal government to set up a national reparations program. Check out this piece on building reparations into your personal budget at the Billfold.
Watch Trevor Noah takes on conservative critics of reparations on The Daily Show:
Slavery wasn’t that long ago. There actually are people alive today with grandparents who were slaves. In fact, up until a couple of years ago, there was a woman whose dad was a slave. Her dad.
