Reparations Are Long Overdue
Reparations for Black People are Long Overdue
Earlier this month, BET founder Bob Johnson, dubbed “America’s first Black billionaire,” publically called for $14 trillion dollars of reparations for slavery. The media mogul, who has long-since been outspoken in regards to matters related to Black politics and liberation, told CNBC, “Wealth transfer is what’s needed.
“Think about this. Since 200-plus-years or so of slavery, labor taken with no compensation, is a wealth transfer. Denial of access to education, which is a primary driver of accumulation of income and wealth, is a wealth transfer.”
The Case For Reparations
This isn’t the first time the case for reparations has been made on a national scale. In 2014, author and journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates – known for his biting and impactful articulation of American race relations – penned a piece in
The Atlantic called The Case for Reparations. In the piece, Coates touched on some of the same systemic challenges and inequities faced by generations of Black people, as Johnson did in his recent CNBC interview. Black-owned land was stolen. We were denied access to the same home loans white families depended on to build wealth and equity. Many Black children were denied a proper education, and families were “redlined” out of desirable neighborhoods.
Poll taxes kept us from making our voices heard in the political system. We were lynched by the thousands. Coates quoted the words of a Mississippi senator and Klansman Theodore Bilbo: “You and I know what’s the best way to keep the nigger from voting. You do it the night before the election.”
Rahul Lal
Graphic based on illustration by Mohamed Assan. Overlay by texture library Poliigon
Today, disparities along racial lines continue to divide Black and White America. Black offenders receive longer, harsher punishments even when they commit the same crimes as their white counterparts. As of 2019, Black borrowers continue to be charged with higher interest rates and heavier refinance fees than white people. In the world we live in today, Black boys are only one-third as likely to read on grade level as white boys by the time they reach 4th grade.
2020 in particular has only further exposed racial disparities, and reinforced the need for reparations. When early data began to show how Covid-19 disproportionately impacted people of color, experts agreed that the pandemic laid bare the health-related inequalities Black people face.
Higher rates of poverty, an increased likelihood of being an “essential worker,” and limited access to healthcare all played a role in making Black people more vulnerable to the virus. In addition, the renewed momentum behind the Black Lives Matter movement, spurred by the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Amaud Arbery have forced millions of people to confront America’s deep-rooted race problems head-on.
America’s great sin – stealing hundreds of thousands of free people from their homeland and forcing them into centuries of bondage to build a nation for the very people who captured them – has never been paid for.
The cost of this great sin has only multiplied in the decades since the first Africans arrived on the shores of Virginia: Providing reparations for the descendants of these enslaved people is not only justified by a history of oppression, it is absolutely necessary.
