#Advocates call on Biden to act on reparations study by Juneteenth

[ausetkmt]

It's been more than a month since a dozen civil rights and religious groups say they sent a letter to the White House calling on President Joe Biden sign an executive order to study reparations by Juneteenth, or this Sunday, June 19, marking the emancipation of enslaved African Americans.

Reparations activists outside new art installation calling on President Joe Biden to sign an executive order on reparations in Washington.

Human Rights Watch

The study activists wants comes after a decades-long push to establish a 13-person reparations commission in Congress.

A art installation calling on President Joe Biden to sign an executive order on reparations stands in Washington.

Human Rights Watch

Shortly after the end of the Civil War, Union leaders promised formerly enslaved families "40 acres and a mule" -- a promise never fulfilled.

However, a reminder of the centuries-old promise has languished in Congress for decades. H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, has been introduced in every legislative session since 1989.

The measure seeks to establish a commission to study "and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, legal and other racial and economic discrimination, and the impact of these forces on living African Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies ..."

In recent years, the bill has gained some political traction.

In 2019, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hundreds of members of Congress and over 350 organizations, including the U.S. Conference of Mayors, NAACP and ACLU publicly announced support for reparations.

At the Tribeca Film Festival, "The Big Payback," a documentary examining reparations, directed by "Living Single" actress Erika Alexander, premiered at the legendary festival in early June.

President Joe Biden delivers remarks in the East Room of the White House, June 13, 2022, in Washington, DC.

Win Mcnamee/Getty Images

Former White House press secretary Jen Psaki reiterated in 2021 that President Biden supported the study of reparations. However, when asked if he would support a bill on reparations Psaki said, "We'll see what happens through the legislative process."

Asked if Biden supports an executive order on the study of reparations, Psaki said at the time, "it would be up to him, he has executive order authority, he would certainly support a study, and we'll see where Congress moves on that issue."

A White House official told ABC News on Thursday, President Biden still "supports a study of reparations and the continued impacts of slavery but he is very clear that we don't need a study to advance racial equity."

Nkechi Taifa, center, speaks at Vote For Justice: An Evening of Empowerment with activists and artists at the Newseum, May 9, 2018, in Washington.

Paul Morigi/AP, FILE

Nkechi Taifa is director of the Reparation Education Project, and has been calling for reparations for moire than 50 years. In 1987, she was one of the founders of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N'COBRA), an organization that worked closely with Democratic Rep. John Conyers to draft the introduction of H.R. 40 in 1989. She says now is the time for Biden to sign an executive order so the commission can be up and running before the end of Biden's presidency.

Taifa says she hopes the display at the ellipse sends a message that reparations advocates need to be paid attention to, and Black people should not be taken for granted.

She told ABC News, "If they think they're gonna rest on Juneteenth because it's a holiday and a watered down policing reform bill -- that's not enough. Black people have been run roughshod over, you know, for centuries, and it just, it just cannot continue."

Joan Neal, deputy executive director and chief equity officer at NETWORK, a social justice advocacy group founded by U.S. religious sisters tells ABC News, that "Slavery was a sin, that was the original sin of this country, and we believe that unless you acknowledge your sin and you make a firm determination to never do it again, and then make restitution for what was lost. You still have not been forgiven."

She added, "All parties have to be willing to stand up and face the sin in order for the sin to be forgiven and in order for things to be whole again."

[bigbirdgladiator]

Presumptive Democratic nominee Biden has said he will support study of reparations, representing a sea change on the issueAs the American civil war reached its bloody end in 1865, the Union general William Sherman seized land from Confederates and mandated it be redistributed, in 40-acre plots, to newly freed slaves.The promise of “40 acres and a mule” was never fulfilled. But a debate has raged ever since about what America owes to the descendants of slaves, and to the victims of racial terror and state-sanctioned discrimination that persisted long after emancipation.“We helped build this nation. We built the United States Capitol. We built the White House. We made cotton king and that built the early economy of the United States,” the Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the sponsor of a House resolution to study reparations, said in an interview this week.“We were never paid, never given insurance, never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today.”Jackson Lee said the disparities exposed by compounding national crises – a pandemic, an economic collapse and widespread protests over police brutality, all of which have taken an unequal toll on African Americans – are helping to make the case for reparations.In the weeks since George Floyd died pleading for his life under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, an act many saw as an embodiment of the violent oppression black Americans have endured for centuries, public support for the Black Lives Matter movement has soared.“Look at the protests. Look at the protesters,” Jackson Lee said. “We are winning the hearts and minds of the American people. That’s why I think the time to pass reparations is now.”Reparations were once a lonely cause championed by black leaders and lawmakers. Now the debate has moved to the center of mainstream politics.Several states, localities and private institutions are beginning to grapple with issue, advancing legislation or convening taskforces to develop proposals for reparations. Progressive candidates running for Congress from New York to Colorado to Texas have declared their support for reparations. And earlier this month, at an AME church in Delaware, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, listened as the state senator Darius Brown challenged him on the issue.“It shouldn’t be a study of reparations,” Brown said. “It should be funding reparations.”But for scholars and advocates who have been making the case for reparations for decades, Biden’s support for studying the issue represents a dramatic break from the past.> [We] never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today> > Sheila Jackson LeeJohn Conyers, who died in 2019 and was the longest-serving African American in Congress, first introduced a bill to study reparations for slavery in 1989. The Michigan Democrat reintroduced it every cycle for nearly three decades, until he resigned in 2017. Even Barack Obama, when asked by the author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose influential 2014 essay in the Atlantic reintroduced the subject, said he was opposed, arguing that reparations was politically impractical.Jackson Lee reintroduced Conyers’ bill, which would develop a commission to study the legacy of slavery across generations and consider a “national apology” for the harm it has caused. The measure, designated HR 40 in reference to Sherman’s unmet promise, now has more than 125 sponsors, the blessing of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, and the New Jersey senator Cory Booker introduced a companion measure.On Juneteenth last year, a congressional subcommittee convened a first-of-its-kind hearing to discuss how the nation might atone for its “original sin”, as well as the Jim Crow segregation that followed and the modern scourges of mass incarceration, persistent inequality and police violence that still plague African Americans.Such a commission would have to grapple with profound moral and ethical questions as well as profane matters of money and politics. Proposals vary widely, as do the cost estimates and suggested criteria for eligibility. But at their core is an attempt to make economic amends for historic wrongs.William Darity, an economist at Duke University and the author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, argues that the wealth disparities between white and black Americans is the “most powerful indicator” of the cumulative economic toll of racial injustice in America.The data paint a stark picture. Black Americans hold one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans. Just 41% of black families own their homes compared with more than 70% of white families. And black college graduates have a lower homeownership rate than white high school dropouts.Darity says the objective of a reparations package should be to close the wealth gap, and that the best way to do that is by direct payments to eligible black Americans. As for political objections to the scale and expense of such a program, he notes that earlier this year Congress allocated $2tn for a coronavirus relief measure that included direct payments to Americans.Others have suggested compensation in the form of educational vouchers, health insurance or investments in programs that address disparities in education, housing and employment. That the debate has expanded to include discussions over feasibility and mechanics is a sign of progress, Darity said.“We’re finally moving away from the question of whether or not it’s the right thing to do – because more and more people acknowledge that, at least in principle, it is the right thing to do,” he said. “And that is a major step forward because the logistical questions can be resolved.”Still the notion of compensating descendants of American slaves is not widely popular. But there are signs that is shifting.According to a Gallup Poll conducted in 2002, 81% of Americans opposed reparations, compared with just 14% who supported the idea. In 2019, Gallup found that 29% of Americans agreed the government should recompense descendants of the enslaved, with support rising among white Americans from 6% to 16%. The most dramatic increase was among black Americans, whose support climbed from a simple majority in 2002 to nearly three-quarters in 2019.At the same time, young Americans are significantly more likely to agree that the legacy of slavery still impacts black Americans today, while also being more likely to say the US government should formally apologize for slavery and pay reparations, according to an AP-NORC poll published in September.And supporters are hopeful those numbers will rise amid a national reckoning over racism and discrimination. Public opinion on race has shifted dramatically in the span of a few weeks, with a majority of Americans now in agreement that racial discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States.In California, assemblywoman Shirley Weber said the protests fueled interest in her bill to study reparations in the state, which the chamber approved overwhelmingly last week.“Something dramatic is going on,” said Weber, who is the daughter of sharecroppers and a scholar of African American studies. “Folks now begin to realize just how extensively, how deeply, issues of race are embedded in our society and how that can produce what we saw happen to George Floyd in Minneapolis.”Reparations have long been met with strong resistance from conservatives and some prominent black leaders, who have dismissed the idea as impractical and unnecessarily divisive.“I don’t think reparations help level the playing field, it might help more eruptions on the playing field,” Senator Tim Scott, the lone black Republican senator, told Fox News earlier this month.Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the free market thinktank Manhattan Institute, worries a renewed focus on reparations was a “distraction” from the more pressing issues, like police brutality and mass incarceration, that has devastated America’s black communities.“How are reparations going to hold police accountable?” he said. “What is the added value of talking about reparations as opposed to talking about just good public policy that is going to address inequality and poverty?” Yet recompense for historical injustices are not without precedent in America. After the second world war, Congress created a commission to compensate Native American tribes for land seized by the US government, though many say the approach was paternalistic. Decades later, Ronald Reagan signed legislation that authorized individual payments of $20,000 to Japanese Americans who were interned in the US during the second world war, and extended a formal apology from the US government.In 2008, the House passed a resolution acknowledging and apologizing for slavery. The Senate approved a similar resolution a year later, but a disclaimer was appended to ensure the apology could not be used as a legal rationale for reparations.Facing history is a necessary part of the healing process for nations cleaved by atrocity said Susan Neiman, an Atlanta-born academic based in Berlin and the author of Learning from the Germans.She said it took time for Germany to confront the horrors of nazism and the Holocaust, Neiman said, and the process faced strong resistance. Since 1952, Germany has paid reparations, mostly to Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.“It needs to be a multi-layered process, one involving schools, the arts, rethinking what values we want to honor in public space, and all manner of legal measures from reparations to ending police brutality,” she said. “Ideally, a broad democratic discussion must accompany such a process, and once it’s done, countries are actually better off for it.”The cruelty of the Covid-19 outbreak, the economic crisis and police brutality against black Americans must be understood as part of “a continuum that began with the Middle Passage”, said the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, author of a new bill to establish a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission.“This is truth-telling time,” she said. “We have to, as I say, break these chains once and for all.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2NiF4U5

[weopenviews]

Presumptive Democratic nominee Biden has said he will support study of reparations, representing a sea change on the issueAs the American civil war reached its bloody end in 1865, the Union general William Sherman seized land from Confederates and mandated it be redistributed, in 40-acre plots, to newly freed slaves.The promise of “40 acres and a mule” was never fulfilled. But a debate has raged ever since about what America owes to the descendants of slaves, and to the victims of racial terror and state-sanctioned discrimination that persisted long after emancipation.“We helped build this nation. We built the United States Capitol. We built the White House. We made cotton king and that built the early economy of the United States,” the Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the sponsor of a House resolution to study reparations, said in an interview this week.“We were never paid, never given insurance, never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today.”Jackson Lee said the disparities exposed by compounding national crises – a pandemic, an economic collapse and widespread protests over police brutality, all of which have taken an unequal toll on African Americans – are helping to make the case for reparations.In the weeks since George Floyd died pleading for his life under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, an act many saw as an embodiment of the violent oppression black Americans have endured for centuries, public support for the Black Lives Matter movement has soared.“Look at the protests. Look at the protesters,” Jackson Lee said. “We are winning the hearts and minds of the American people. That’s why I think the time to pass reparations is now.”Reparations were once a lonely cause championed by black leaders and lawmakers. Now the debate has moved to the center of mainstream politics.Several states, localities and private institutions are beginning to grapple with issue, advancing legislation or convening taskforces to develop proposals for reparations. Progressive candidates running for Congress from New York to Colorado to Texas have declared their support for reparations. And earlier this month, at an AME church in Delaware, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, listened as the state senator Darius Brown challenged him on the issue.“It shouldn’t be a study of reparations,” Brown said. “It should be funding reparations.”But for scholars and advocates who have been making the case for reparations for decades, Biden’s support for studying the issue represents a dramatic break from the past.> [We] never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today> > Sheila Jackson LeeJohn Conyers, who died in 2019 and was the longest-serving African American in Congress, first introduced a bill to study reparations for slavery in 1989. The Michigan Democrat reintroduced it every cycle for nearly three decades, until he resigned in 2017. Even Barack Obama, when asked by the author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose influential 2014 essay in the Atlantic reintroduced the subject, said he was opposed, arguing that reparations was politically impractical.Jackson Lee reintroduced Conyers’ bill, which would develop a commission to study the legacy of slavery across generations and consider a “national apology” for the harm it has caused. The measure, designated HR 40 in reference to Sherman’s unmet promise, now has more than 125 sponsors, the blessing of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, and the New Jersey senator Cory Booker introduced a companion measure.On Juneteenth last year, a congressional subcommittee convened a first-of-its-kind hearing to discuss how the nation might atone for its “original sin”, as well as the Jim Crow segregation that followed and the modern scourges of mass incarceration, persistent inequality and police violence that still plague African Americans.Such a commission would have to grapple with profound moral and ethical questions as well as profane matters of money and politics. Proposals vary widely, as do the cost estimates and suggested criteria for eligibility. But at their core is an attempt to make economic amends for historic wrongs.William Darity, an economist at Duke University and the author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, argues that the wealth disparities between white and black Americans is the “most powerful indicator” of the cumulative economic toll of racial injustice in America.The data paint a stark picture. Black Americans hold one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans. Just 41% of black families own their homes compared with more than 70% of white families. And black college graduates have a lower homeownership rate than white high school dropouts.Darity says the objective of a reparations package should be to close the wealth gap, and that the best way to do that is by direct payments to eligible black Americans. As for political objections to the scale and expense of such a program, he notes that earlier this year Congress allocated $2tn for a coronavirus relief measure that included direct payments to Americans.Others have suggested compensation in the form of educational vouchers, health insurance or investments in programs that address disparities in education, housing and employment. That the debate has expanded to include discussions over feasibility and mechanics is a sign of progress, Darity said.“We’re finally moving away from the question of whether or not it’s the right thing to do – because more and more people acknowledge that, at least in principle, it is the right thing to do,” he said. “And that is a major step forward because the logistical questions can be resolved.”Still the notion of compensating descendants of American slaves is not widely popular. But there are signs that is shifting.According to a Gallup Poll conducted in 2002, 81% of Americans opposed reparations, compared with just 14% who supported the idea. In 2019, Gallup found that 29% of Americans agreed the government should recompense descendants of the enslaved, with support rising among white Americans from 6% to 16%. The most dramatic increase was among black Americans, whose support climbed from a simple majority in 2002 to nearly three-quarters in 2019.At the same time, young Americans are significantly more likely to agree that the legacy of slavery still impacts black Americans today, while also being more likely to say the US government should formally apologize for slavery and pay reparations, according to an AP-NORC poll published in September.And supporters are hopeful those numbers will rise amid a national reckoning over racism and discrimination. Public opinion on race has shifted dramatically in the span of a few weeks, with a majority of Americans now in agreement that racial discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States.In California, assemblywoman Shirley Weber said the protests fueled interest in her bill to study reparations in the state, which the chamber approved overwhelmingly last week.“Something dramatic is going on,” said Weber, who is the daughter of sharecroppers and a scholar of African American studies. “Folks now begin to realize just how extensively, how deeply, issues of race are embedded in our society and how that can produce what we saw happen to George Floyd in Minneapolis.”Reparations have long been met with strong resistance from conservatives and some prominent black leaders, who have dismissed the idea as impractical and unnecessarily divisive.“I don’t think reparations help level the playing field, it might help more eruptions on the playing field,” Senator Tim Scott, the lone black Republican senator, told Fox News earlier this month.Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the free market thinktank Manhattan Institute, worries a renewed focus on reparations was a “distraction” from the more pressing issues, like police brutality and mass incarceration, that has devastated America’s black communities.“How are reparations going to hold police accountable?” he said. “What is the added value of talking about reparations as opposed to talking about just good public policy that is going to address inequality and poverty?” Yet recompense for historical injustices are not without precedent in America. After the second world war, Congress created a commission to compensate Native American tribes for land seized by the US government, though many say the approach was paternalistic. Decades later, Ronald Reagan signed legislation that authorized individual payments of $20,000 to Japanese Americans who were interned in the US during the second world war, and extended a formal apology from the US government.In 2008, the House passed a resolution acknowledging and apologizing for slavery. The Senate approved a similar resolution a year later, but a disclaimer was appended to ensure the apology could not be used as a legal rationale for reparations.Facing history is a necessary part of the healing process for nations cleaved by atrocity said Susan Neiman, an Atlanta-born academic based in Berlin and the author of Learning from the Germans.She said it took time for Germany to confront the horrors of nazism and the Holocaust, Neiman said, and the process faced strong resistance. Since 1952, Germany has paid reparations, mostly to Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.“It needs to be a multi-layered process, one involving schools, the arts, rethinking what values we want to honor in public space, and all manner of legal measures from reparations to ending police brutality,” she said. “Ideally, a broad democratic discussion must accompany such a process, and once it’s done, countries are actually better off for it.”The cruelty of the Covid-19 outbreak, the economic crisis and police brutality against black Americans must be understood as part of “a continuum that began with the Middle Passage”, said the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, author of a new bill to establish a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission.“This is truth-telling time,” she said. “We have to, as I say, break these chains once and for all.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2NiF4U5

[tendance-news]

Presumptive Democratic nominee Biden has said he will support study of reparations, representing a sea change on the issueAs the American civil war reached its bloody end in 1865, the Union general William Sherman seized land from Confederates and mandated it be redistributed, in 40-acre plots, to newly freed slaves.The promise of “40 acres and a mule” was never fulfilled. But a debate has raged ever since about what America owes to the descendants of slaves, and to the victims of racial terror and state-sanctioned discrimination that persisted long after emancipation.“We helped build this nation. We built the United States Capitol. We built the White House. We made cotton king and that built the early economy of the United States,” the Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the sponsor of a House resolution to study reparations, said in an interview this week.“We were never paid, never given insurance, never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today.”Jackson Lee said the disparities exposed by compounding national crises – a pandemic, an economic collapse and widespread protests over police brutality, all of which have taken an unequal toll on African Americans – are helping to make the case for reparations.In the weeks since George Floyd died pleading for his life under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, an act many saw as an embodiment of the violent oppression black Americans have endured for centuries, public support for the Black Lives Matter movement has soared.“Look at the protests. Look at the protesters,” Jackson Lee said. “We are winning the hearts and minds of the American people. That’s why I think the time to pass reparations is now.”Reparations were once a lonely cause championed by black leaders and lawmakers. Now the debate has moved to the center of mainstream politics.Several states, localities and private institutions are beginning to grapple with issue, advancing legislation or convening taskforces to develop proposals for reparations. Progressive candidates running for Congress from New York to Colorado to Texas have declared their support for reparations. And earlier this month, at an AME church in Delaware, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, listened as the state senator Darius Brown challenged him on the issue.“It shouldn’t be a study of reparations,” Brown said. “It should be funding reparations.”But for scholars and advocates who have been making the case for reparations for decades, Biden’s support for studying the issue represents a dramatic break from the past.> [We] never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today> > Sheila Jackson LeeJohn Conyers, who died in 2019 and was the longest-serving African American in Congress, first introduced a bill to study reparations for slavery in 1989. The Michigan Democrat reintroduced it every cycle for nearly three decades, until he resigned in 2017. Even Barack Obama, when asked by the author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose influential 2014 essay in the Atlantic reintroduced the subject, said he was opposed, arguing that reparations was politically impractical.Jackson Lee reintroduced Conyers’ bill, which would develop a commission to study the legacy of slavery across generations and consider a “national apology” for the harm it has caused. The measure, designated HR 40 in reference to Sherman’s unmet promise, now has more than 125 sponsors, the blessing of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, and the New Jersey senator Cory Booker introduced a companion measure.On Juneteenth last year, a congressional subcommittee convened a first-of-its-kind hearing to discuss how the nation might atone for its “original sin”, as well as the Jim Crow segregation that followed and the modern scourges of mass incarceration, persistent inequality and police violence that still plague African Americans.Such a commission would have to grapple with profound moral and ethical questions as well as profane matters of money and politics. Proposals vary widely, as do the cost estimates and suggested criteria for eligibility. But at their core is an attempt to make economic amends for historic wrongs.William Darity, an economist at Duke University and the author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, argues that the wealth disparities between white and black Americans is the “most powerful indicator” of the cumulative economic toll of racial injustice in America.The data paint a stark picture. Black Americans hold one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans. Just 41% of black families own their homes compared with more than 70% of white families. And black college graduates have a lower homeownership rate than white high school dropouts.Darity says the objective of a reparations package should be to close the wealth gap, and that the best way to do that is by direct payments to eligible black Americans. As for political objections to the scale and expense of such a program, he notes that earlier this year Congress allocated $2tn for a coronavirus relief measure that included direct payments to Americans.Others have suggested compensation in the form of educational vouchers, health insurance or investments in programs that address disparities in education, housing and employment. That the debate has expanded to include discussions over feasibility and mechanics is a sign of progress, Darity said.“We’re finally moving away from the question of whether or not it’s the right thing to do – because more and more people acknowledge that, at least in principle, it is the right thing to do,” he said. “And that is a major step forward because the logistical questions can be resolved.”Still the notion of compensating descendants of American slaves is not widely popular. But there are signs that is shifting.According to a Gallup Poll conducted in 2002, 81% of Americans opposed reparations, compared with just 14% who supported the idea. In 2019, Gallup found that 29% of Americans agreed the government should recompense descendants of the enslaved, with support rising among white Americans from 6% to 16%. The most dramatic increase was among black Americans, whose support climbed from a simple majority in 2002 to nearly three-quarters in 2019.At the same time, young Americans are significantly more likely to agree that the legacy of slavery still impacts black Americans today, while also being more likely to say the US government should formally apologize for slavery and pay reparations, according to an AP-NORC poll published in September.And supporters are hopeful those numbers will rise amid a national reckoning over racism and discrimination. Public opinion on race has shifted dramatically in the span of a few weeks, with a majority of Americans now in agreement that racial discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States.In California, assemblywoman Shirley Weber said the protests fueled interest in her bill to study reparations in the state, which the chamber approved overwhelmingly last week.“Something dramatic is going on,” said Weber, who is the daughter of sharecroppers and a scholar of African American studies. “Folks now begin to realize just how extensively, how deeply, issues of race are embedded in our society and how that can produce what we saw happen to George Floyd in Minneapolis.”Reparations have long been met with strong resistance from conservatives and some prominent black leaders, who have dismissed the idea as impractical and unnecessarily divisive.“I don’t think reparations help level the playing field, it might help more eruptions on the playing field,” Senator Tim Scott, the lone black Republican senator, told Fox News earlier this month.Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the free market thinktank Manhattan Institute, worries a renewed focus on reparations was a “distraction” from the more pressing issues, like police brutality and mass incarceration, that has devastated America’s black communities.“How are reparations going to hold police accountable?” he said. “What is the added value of talking about reparations as opposed to talking about just good public policy that is going to address inequality and poverty?” Yet recompense for historical injustices are not without precedent in America. After the second world war, Congress created a commission to compensate Native American tribes for land seized by the US government, though many say the approach was paternalistic. Decades later, Ronald Reagan signed legislation that authorized individual payments of $20,000 to Japanese Americans who were interned in the US during the second world war, and extended a formal apology from the US government.In 2008, the House passed a resolution acknowledging and apologizing for slavery. The Senate approved a similar resolution a year later, but a disclaimer was appended to ensure the apology could not be used as a legal rationale for reparations.Facing history is a necessary part of the healing process for nations cleaved by atrocity said Susan Neiman, an Atlanta-born academic based in Berlin and the author of Learning from the Germans.She said it took time for Germany to confront the horrors of nazism and the Holocaust, Neiman said, and the process faced strong resistance. Since 1952, Germany has paid reparations, mostly to Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.“It needs to be a multi-layered process, one involving schools, the arts, rethinking what values we want to honor in public space, and all manner of legal measures from reparations to ending police brutality,” she said. “Ideally, a broad democratic discussion must accompany such a process, and once it’s done, countries are actually better off for it.”The cruelty of the Covid-19 outbreak, the economic crisis and police brutality against black Americans must be understood as part of “a continuum that began with the Middle Passage”, said the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, author of a new bill to establish a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission.“This is truth-telling time,” she said. “We have to, as I say, break these chains once and for all.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2NiF4U5

[saadullah-faisal-world]

Presumptive Democratic nominee Biden has said he will support study of reparations, representing a sea change on the issueAs the American civil war reached its bloody end in 1865, the Union general William Sherman seized land from Confederates and mandated it be redistributed, in 40-acre plots, to newly freed slaves.The promise of “40 acres and a mule” was never fulfilled. But a debate has raged ever since about what America owes to the descendants of slaves, and to the victims of racial terror and state-sanctioned discrimination that persisted long after emancipation.“We helped build this nation. We built the United States Capitol. We built the White House. We made cotton king and that built the early economy of the United States,” the Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the sponsor of a House resolution to study reparations, said in an interview this week.“We were never paid, never given insurance, never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today.”Jackson Lee said the disparities exposed by compounding national crises – a pandemic, an economic collapse and widespread protests over police brutality, all of which have taken an unequal toll on African Americans – are helping to make the case for reparations.In the weeks since George Floyd died pleading for his life under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, an act many saw as an embodiment of the violent oppression black Americans have endured for centuries, public support for the Black Lives Matter movement has soared.“Look at the protests. Look at the protesters,” Jackson Lee said. “We are winning the hearts and minds of the American people. That’s why I think the time to pass reparations is now.”Reparations were once a lonely cause championed by black leaders and lawmakers. Now the debate has moved to the center of mainstream politics.Several states, localities and private institutions are beginning to grapple with issue, advancing legislation or convening taskforces to develop proposals for reparations. Progressive candidates running for Congress from New York to Colorado to Texas have declared their support for reparations. And earlier this month, at an AME church in Delaware, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, listened as the state senator Darius Brown challenged him on the issue.“It shouldn’t be a study of reparations,” Brown said. “It should be funding reparations.”But for scholars and advocates who have been making the case for reparations for decades, Biden’s support for studying the issue represents a dramatic break from the past.> [We] never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today> > Sheila Jackson LeeJohn Conyers, who died in 2019 and was the longest-serving African American in Congress, first introduced a bill to study reparations for slavery in 1989. The Michigan Democrat reintroduced it every cycle for nearly three decades, until he resigned in 2017. Even Barack Obama, when asked by the author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose influential 2014 essay in the Atlantic reintroduced the subject, said he was opposed, arguing that reparations was politically impractical.Jackson Lee reintroduced Conyers’ bill, which would develop a commission to study the legacy of slavery across generations and consider a “national apology” for the harm it has caused. The measure, designated HR 40 in reference to Sherman’s unmet promise, now has more than 125 sponsors, the blessing of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, and the New Jersey senator Cory Booker introduced a companion measure.On Juneteenth last year, a congressional subcommittee convened a first-of-its-kind hearing to discuss how the nation might atone for its “original sin”, as well as the Jim Crow segregation that followed and the modern scourges of mass incarceration, persistent inequality and police violence that still plague African Americans.Such a commission would have to grapple with profound moral and ethical questions as well as profane matters of money and politics. Proposals vary widely, as do the cost estimates and suggested criteria for eligibility. But at their core is an attempt to make economic amends for historic wrongs.William Darity, an economist at Duke University and the author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, argues that the wealth disparities between white and black Americans is the “most powerful indicator” of the cumulative economic toll of racial injustice in America.The data paint a stark picture. Black Americans hold one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans. Just 41% of black families own their homes compared with more than 70% of white families. And black college graduates have a lower homeownership rate than white high school dropouts.Darity says the objective of a reparations package should be to close the wealth gap, and that the best way to do that is by direct payments to eligible black Americans. As for political objections to the scale and expense of such a program, he notes that earlier this year Congress allocated $2tn for a coronavirus relief measure that included direct payments to Americans.Others have suggested compensation in the form of educational vouchers, health insurance or investments in programs that address disparities in education, housing and employment. That the debate has expanded to include discussions over feasibility and mechanics is a sign of progress, Darity said.“We’re finally moving away from the question of whether or not it’s the right thing to do – because more and more people acknowledge that, at least in principle, it is the right thing to do,” he said. “And that is a major step forward because the logistical questions can be resolved.”Still the notion of compensating descendants of American slaves is not widely popular. But there are signs that is shifting.According to a Gallup Poll conducted in 2002, 81% of Americans opposed reparations, compared with just 14% who supported the idea. In 2019, Gallup found that 29% of Americans agreed the government should recompense descendants of the enslaved, with support rising among white Americans from 6% to 16%. The most dramatic increase was among black Americans, whose support climbed from a simple majority in 2002 to nearly three-quarters in 2019.At the same time, young Americans are significantly more likely to agree that the legacy of slavery still impacts black Americans today, while also being more likely to say the US government should formally apologize for slavery and pay reparations, according to an AP-NORC poll published in September.And supporters are hopeful those numbers will rise amid a national reckoning over racism and discrimination. Public opinion on race has shifted dramatically in the span of a few weeks, with a majority of Americans now in agreement that racial discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States.In California, assemblywoman Shirley Weber said the protests fueled interest in her bill to study reparations in the state, which the chamber approved overwhelmingly last week.“Something dramatic is going on,” said Weber, who is the daughter of sharecroppers and a scholar of African American studies. “Folks now begin to realize just how extensively, how deeply, issues of race are embedded in our society and how that can produce what we saw happen to George Floyd in Minneapolis.”Reparations have long been met with strong resistance from conservatives and some prominent black leaders, who have dismissed the idea as impractical and unnecessarily divisive.“I don’t think reparations help level the playing field, it might help more eruptions on the playing field,” Senator Tim Scott, the lone black Republican senator, told Fox News earlier this month.Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the free market thinktank Manhattan Institute, worries a renewed focus on reparations was a “distraction” from the more pressing issues, like police brutality and mass incarceration, that has devastated America’s black communities.“How are reparations going to hold police accountable?” he said. “What is the added value of talking about reparations as opposed to talking about just good public policy that is going to address inequality and poverty?” Yet recompense for historical injustices are not without precedent in America. After the second world war, Congress created a commission to compensate Native American tribes for land seized by the US government, though many say the approach was paternalistic. Decades later, Ronald Reagan signed legislation that authorized individual payments of $20,000 to Japanese Americans who were interned in the US during the second world war, and extended a formal apology from the US government.In 2008, the House passed a resolution acknowledging and apologizing for slavery. The Senate approved a similar resolution a year later, but a disclaimer was appended to ensure the apology could not be used as a legal rationale for reparations.Facing history is a necessary part of the healing process for nations cleaved by atrocity said Susan Neiman, an Atlanta-born academic based in Berlin and the author of Learning from the Germans.She said it took time for Germany to confront the horrors of nazism and the Holocaust, Neiman said, and the process faced strong resistance. Since 1952, Germany has paid reparations, mostly to Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.“It needs to be a multi-layered process, one involving schools, the arts, rethinking what values we want to honor in public space, and all manner of legal measures from reparations to ending police brutality,” she said. “Ideally, a broad democratic discussion must accompany such a process, and once it’s done, countries are actually better off for it.”The cruelty of the Covid-19 outbreak, the economic crisis and police brutality against black Americans must be understood as part of “a continuum that began with the Middle Passage”, said the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, author of a new bill to establish a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission.“This is truth-telling time,” she said. “We have to, as I say, break these chains once and for all.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2NiF4U5

[orendrasingh]

Presumptive Democratic nominee Biden has said he will support study of reparations, representing a sea change on the issueAs the American civil war reached its bloody end in 1865, the Union general William Sherman seized land from Confederates and mandated it be redistributed, in 40-acre plots, to newly freed slaves.The promise of “40 acres and a mule” was never fulfilled. But a debate has raged ever since about what America owes to the descendants of slaves, and to the victims of racial terror and state-sanctioned discrimination that persisted long after emancipation.“We helped build this nation. We built the United States Capitol. We built the White House. We made cotton king and that built the early economy of the United States,” the Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the sponsor of a House resolution to study reparations, said in an interview this week.“We were never paid, never given insurance, never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today.”Jackson Lee said the disparities exposed by compounding national crises – a pandemic, an economic collapse and widespread protests over police brutality, all of which have taken an unequal toll on African Americans – are helping to make the case for reparations.In the weeks since George Floyd died pleading for his life under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, an act many saw as an embodiment of the violent oppression black Americans have endured for centuries, public support for the Black Lives Matter movement has soared.“Look at the protests. Look at the protesters,” Jackson Lee said. “We are winning the hearts and minds of the American people. That’s why I think the time to pass reparations is now.”Reparations were once a lonely cause championed by black leaders and lawmakers. Now the debate has moved to the center of mainstream politics.Several states, localities and private institutions are beginning to grapple with issue, advancing legislation or convening taskforces to develop proposals for reparations. Progressive candidates running for Congress from New York to Colorado to Texas have declared their support for reparations. And earlier this month, at an AME church in Delaware, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, listened as the state senator Darius Brown challenged him on the issue.“It shouldn’t be a study of reparations,” Brown said. “It should be funding reparations.”But for scholars and advocates who have been making the case for reparations for decades, Biden’s support for studying the issue represents a dramatic break from the past.> [We] never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today> > Sheila Jackson LeeJohn Conyers, who died in 2019 and was the longest-serving African American in Congress, first introduced a bill to study reparations for slavery in 1989. The Michigan Democrat reintroduced it every cycle for nearly three decades, until he resigned in 2017. Even Barack Obama, when asked by the author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose influential 2014 essay in the Atlantic reintroduced the subject, said he was opposed, arguing that reparations was politically impractical.Jackson Lee reintroduced Conyers’ bill, which would develop a commission to study the legacy of slavery across generations and consider a “national apology” for the harm it has caused. The measure, designated HR 40 in reference to Sherman’s unmet promise, now has more than 125 sponsors, the blessing of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, and the New Jersey senator Cory Booker introduced a companion measure.On Juneteenth last year, a congressional subcommittee convened a first-of-its-kind hearing to discuss how the nation might atone for its “original sin”, as well as the Jim Crow segregation that followed and the modern scourges of mass incarceration, persistent inequality and police violence that still plague African Americans.Such a commission would have to grapple with profound moral and ethical questions as well as profane matters of money and politics. Proposals vary widely, as do the cost estimates and suggested criteria for eligibility. But at their core is an attempt to make economic amends for historic wrongs.William Darity, an economist at Duke University and the author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, argues that the wealth disparities between white and black Americans is the “most powerful indicator” of the cumulative economic toll of racial injustice in America.The data paint a stark picture. Black Americans hold one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans. Just 41% of black families own their homes compared with more than 70% of white families. And black college graduates have a lower homeownership rate than white high school dropouts.Darity says the objective of a reparations package should be to close the wealth gap, and that the best way to do that is by direct payments to eligible black Americans. As for political objections to the scale and expense of such a program, he notes that earlier this year Congress allocated $2tn for a coronavirus relief measure that included direct payments to Americans.Others have suggested compensation in the form of educational vouchers, health insurance or investments in programs that address disparities in education, housing and employment. That the debate has expanded to include discussions over feasibility and mechanics is a sign of progress, Darity said.“We’re finally moving away from the question of whether or not it’s the right thing to do – because more and more people acknowledge that, at least in principle, it is the right thing to do,” he said. “And that is a major step forward because the logistical questions can be resolved.”Still the notion of compensating descendants of American slaves is not widely popular. But there are signs that is shifting.According to a Gallup Poll conducted in 2002, 81% of Americans opposed reparations, compared with just 14% who supported the idea. In 2019, Gallup found that 29% of Americans agreed the government should recompense descendants of the enslaved, with support rising among white Americans from 6% to 16%. The most dramatic increase was among black Americans, whose support climbed from a simple majority in 2002 to nearly three-quarters in 2019.At the same time, young Americans are significantly more likely to agree that the legacy of slavery still impacts black Americans today, while also being more likely to say the US government should formally apologize for slavery and pay reparations, according to an AP-NORC poll published in September.And supporters are hopeful those numbers will rise amid a national reckoning over racism and discrimination. Public opinion on race has shifted dramatically in the span of a few weeks, with a majority of Americans now in agreement that racial discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States.In California, assemblywoman Shirley Weber said the protests fueled interest in her bill to study reparations in the state, which the chamber approved overwhelmingly last week.“Something dramatic is going on,” said Weber, who is the daughter of sharecroppers and a scholar of African American studies. “Folks now begin to realize just how extensively, how deeply, issues of race are embedded in our society and how that can produce what we saw happen to George Floyd in Minneapolis.”Reparations have long been met with strong resistance from conservatives and some prominent black leaders, who have dismissed the idea as impractical and unnecessarily divisive.“I don’t think reparations help level the playing field, it might help more eruptions on the playing field,” Senator Tim Scott, the lone black Republican senator, told Fox News earlier this month.Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the free market thinktank Manhattan Institute, worries a renewed focus on reparations was a “distraction” from the more pressing issues, like police brutality and mass incarceration, that has devastated America’s black communities.“How are reparations going to hold police accountable?” he said. “What is the added value of talking about reparations as opposed to talking about just good public policy that is going to address inequality and poverty?” Yet recompense for historical injustices are not without precedent in America. After the second world war, Congress created a commission to compensate Native American tribes for land seized by the US government, though many say the approach was paternalistic. Decades later, Ronald Reagan signed legislation that authorized individual payments of $20,000 to Japanese Americans who were interned in the US during the second world war, and extended a formal apology from the US government.In 2008, the House passed a resolution acknowledging and apologizing for slavery. The Senate approved a similar resolution a year later, but a disclaimer was appended to ensure the apology could not be used as a legal rationale for reparations.Facing history is a necessary part of the healing process for nations cleaved by atrocity said Susan Neiman, an Atlanta-born academic based in Berlin and the author of Learning from the Germans.She said it took time for Germany to confront the horrors of nazism and the Holocaust, Neiman said, and the process faced strong resistance. Since 1952, Germany has paid reparations, mostly to Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.“It needs to be a multi-layered process, one involving schools, the arts, rethinking what values we want to honor in public space, and all manner of legal measures from reparations to ending police brutality,” she said. “Ideally, a broad democratic discussion must accompany such a process, and once it’s done, countries are actually better off for it.”The cruelty of the Covid-19 outbreak, the economic crisis and police brutality against black Americans must be understood as part of “a continuum that began with the Middle Passage”, said the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, author of a new bill to establish a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission.“This is truth-telling time,” she said. “We have to, as I say, break these chains once and for all.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2NiF4U5

[newseveryhourly]

Presumptive Democratic nominee Biden has said he will support study of reparations, representing a sea change on the issueAs the American civil war reached its bloody end in 1865, the Union general William Sherman seized land from Confederates and mandated it be redistributed, in 40-acre plots, to newly freed slaves.The promise of “40 acres and a mule” was never fulfilled. But a debate has raged ever since about what America owes to the descendants of slaves, and to the victims of racial terror and state-sanctioned discrimination that persisted long after emancipation.“We helped build this nation. We built the United States Capitol. We built the White House. We made cotton king and that built the early economy of the United States,” the Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the sponsor of a House resolution to study reparations, said in an interview this week.“We were never paid, never given insurance, never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today.”Jackson Lee said the disparities exposed by compounding national crises – a pandemic, an economic collapse and widespread protests over police brutality, all of which have taken an unequal toll on African Americans – are helping to make the case for reparations.In the weeks since George Floyd died pleading for his life under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, an act many saw as an embodiment of the violent oppression black Americans have endured for centuries, public support for the Black Lives Matter movement has soared.“Look at the protests. Look at the protesters,” Jackson Lee said. “We are winning the hearts and minds of the American people. That’s why I think the time to pass reparations is now.”Reparations were once a lonely cause championed by black leaders and lawmakers. Now the debate has moved to the center of mainstream politics.Several states, localities and private institutions are beginning to grapple with issue, advancing legislation or convening taskforces to develop proposals for reparations. Progressive candidates running for Congress from New York to Colorado to Texas have declared their support for reparations. And earlier this month, at an AME church in Delaware, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, listened as the state senator Darius Brown challenged him on the issue.“It shouldn’t be a study of reparations,” Brown said. “It should be funding reparations.”But for scholars and advocates who have been making the case for reparations for decades, Biden’s support for studying the issue represents a dramatic break from the past.> [We] never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today> > Sheila Jackson LeeJohn Conyers, who died in 2019 and was the longest-serving African American in Congress, first introduced a bill to study reparations for slavery in 1989. The Michigan Democrat reintroduced it every cycle for nearly three decades, until he resigned in 2017. Even Barack Obama, when asked by the author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose influential 2014 essay in the Atlantic reintroduced the subject, said he was opposed, arguing that reparations was politically impractical.Jackson Lee reintroduced Conyers’ bill, which would develop a commission to study the legacy of slavery across generations and consider a “national apology” for the harm it has caused. The measure, designated HR 40 in reference to Sherman’s unmet promise, now has more than 125 sponsors, the blessing of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, and the New Jersey senator Cory Booker introduced a companion measure.On Juneteenth last year, a congressional subcommittee convened a first-of-its-kind hearing to discuss how the nation might atone for its “original sin”, as well as the Jim Crow segregation that followed and the modern scourges of mass incarceration, persistent inequality and police violence that still plague African Americans.Such a commission would have to grapple with profound moral and ethical questions as well as profane matters of money and politics. Proposals vary widely, as do the cost estimates and suggested criteria for eligibility. But at their core is an attempt to make economic amends for historic wrongs.William Darity, an economist at Duke University and the author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, argues that the wealth disparities between white and black Americans is the “most powerful indicator” of the cumulative economic toll of racial injustice in America.The data paint a stark picture. Black Americans hold one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans. Just 41% of black families own their homes compared with more than 70% of white families. And black college graduates have a lower homeownership rate than white high school dropouts.Darity says the objective of a reparations package should be to close the wealth gap, and that the best way to do that is by direct payments to eligible black Americans. As for political objections to the scale and expense of such a program, he notes that earlier this year Congress allocated $2tn for a coronavirus relief measure that included direct payments to Americans.Others have suggested compensation in the form of educational vouchers, health insurance or investments in programs that address disparities in education, housing and employment. That the debate has expanded to include discussions over feasibility and mechanics is a sign of progress, Darity said.“We’re finally moving away from the question of whether or not it’s the right thing to do – because more and more people acknowledge that, at least in principle, it is the right thing to do,” he said. “And that is a major step forward because the logistical questions can be resolved.”Still the notion of compensating descendants of American slaves is not widely popular. But there are signs that is shifting.According to a Gallup Poll conducted in 2002, 81% of Americans opposed reparations, compared with just 14% who supported the idea. In 2019, Gallup found that 29% of Americans agreed the government should recompense descendants of the enslaved, with support rising among white Americans from 6% to 16%. The most dramatic increase was among black Americans, whose support climbed from a simple majority in 2002 to nearly three-quarters in 2019.At the same time, young Americans are significantly more likely to agree that the legacy of slavery still impacts black Americans today, while also being more likely to say the US government should formally apologize for slavery and pay reparations, according to an AP-NORC poll published in September.And supporters are hopeful those numbers will rise amid a national reckoning over racism and discrimination. Public opinion on race has shifted dramatically in the span of a few weeks, with a majority of Americans now in agreement that racial discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States.In California, assemblywoman Shirley Weber said the protests fueled interest in her bill to study reparations in the state, which the chamber approved overwhelmingly last week.“Something dramatic is going on,” said Weber, who is the daughter of sharecroppers and a scholar of African American studies. “Folks now begin to realize just how extensively, how deeply, issues of race are embedded in our society and how that can produce what we saw happen to George Floyd in Minneapolis.”Reparations have long been met with strong resistance from conservatives and some prominent black leaders, who have dismissed the idea as impractical and unnecessarily divisive.“I don’t think reparations help level the playing field, it might help more eruptions on the playing field,” Senator Tim Scott, the lone black Republican senator, told Fox News earlier this month.Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the free market thinktank Manhattan Institute, worries a renewed focus on reparations was a “distraction” from the more pressing issues, like police brutality and mass incarceration, that has devastated America’s black communities.“How are reparations going to hold police accountable?” he said. “What is the added value of talking about reparations as opposed to talking about just good public policy that is going to address inequality and poverty?” Yet recompense for historical injustices are not without precedent in America. After the second world war, Congress created a commission to compensate Native American tribes for land seized by the US government, though many say the approach was paternalistic. Decades later, Ronald Reagan signed legislation that authorized individual payments of $20,000 to Japanese Americans who were interned in the US during the second world war, and extended a formal apology from the US government.In 2008, the House passed a resolution acknowledging and apologizing for slavery. The Senate approved a similar resolution a year later, but a disclaimer was appended to ensure the apology could not be used as a legal rationale for reparations.Facing history is a necessary part of the healing process for nations cleaved by atrocity said Susan Neiman, an Atlanta-born academic based in Berlin and the author of Learning from the Germans.She said it took time for Germany to confront the horrors of nazism and the Holocaust, Neiman said, and the process faced strong resistance. Since 1952, Germany has paid reparations, mostly to Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.“It needs to be a multi-layered process, one involving schools, the arts, rethinking what values we want to honor in public space, and all manner of legal measures from reparations to ending police brutality,” she said. “Ideally, a broad democratic discussion must accompany such a process, and once it’s done, countries are actually better off for it.”The cruelty of the Covid-19 outbreak, the economic crisis and police brutality against black Americans must be understood as part of “a continuum that began with the Middle Passage”, said the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, author of a new bill to establish a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission.“This is truth-telling time,” she said. “We have to, as I say, break these chains once and for all.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2NiF4U5

[attredd]

Presumptive Democratic nominee Biden has said he will support study of reparations, representing a sea change on the issueAs the American civil war reached its bloody end in 1865, the Union general William Sherman seized land from Confederates and mandated it be redistributed, in 40-acre plots, to newly freed slaves.The promise of “40 acres and a mule” was never fulfilled. But a debate has raged ever since about what America owes to the descendants of slaves, and to the victims of racial terror and state-sanctioned discrimination that persisted long after emancipation.“We helped build this nation. We built the United States Capitol. We built the White House. We made cotton king and that built the early economy of the United States,” the Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the sponsor of a House resolution to study reparations, said in an interview this week.“We were never paid, never given insurance, never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today.”Jackson Lee said the disparities exposed by compounding national crises – a pandemic, an economic collapse and widespread protests over police brutality, all of which have taken an unequal toll on African Americans – are helping to make the case for reparations.In the weeks since George Floyd died pleading for his life under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, an act many saw as an embodiment of the violent oppression black Americans have endured for centuries, public support for the Black Lives Matter movement has soared.“Look at the protests. Look at the protesters,” Jackson Lee said. “We are winning the hearts and minds of the American people. That’s why I think the time to pass reparations is now.”Reparations were once a lonely cause championed by black leaders and lawmakers. Now the debate has moved to the center of mainstream politics.Several states, localities and private institutions are beginning to grapple with issue, advancing legislation or convening taskforces to develop proposals for reparations. Progressive candidates running for Congress from New York to Colorado to Texas have declared their support for reparations. And earlier this month, at an AME church in Delaware, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, listened as the state senator Darius Brown challenged him on the issue.“It shouldn’t be a study of reparations,” Brown said. “It should be funding reparations.”But for scholars and advocates who have been making the case for reparations for decades, Biden’s support for studying the issue represents a dramatic break from the past.> [We] never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today> > Sheila Jackson LeeJohn Conyers, who died in 2019 and was the longest-serving African American in Congress, first introduced a bill to study reparations for slavery in 1989. The Michigan Democrat reintroduced it every cycle for nearly three decades, until he resigned in 2017. Even Barack Obama, when asked by the author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose influential 2014 essay in the Atlantic reintroduced the subject, said he was opposed, arguing that reparations was politically impractical.Jackson Lee reintroduced Conyers’ bill, which would develop a commission to study the legacy of slavery across generations and consider a “national apology” for the harm it has caused. The measure, designated HR 40 in reference to Sherman’s unmet promise, now has more than 125 sponsors, the blessing of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, and the New Jersey senator Cory Booker introduced a companion measure.On Juneteenth last year, a congressional subcommittee convened a first-of-its-kind hearing to discuss how the nation might atone for its “original sin”, as well as the Jim Crow segregation that followed and the modern scourges of mass incarceration, persistent inequality and police violence that still plague African Americans.Such a commission would have to grapple with profound moral and ethical questions as well as profane matters of money and politics. Proposals vary widely, as do the cost estimates and suggested criteria for eligibility. But at their core is an attempt to make economic amends for historic wrongs.William Darity, an economist at Duke University and the author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, argues that the wealth disparities between white and black Americans is the “most powerful indicator” of the cumulative economic toll of racial injustice in America.The data paint a stark picture. Black Americans hold one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans. Just 41% of black families own their homes compared with more than 70% of white families. And black college graduates have a lower homeownership rate than white high school dropouts.Darity says the objective of a reparations package should be to close the wealth gap, and that the best way to do that is by direct payments to eligible black Americans. As for political objections to the scale and expense of such a program, he notes that earlier this year Congress allocated $2tn for a coronavirus relief measure that included direct payments to Americans.Others have suggested compensation in the form of educational vouchers, health insurance or investments in programs that address disparities in education, housing and employment. That the debate has expanded to include discussions over feasibility and mechanics is a sign of progress, Darity said.“We’re finally moving away from the question of whether or not it’s the right thing to do – because more and more people acknowledge that, at least in principle, it is the right thing to do,” he said. “And that is a major step forward because the logistical questions can be resolved.”Still the notion of compensating descendants of American slaves is not widely popular. But there are signs that is shifting.According to a Gallup Poll conducted in 2002, 81% of Americans opposed reparations, compared with just 14% who supported the idea. In 2019, Gallup found that 29% of Americans agreed the government should recompense descendants of the enslaved, with support rising among white Americans from 6% to 16%. The most dramatic increase was among black Americans, whose support climbed from a simple majority in 2002 to nearly three-quarters in 2019.At the same time, young Americans are significantly more likely to agree that the legacy of slavery still impacts black Americans today, while also being more likely to say the US government should formally apologize for slavery and pay reparations, according to an AP-NORC poll published in September.And supporters are hopeful those numbers will rise amid a national reckoning over racism and discrimination. Public opinion on race has shifted dramatically in the span of a few weeks, with a majority of Americans now in agreement that racial discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States.In California, assemblywoman Shirley Weber said the protests fueled interest in her bill to study reparations in the state, which the chamber approved overwhelmingly last week.“Something dramatic is going on,” said Weber, who is the daughter of sharecroppers and a scholar of African American studies. “Folks now begin to realize just how extensively, how deeply, issues of race are embedded in our society and how that can produce what we saw happen to George Floyd in Minneapolis.”Reparations have long been met with strong resistance from conservatives and some prominent black leaders, who have dismissed the idea as impractical and unnecessarily divisive.“I don’t think reparations help level the playing field, it might help more eruptions on the playing field,” Senator Tim Scott, the lone black Republican senator, told Fox News earlier this month.Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the free market thinktank Manhattan Institute, worries a renewed focus on reparations was a “distraction” from the more pressing issues, like police brutality and mass incarceration, that has devastated America’s black communities.“How are reparations going to hold police accountable?” he said. “What is the added value of talking about reparations as opposed to talking about just good public policy that is going to address inequality and poverty?” Yet recompense for historical injustices are not without precedent in America. After the second world war, Congress created a commission to compensate Native American tribes for land seized by the US government, though many say the approach was paternalistic. Decades later, Ronald Reagan signed legislation that authorized individual payments of $20,000 to Japanese Americans who were interned in the US during the second world war, and extended a formal apology from the US government.In 2008, the House passed a resolution acknowledging and apologizing for slavery. The Senate approved a similar resolution a year later, but a disclaimer was appended to ensure the apology could not be used as a legal rationale for reparations.Facing history is a necessary part of the healing process for nations cleaved by atrocity said Susan Neiman, an Atlanta-born academic based in Berlin and the author of Learning from the Germans.She said it took time for Germany to confront the horrors of nazism and the Holocaust, Neiman said, and the process faced strong resistance. Since 1952, Germany has paid reparations, mostly to Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.“It needs to be a multi-layered process, one involving schools, the arts, rethinking what values we want to honor in public space, and all manner of legal measures from reparations to ending police brutality,” she said. “Ideally, a broad democratic discussion must accompany such a process, and once it’s done, countries are actually better off for it.”The cruelty of the Covid-19 outbreak, the economic crisis and police brutality against black Americans must be understood as part of “a continuum that began with the Middle Passage”, said the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, author of a new bill to establish a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission.“This is truth-telling time,” she said. “We have to, as I say, break these chains once and for all.”

from Yahoo News - Latest News & Headlines https://ift.tt/2NiF4U5

[deniscollins]

At Historic Hearing, House Panel Explores Reparations

In 1865, following the liberation of African-American slaves after the Civil War, the federal government awarded 400,000 acres of coastal land to former slaves, which was rescinded a year later. In the late 1800s, the idea of pensions for former slaves — similar to pensions for Union soldiers — took hold did not pass Congress. Should the federal government provide reparations -- such as zero-interest loans for prospective black homeowners, free college tuition, community development plans to spur the growth of black-owned businesses in black neighborhoods -- to the relatives of former slaves: (1) Yes, (2) No? Why? What are the ethics underlying your decision?

Frail but sharp at 88, the Rev. Doris Sherman woke up at 4 a.m. on Wednesday to travel here from Philadelphia for an event that, even after the nation elected its first black president, she never thought she would see: a meeting in the capital of the United States on reparations for African-Americans.

Dressed all in white, the color of the suffragist movement — it was a coincidence, she said — Ms. Sherman, who is black, reflected on the unfulfilled Civil War-era promise to former slaves of “40 acres and a mule.” As a schoolteacher for 30 years before entering the ministry, she recalled so many black parents struggling to provide day care, their children “left back and left out.”

If the government did anything, she said, it should do something for the children. “We don’t want that mule now,” she said. “We don’t want that 40 acres. We are asking for remembrance. Remember the struggle. Remember the injustice and remember the now.”

Ms. Sherman was among hundreds of other mostly black spectators — so many that they filled three overflow rooms — who descended on Capitol Hill for Wednesday’s historic hearing, the first time Congress has considered a bill, H.R. 40, that would create a commission to develop proposals to address the lingering effects of slavery and consider a “national apology” for the harm it has caused.

The sometimes raucous session before a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee lasted nearly three and a half hours and dug into the darkest corners of the nation’s history, exposing the bitter cultural and ideological divides in Washington and beyond. Republican lawmakers and witnesses — including Burgess Owens, the retired football star — were jeered when they argued that black people could pull themselves up by their own bootstraps and that reparations might damage their psyches.

“We’ve become successful like no other because of this great opportunity to live the American dream,” Mr. Owens, who is black, told the panel. “Let’s not steal that from our kids by telling them they can’t do it.”

That the hearing took place at all was remarkable, a reflection of the shifting landscape in the Democratic Party and the wrenching national debate over racial justice in the era of President Trump. Nearly 60 House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, support the bill. And at least 11 Democratic presidential candidates — with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. a notable exception — have embraced either the concept of reparations or the bill to study it.

“We have not had a conversation about reparations on this scale or level since the Reconstruction Era,” William A. Darity Jr., a professor of public policy at Duke University who is writing a book on reparations, said in a telephone interview. “To be blunt, I am more optimistic than I have ever been in my life about the prospect of the enactment of a reparations program that is comprehensive and transformative.”

The first time the federal government considered reparations for black people was in 1865, when 400,000 acres of coastal land were awarded to former slaves, the result of a special order issued by the Union general, William T. Sherman. It lasted less than a year. When President Abraham Lincoln died, he was succeeded by Andrew Johnson, who rescinded Sherman’s order.

In the late 1800s, the idea of pensions for former slaves — similar to pensions for Union soldiers — took hold, championed for a time by a Nebraska congressman. But the idea fizzled in the face of strong opposition from federal agencies.

In 1989, Representative John Conyers Jr., who retired in 2017, introduced legislation to create a commission to develop proposals for reparations. He introduced it every year for nearly 30 years. It went nowhere. Even President Barack Obama opposed reparations, calling the idea impractical.

It is that bill, titled the “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act,” and now sponsored by Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, Democrat of Texas, that the subcommittee has before it. It would authorize $12 million for a 13-member commission to study the effects of slavery and make recommendations to Congress.

“I just simply ask: Why not?” Ms. Jackson Lee said Wednesday. “And why not now?”

But Professor Darity’s optimism may be overstated.

Even if it passes the House, the bill has little chance of getting through the Republican-controlled Senate, where Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, spoke out against it on Tuesday, telling reporters he does not favor reparations “for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible.”

Mr. McConnell’s remark prompted a sharp rebuke from the hearing’s star witness, the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose 2014 article “The Case for Reparations” in The Atlantic rekindled the debate, arguing that African-Americans had been exploited by nearly every American institution. Mr. Coates, who is black, ticked off a list of government-sponsored discriminatory policies — including those in Mr. McConnell’s birthplace of Alabama — such as redlining and poll taxes.

“He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion,” Mr. Coates said. “Victims of their plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they would love a word with the majority leader.”

“While emancipation dead-bolted the door against the bandits of America, Jim Crow wedged the windows wide open,” he added. “That’s the thing about Senator McConnell’s ‘something.’ It was 150 years ago, and it was right now.”

Advocates for reparations say their cause is misunderstood, and emphasize that it does not necessarily mean the government would be writing checks to black people, though Mr. Coates said he was not opposed to the idea.

Rather, they say, the government could offer various types of assistance — zero-interest loans for prospective black homeowners, free college tuition, community development plans to spur the growth of black-owned businesses in black neighborhoods — to address the social and economic fallout of slavery and racially discriminatory federal policies that have resulted in a huge wealth gap between white and black people.

“When a black woman or man is arrested, they may land in jail for how many days because they don’t have the home, the mortgage to get the bail — and cash bail is discriminatory,” Julianne Malveaux, an economist, told the subcommittee, her voice rising in anger. “I want y’all Congress people to deal with issues of economic structure.”

Wednesday’s hearing was laden with symbolism. This year is the 400th anniversary of the first documented arrival of Africans to the port of Jamestown in what was then the colony of Virginia. Wednesday, June 19, was Juneteenth, the holiday that celebrates the end of slavery in the United States. And the bill carries the designation H.R. 40, a reference to “40 acres and a mule.”

As passions flared, the subcommittee chairman, Representative Steve Cohen of Tennessee, repeatedly told the spectators to simmer down. And politics was at work: A Democratic presidential candidate, Senator Cory Booker, who is carrying the bill in the Senate, was the first witness, declaring himself “brokenhearted and very angry” at the nation’s reluctance to deal with what he called “a cancer on the soul of our country.”

“I believe right now we have a historic opportunity to break the silence,” Mr. Booker said. “To speak to the ugly past and talk constructively about how to move this nation forward.”

One Republican congressman, Representative Louie Gohmert of Texas, lashed out at “today’s claim that the Republicans are the party of racism,” noting that southern segregationist Democrats were responsible for the era of Jim Crow.

Another Republican, Representative Mike Johnson of Louisiana, drew hisses when he suggested that black leaders like Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington “encouraged people to take control of and responsibility for their own lives, because that gives every human being a greater sense of meaning, purpose and satisfaction.”

The actor and activist Danny Glover told of his great-grandmother, Mary Brown, a slave who was freed by Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. A documentary filmmaker, Katrina Browne, who is white, recounted her painful discovery that her Rhode Island ancestors had been “the largest slave trading family in United States history,” and brought more than 12,000 Africans to the Americas in chains.

Her message to the lawmakers: “It is good for the soul of a person, a people and of a nation to set things right.”

[ausetkmt]

Earlier this month, over a dozen civil rights and religious groups sent a letter to the White House calling on President Joe Biden to act on reparations by signing an executive order to study reparations by Juneteenth. This comes after a decadeslong push to establish a 13-person reparation commission in Congress.

Shortly after the end of the Civil War, formerly enslaved families were promised by Union leadership 40 acres and a mule. The promise was never fulfilled, however a reminder of the centuries-old promise remained in Congress for decades. H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, has been introduced in every legislative session since 1989.

In this May 19, 2021, file photo, Hughes Van Ellis, a Tulsa Race Massacre survivor and World War II veteran, and Viola Fletcher, oldest living survivor of the Tulsa Race Massacre, testify before the Civil Rights and Civil Liber...

Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images, FILE

In recent years, the bill has gained traction politically. In 2019, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, hundreds of members of Congress and over 350 organizations such as the U.S. Conference of Mayors, NAACP and ACLU publicly announced support for reparations. H.R. 40 was able to pass out of the House Judiciary Committee in 2021, however, it has failed to come to a vote in the House or Senate.

When asked about the letter from racial justice advocates calling for Biden to meet with them and sign the H.R. 40 executive order, now former White House press secretary Jen Psaki said she was unaware of the letter. However, she said there was a range of executive orders the White House was considering including police reform and student debt.

Psaki previously reiterated in 2021 that President Biden supported the study of reparations. However, when asked if he would support a bill on reparations Psaki said, "We'll see what happens through the legislative process.”

Asked if Biden supports an executive order on the study of reparations, Psaki said at the time, "it would be up to him, he has executive order authority, he would certainly support a study, and we'll see where Congress moves on that issue."

A source familiar with White House proceedings told ABC News that Biden’s support of H.R. 40 has not changed, however he feels that “we don't need a study to continue to advance racial equity.”

In this April 13, 2021, file photo, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris meet with members of the Congressional Black Caucus, including House Majority Whip James Clyburn, Sen. Raphael Warnock, R...

Pete Marovich, Pool/Getty Images

Dreisen Heath, a researcher and advocate in Human Rights Watch's United States Program focusing on racial justice issues, said that the push for an executive order for H.R. 40 is a necessity. She said if a “commission Bill cannot advance through both chambers, then that's why you have other branches of government, who have also promised to execute on a study for reparations and developing reparations proposals, to commit to executive action and do it.”

Heath added other bills have dealt with the legacy of enslavement with majority support from Republicans, including Anti-lynching legislation that stalled for over a century.

“If Juneteenth is a consensus, then reparations also has to be a consensus. And if the congressional chambers aren't going to commit to doing something that they all publicly said that they were going to do, then the President has to do what he also publicly promised that he was going to do," Heath said.

For many fighting for reparations, Tiffany Crutcher is seen as an example of the cumulative impacts that enslaved people have overcome.

In this June 19, 2020, file photo, Dr. Tiffany Crutcher is seen on stage with family members during events to mark Juneteenth, in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Lawrence Bryant/Reuters, FILE

The Oklahoma native said she believes race is a factor in why reparations has happened in the centuries since it was first proposed. “I think that people believe and repair and reparations when it comes to everybody, but Black people.”

To her reparations is about more than just cash payments. “We're talking about decades and centuries of harm. That caused my mother to recently pass away of COVID-19 because of the continued harm. We're talking about decades of harm that caused my brother to take his last breath alone.”

She added, “laws that are in place that allow the brutality of Black people in this country is so much more than money."

H.R. 40’s lead sponsor Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee told ABC News, “We can't allow a question of slavery and its impact on the descendants of enslaved Africans today, African Americans to go unanswered. Because we believe the momentum is there, because President Biden is a President that understands equity and is committed to and who has recognized the importance of African Americans in this nation this is a diverse nation, but he recognizes the importance of not only African Americans, but our history.”

Jackson Lee told ABC News one of the things that she hopes will happen if H.R. 40 gets signed by Biden is the retelling of human stories.

“There are many human stories about the impact of slavery, because there are descendants who can clearly document their life and their history to the slaves who were enslaved over 200 years," Jackson Lee said.

In this March 1, 2022, file photo, President Joe Biden embraces Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee after Biden delivered the State of the Union address to a joint session of Congress in the U.S. Capitol's House Chamber in Washington, D.C.

Win McNamee/Getty Images, FILE

University of Connecticut professor Thomas Craemer has studied the topic of race and reparations for over 15 years. Craemer published study in 2015 estimating that the costs of slavery and loss of wealth through slavery cost a conservative estimate of $14.5 trillion through 2009, which didn’t account for inflation. His study also didn’t account for colonial slavery or the loss of wealth due to discrimination after slavery.

Craemer told ABC News when H.R. 40 was introduced, it was a progressive idea, however he says with the amount of research into the impacts of slavery, “setting up a commission to study is not enough. The goal should actually include actual reparations payouts, as a stark starting amount rather than only studying it because they could be a delay tactic. Investment.”

He said reparations “is not a past injustice but a injustice, and it has to do with loss inheritances, and taken inheritances, rights as given. We ignore it when it comes to African American inheritances, and this is a present day wrong that needs to be right.”

“The time is urgent more than ever before,” Crutcher told ABC News on the 108th birthday of Tulsa Race Massacre survivor Mother Viola Fletcher. She notes the last three remaining survivors of the Massacre have waited a lifetime for restorative justice.

Crutcher said for Mother Leslie Randall, 107, and Uncle Hughes Van Ellis, 101, “there's no greater time. How much longer will they have to wait for justice?”

[ausetkmt]

As the American civil war reached its bloody end in 1865, the Union general William Sherman seized land from Confederates and mandated it be redistributed, in 40-acre plots, to newly freed slaves.

The promise of “40 acres and a mule” was never fulfilled. But a debate has raged ever since about what America owes to the descendants of slaves, and to the victims of racial terror and state-sanctioned discrimination that persisted long after emancipation.

“We helped build this nation. We built the United States Capitol. We built the White House. We made cotton king and that built the early economy of the United States,” the Texas congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, the sponsor of a House resolution to study reparations, said in an interview this week.

“We were never paid, never given insurance, never received compensation for the more than 200 years of living and working in bondage. And we continue to live with the stain of slavery today.”

Jackson Lee said the disparities exposed by compounding national crises – a pandemic, an economic collapse and widespread protests over police brutality, all of which have taken an unequal toll on African Americans – are helping to make the case for reparations.

In the weeks since George Floyd died pleading for his life under the knee of a Minneapolis police officer, an act many saw as an embodiment of the violent oppression black Americans have endured for centuries, public support for the Black Lives Matter movement has soared.

Reparations were once a lonely cause championed by black leaders and lawmakers. Now the debate has moved to the center of mainstream politics.

Several states, localities and private institutions are beginning to grapple with issue, advancing legislation or convening taskforces to develop proposals for reparations. Progressive candidates running for Congress from New York to Colorado to Texas have declared their support for reparations. And earlier this month, at an AME church in Delaware, Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, listened as the state senator Darius Brown challenged him on the issue.

“It shouldn’t be a study of reparations,” Brown said. “It should be funding reparations.”

But for scholars and advocates who have been making the case for reparations for decades, Biden’s support for studying the issue represents a dramatic break from the past.

John Conyers, who died in 2019 and was the longest-serving African American in Congress, first introduced a bill to study reparations for slavery in 1989. The Michigan Democrat reintroduced it every cycle for nearly three decades, until he resigned in 2017. Even Barack Obama, when asked by the author, Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose influential 2014 essay in the Atlantic reintroduced the subject, said he was opposed, arguing that reparations was politically impractical.

Jackson Lee reintroduced Conyers’ bill, which would develop a commission to study the legacy of slavery across generations and consider a “national apology” for the harm it has caused. The measure, designated HR 40 in reference to Sherman’s unmet promise, now has more than 125 sponsors, the blessing of Nancy Pelosi, the House speaker, and the New Jersey senator Cory Booker introduced a companion measure.

On Juneteenth last year, a congressional subcommittee convened a first-of-its-kind hearing to discuss how the nation might atone for its “original sin”, as well as the Jim Crow segregation that followed and the modern scourges of mass incarceration, persistent inequality and police violence that still plague African Americans.

Such a commission would have to grapple with profound moral and ethical questions as well as profane matters of money and politics. Proposals vary widely, as do the cost estimates and suggested criteria for eligibility. But at their core is an attempt to make economic amends for historic wrongs.

William Darity, an economist at Duke University and the author of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, argues that the wealth disparities between white and black Americans is the “most powerful indicator” of the cumulative economic toll of racial injustice in America.

The data paint a stark picture. Black Americans hold one-tenth of the wealth of white Americans. Just 41% of black families own their homes compared with more than 70% of white families. And black college graduates have a lower homeownership rate than white high school dropouts.

Darity says the objective of a reparations package should be to close the wealth gap, and that the best way to do that is by direct payments to eligible black Americans. As for political objections to the scale and expense of such a program, he notes that earlier this year Congress allocated $2tn for a coronavirus relief measure that included direct payments to Americans.

Others have suggested compensation in the form of educational vouchers, health insurance or investments in programs that address disparities in education, housing and employment.

That the debate has expanded to include discussions over feasibility and mechanics is a sign of progress, Darity said.

“We’re finally moving away from the question of whether or not it’s the right thing to do – because more and more people acknowledge that, at least in principle, it is the right thing to do,” he said. “And that is a major step forward because the logistical questions can be resolved.”

Still the notion of compensating descendants of American slaves is not widely popular. But there are signs that is shifting.

According to a Gallup Poll conducted in 2002, 81% of Americans opposed reparations, compared with just 14% who supported the idea. In 2019, Gallup found that 29% of Americans agreed the government should recompense descendants of the enslaved, with support rising among white Americans from 6% to 16%. The most dramatic increase was among black Americans, whose support climbed from a simple majority in 2002 to nearly three-quarters in 2019.

At the same time, young Americans are significantly more likely to agree that the legacy of slavery still impacts black Americans today, while also being more likely to say the US government should formally apologize for slavery and pay reparations, according to an AP-NORC poll published in September.

And supporters are hopeful those numbers will rise amid a national reckoning over racism and discrimination. Public opinion on race has shifted dramatically in the span of a few weeks, with a majority of Americans now in agreement that racial discrimination is a “big problem” in the United States.

In California, assemblywoman Shirley Weber said the protests fueled interest in her bill to study reparations in the state, which the chamber approved overwhelmingly last week.

“Something dramatic is going on,” said Weber, who is the daughter of sharecroppers and a scholar of African American studies. “Folks now begin to realize just how extensively, how deeply, issues of race are embedded in our society and how that can produce what we saw happen to George Floyd in Minneapolis.”

Reparations have long been met with strong resistance from conservatives and some prominent black leaders, who have dismissed the idea as impractical and unnecessarily divisive.

“I don’t think reparations help level the playing field, it might help more eruptions on the playing field,” Senator Tim Scott, the lone black Republican senator, told Fox News earlier this month.

Coleman Hughes, a fellow at the free market thinktank Manhattan Institute, worries a renewed focus on reparations was a “distraction” from the more pressing issues, like police brutality and mass incarceration, that has devastated America’s black communities.

Yet recompense for historical injustices are not without precedent in America.

After the second world war, Congress created a commission to compensate Native American tribes for land seized by the US government, though many say the approach was paternalistic. Decades later, Ronald Reagan signed legislation that authorized individual payments of $20,000 to Japanese Americans who were interned in the US during the second world war, and extended a formal apology from the US government.

In 2008, the House passed a resolution acknowledging and apologizing for slavery. The Senate approved a similar resolution a year later, but a disclaimer was appended to ensure the apology could not be used as a legal rationale for reparations.

Facing history is a necessary part of the healing process for nations cleaved by atrocity said Susan Neiman, an Atlanta-born academic based in Berlin and the author of Learning from the Germans.

She said it took time for Germany to confront the horrors of nazism and the Holocaust, Neiman said, and the process faced strong resistance. Since 1952, Germany has paid reparations, mostly to Jewish victims of the Nazi regime.

“It needs to be a multi-layered process, one involving schools, the arts, rethinking what values we want to honor in public space, and all manner of legal measures from reparations to ending police brutality,” she said. “Ideally, a broad democratic discussion must accompany such a process, and once it’s done, countries are actually better off for it.”

The cruelty of the Covid-19 outbreak, the economic crisis and police brutality against black Americans must be understood as part of “a continuum that began with the Middle Passage”, said the California congresswoman Barbara Lee, author of a new bill to establish a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission.

“This is truth-telling time,” she said. “We have to, as I say, break these chains once and for all.”