“UN group recommends ‘reparatory justice’ for African Americans”
“”The colonial history, the legacy of enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism, and racial inequality in the US remains a serious challenge as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent,” wrote members of the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, at the conclusion of a 10-day trip to the United States.
The Working Group is preparing a final report to deliver in September 2016, as part of the International Decade for People of African Descent..
The working group does encourage Congress to pass H.R. 40, a bill introduced year after year by Rep. John Conyers (D-MI), the longest-serving member of Congress. Rep. Conyers, who is black, was first elected in 1965.
H.R. 40 calls to create a commission to study slavery’s past and present impact on African American communities, and to consider appropriate reparations.”
First of all, this wouldn’t include my family; the owner-traffickers of my ancestors / my ancestors (because slavery was more complicated than presented in our textbooks) were paid by the British government when slavery ended in Jamaica. Although Jamaica has brought that up recently; I kinda think the WHO should be dishing out, but anyway, unrelated.
A one-time financial payout isn’t really what I see as reparatory justice; I see updates to history and English curricula to center more Black narratives for all American students, I see special concerted real funding and “grand challenges” for majority-black schools and communities that have been under-resourced and over-policed for decades/centuries (like, maybe starting from the model of HUD’s Post-Sandy Resilience Challenge), I see something like the open Medicare data on hospital cost/quality except open data on how different companies and institutions have treated black people (like how some banks have appeared to be targeting black people for predatory loans, or how some real estate agencies show black people fewer houses in worse neighborhoods, etc…) — not to shame these places, but to give black people information that we can use while navigating the ingrained racism of this country.
Related: The Case for Reparations — in case you still haven’t read it
