New York state will create a commission tasked with considering reparations to address the persistent, harmful effects of slavery in the state, under a bill signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday.
It comes at a time when many states and towns throughout the United States attempt to figure out how to best reckon with the country’s dark past, and follows in the footsteps of similar task forces established in California and Illinois.
“In New York, we like to think we’re on the right side of this. Slavery was a product of the South, the Confederacy,” Hochul, a Democrat, said at the bill signing ceremony in New York City. “What is hard to embrace is the fact that our state also flourished from that slavery. It’s not a beautiful story, but indeed it is the truth.”
The law, which was passed by state lawmakers in June, says the commission will examine the institution of slavery, which was fully abolished in New York by 1827, and its ongoing impact on Black New Yorkers today.
When I see this talk about reparations for slavery, I can’t help thinking that Americans are still not facing the historical facts.
Brown v. Board of Education was in 1954. African-Americans were, by law, by the government, denied a proper education. The pioneers who fought for their right to an education are still alive. Which means that the people who were denied an education are also still alive.
There’s a lot of history post-slavery that explains the situation in the US today, such as the countless anti-black pogroms, in which African-Americans had their possessions stolen or destroyed. But government-mandated school “segregation” is one thing where it is immediately obvious that: Living African-Americans did not have the same opportunities and must necessarily be poorer because of government action.
It’s crazy to me that there is talk about reparations for slavery but not about damages for crimes committed against people still living today.
My grandfather would tell me stories about when blacks started to have the same jobs as whites. He said the white men would antagonize the black men purposely. Spit on them, call them the n-word, punch them, anything to get a reaction. Once a black man struck back he would get reported to management, fired, and other employers would refuse to hire a dangerous black man.
And that’s not even getting into the atrocities committed directly by the US government on black communities such as the Tulsa Race Massacre (also of course, Tuskegee, firebombing a city block in Philadelphia, etc.).
So much wealth completely wiped out because some black folks were “uppity” enough to dare to be successful in capitalism. Shit that I 100% never learned about in high school.
There were so many of these pogroms. Strictly, a pogrom is something that was done to Jews. But then a ghetto was where Jews lived.
Any town or city in the south that is almost all white had at least one racial cleansing, as it is sometimes called. During the time of slavery, people wanted their forced labor, their “property” close by. Segregation was forced later. (My knowledge comes solely from Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America.)
Perhaps something could be done about the land that was stolen, when the owners fled or were murdered. But the survivors of these massacres are dead by now.
That’s why I think affirmative action makes more sense than a one-time reparations payment. It’s the only way to reverse the issue at a societal level.
It may be good politics, but I am critical of it. The victims of American racism were individual human beings. AA does not look at the individual and what harm they suffered, but again, only looks at the color of the skin.
The election of Barack Obama was a great victory for the USA, but also an indictment. He was not born into an African American family, deprived by segregation. (The British occupation of Kenya was brutal, particularly during the last stage - the Mau Mau rebellion, with its 10,000s of dead - when his father came to the US. But I don’t know what his family’s role was.)
All over the world, we can see that having less educated parents is a burden for the academic success of children. This is completely unrelated to racism. Less educated parents can’t help with homework as much, or impart academic knowledge in passing. I can’t even imagine what it is like, on top, to have parents/grandparents who have only ever known a good education as something that gets you murdered by white people.
Obama did not have all that ancestral baggage, and he had this brilliant career. That’s common for recent African immigrants.
Maybe AA helps the US become a better, stronger nation. But I worry that it may perpetuate damage by still practicing differential treatment, based on assigned racial category. In any case, it does nothing to redress the concrete harm, done to individual human beings.
AA is a societal remedy to a societal-level injustice. Redlining and biased admissions policies only looked at the color of one’s skin too.
Obama talked about this at length; regardless of his family past he also suffered racism, whether it was trying to get a taxi or how people treated him in the workplace.
Less educated parents creates a cycle of poverty, which is one of the reasons AA is used as a remedy to address the fact that white Americans were given more opportunities including scholarships and housing benefits that were denied to POC.
AA shouldn’t be permanent but we are not past the injustices yet.
Yes, that’s one problem I pointed out. It continues that tradition.
What you say about its effects is how it may help the US. It may help American society benefit from talents that would otherwise lay fallow. It also may have other positive effects. If it works as intended, it will benefit the nation by making it richer and stronger.
What it doesn’t do is address past injustices. These injustices were countless individual crimes that happened to individual human beings.
It’s impossible to adjudicate every individual injustice by this point, which is why a larger societal-level fix is necessary.