New York state will create a commission tasked with considering reparations to address the persistent, harmful effects of slavery in the state, under a bill signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday.
It comes at a time when many states and towns throughout the United States attempt to figure out how to best reckon with the country’s dark past, and follows in the footsteps of similar task forces established in California and Illinois.
“In New York, we like to think we’re on the right side of this. Slavery was a product of the South, the Confederacy,” Hochul, a Democrat, said at the bill signing ceremony in New York City. “What is hard to embrace is the fact that our state also flourished from that slavery. It’s not a beautiful story, but indeed it is the truth.”
The law, which was passed by state lawmakers in June, says the commission will examine the institution of slavery, which was fully abolished in New York by 1827, and its ongoing impact on Black New Yorkers today.
When I see this talk about reparations for slavery, I can’t help thinking that Americans are still not facing the historical facts.
Brown v. Board of Education was in 1954. African-Americans were, by law, by the government, denied a proper education. The pioneers who fought for their right to an education are still alive. Which means that the people who were denied an education are also still alive.
There’s a lot of history post-slavery that explains the situation in the US today, such as the countless anti-black pogroms, in which African-Americans had their possessions stolen or destroyed. But government-mandated school “segregation” is one thing where it is immediately obvious that: Living African-Americans did not have the same opportunities and must necessarily be poorer because of government action.
It’s crazy to me that there is talk about reparations for slavery but not about damages for crimes committed against people still living today.
My grandfather would tell me stories about when blacks started to have the same jobs as whites. He said the white men would antagonize the black men purposely. Spit on them, call them the n-word, punch them, anything to get a reaction. Once a black man struck back he would get reported to management, fired, and other employers would refuse to hire a dangerous black man.
And that’s not even getting into the atrocities committed directly by the US government on black communities such as the Tulsa Race Massacre (also of course, Tuskegee, firebombing a city block in Philadelphia, etc.).
So much wealth completely wiped out because some black folks were “uppity” enough to dare to be successful in capitalism. Shit that I 100% never learned about in high school.
There were so many of these pogroms. Strictly, a pogrom is something that was done to Jews. But then a ghetto was where Jews lived.
Any town or city in the south that is almost all white had at least one racial cleansing, as it is sometimes called. During the time of slavery, people wanted their forced labor, their “property” close by. Segregation was forced later. (My knowledge comes solely from Blood at the Root: A Racial Cleansing in America.)
Perhaps something could be done about the land that was stolen, when the owners fled or were murdered. But the survivors of these massacres are dead by now.
That’s why I think affirmative action makes more sense than a one-time reparations payment. It’s the only way to reverse the issue at a societal level.
It may be good politics, but I am critical of it. The victims of American racism were individual human beings. AA does not look at the individual and what harm they suffered, but again, only looks at the color of the skin.
The election of Barack Obama was a great victory for the USA, but also an indictment. He was not born into an African American family, deprived by segregation. (The British occupation of Kenya was brutal, particularly during the last stage - the Mau Mau rebellion, with its 10,000s of dead - when his father came to the US. But I don’t know what his family’s role was.)
All over the world, we can see that having less educated parents is a burden for the academic success of children. This is completely unrelated to racism. Less educated parents can’t help with homework as much, or impart academic knowledge in passing. I can’t even imagine what it is like, on top, to have parents/grandparents who have only ever known a good education as something that gets you murdered by white people.
Obama did not have all that ancestral baggage, and he had this brilliant career. That’s common for recent African immigrants.
Maybe AA helps the US become a better, stronger nation. But I worry that it may perpetuate damage by still practicing differential treatment, based on assigned racial category. In any case, it does nothing to redress the concrete harm, done to individual human beings.
AA is a societal remedy to a societal-level injustice. Redlining and biased admissions policies only looked at the color of one’s skin too.
Obama talked about this at length; regardless of his family past he also suffered racism, whether it was trying to get a taxi or how people treated him in the workplace.
Less educated parents creates a cycle of poverty, which is one of the reasons AA is used as a remedy to address the fact that white Americans were given more opportunities including scholarships and housing benefits that were denied to POC.
AA shouldn’t be permanent but we are not past the injustices yet.
only looked at the color of one’s skin too
Yes, that’s one problem I pointed out. It continues that tradition.
What you say about its effects is how it may help the US. It may help American society benefit from talents that would otherwise lay fallow. It also may have other positive effects. If it works as intended, it will benefit the nation by making it richer and stronger.
What it doesn’t do is address past injustices. These injustices were countless individual crimes that happened to individual human beings.
It’s impossible to adjudicate every individual injustice by this point, which is why a larger societal-level fix is necessary.
This isn’t going to help Democrats when the election comes to town.
Red lining and white flight I imagine are alive and well in the state with the most segregated school system in the country. (Or is it just NYC that is the most segregated?) Policy choices continue to send black new yorkers down a worse path than white ones. Stop and frisk is here and now. I always felt that reparations for slavery would be best spent in the school system, but NY would really have to pull a lot more strings to correct for the second class citizenship caused by slavery. To be fair, I’m glad Hochul is trying to correct so many wrongs in her state. But I’m also angry that Eric Adams is in office right now.
The 1% of this country have fucked everyone. How about everyone except them gets reparations?
This nation as a whole instituted slavery and Jim Crow. Yeah there were only a percentage of the population that had slaves but the government legalized it, instituted systems to maintain it, and instituted Jim Crow afterwards. Just like how the Nazis committed atrocities against the Jews during WW2 this nation committed atrocities against African Americans for hundreds of years. No one questions the fact that Germany owes the Jews reparations even though most Germans didn’t commit those crimes but when it comes to African Americans and the US everyone has an opinion.
How about fixing modern-day slavery first? – see: for profit prisons and “labor leasing programs”
Whataboutism
I’ve always contended the sale or profits of slave built buildings and infrastructure held by the US government could be used to fund programs to help descendants of slaves and be redirected to educational grants.
there hasnt been any slavery in New York in basically 200 years. no one affected by it is alive now. nor are their children, or even their children’s children.
A lot of the old money that built New York, like the Vanderbilts, Goldman, and Lehman families became rich on the backs of slaves. The ancestors of the slave owners inherited that wealth and with it the debt to the ancestors of their slaves.
And it should be those families paying reparations.
Those families did things like build parks, libraries, museums, concert halls, and schools that New Yorkers all have benefitted from. If you live in New York (or The US in general), you have benefitted from the spoils of slavery.
As do the descendants of slaves who have those same amenities available.
That’s not the argument you think it is. Also, my family came over poor on both sides. We weren’t the ones doing the oppressing.
Black people were systematically prevented from benefiting from those amenities for generations (and sometimes still are).
My family are poor immigrants on both sides too. That doesn’t matter. If you buy a house and later find out that the plumbing is bad, that is your responsibility even though you didn’t create the problem. We inherited this country and with it the obligation to fix the broken parts.
I understand what you’re saying but disagree with your ultimate conclusion.
The average modern-day American did not directly benefit from slavery and many didn’t even come to the country until after slavery had been long since abolished. Some of those people were also treated as ethnic minorities though they may be seen as “white” now. Which is to say, they were terribly disadvantaged in the American economy because they were immigrants or descended from the “wrong” background.
Any reparations that are to be made should be made by the perpetrators or those who have directly benefited from said perpetrators’ actions. To tax other impoverished lineages in order to provide reparations to another group which had it even worse is unjust.
I do firmly believe that the country needs to address its systemic issues, but I don’t believe that taxing the majority to give cash to the aggrieved is the solution.
It is an undeniable fact that modern Americans benefitted from slavery and black Americans are still harmed by it.
In US counties today, a larger local slave population in the past was correlated with lower percentages of uninsured white people, higher white median incomes, lower white poverty rates, higher white homeownership rates, and lower percentages of white people on food stamps.
Slavery was an early driver of economic growth. The US simply would not be in the high economic position it is now and the African countries who were raised for their population would not be so comparatively impoverished.
The perpetrator of slavery was ultimately the American government who made it legalized, encouraged, and enforced it. As the current stewards of our government, we are all responsible for the harm done in the past and the harm still being done to our fellow Americans.
You sound like this guy in the article:
State Senate Republican Leader Rob Ortt said in a statement that he believes New York’s recommendations will come at an “astronomical cost” to all New Yorkers.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean cash reparations:
California in 2020 became the first state to create a reparations task force. The group handed its two-year report to state lawmakers in June, who then introduced a bill that would create an agency to carry out some of the panel’s more-than 100 recommendations, including helping families with genealogical research. But turning those proposals into policies could be difficult, given the state is facing a heavy budget deficit.
Other states, including Massachusetts and New Jersey, have considered studying reparations, but none have yet passed legislation. A Chicago suburb in Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to make reparations available to Black residents through a $10 million housing project in 2021.
no one affected by it is alive now
Millions of people are still affected. Black people are much poorer on average, which leads to a circle of misery involving everything from access to education, to crime rate, to perpetuation of racism, that keeps them down.
Just because the original victims and perpetrators are dead doesn’t mean the crime is not creating new victims every day.
And it’s not just slavery. It’s centuries of racism inherent to social, legal, political, and economic systems that continue to have ramifications. The civil rights movement was only 65 years ago (wait, 65 years? Oh, how the time flies) and everyone knows that absolutely did not solve racist policy in the US.
no one affected by it is alive now. nor are their children, or even their children’s children.
You’re wrong there. All the descendants of the white slave owners are people who profited from slavery through inheritances.
What percentage of Americans are descendants of slave owners? a lot of Americans didn’t even immigrate to the untitled states until after slavery was abolished.
What percentage of Americans are descendants of slave owners
it’s a vanishingly small number. only around 6% of all Americans were slave owners. some were killed during the civil war, others in succeeding wars (notably WW1 and WW2) - the current number is unknown as that isnt really tracked, but it’s unlikely to be more than 4% of the current population.
you cant really fault the decedents for what happened 200 years ago though - they werent there, their parents, and even grandparents werent born yet. for most families it’s been 5 or 6 generations (or more). getting reparations would be something that should have been attempted 200 years ago. it’s simply laughable to consider it now.
I can tell you that nearly 100% of black Americans were descendants of slaves and parents/grandparents that lived through Jim Crow and institutionalized racism (hard to say exactly what % since we completely destroyed any possibility of tracing most of their history or genealogy). The Tulsa Race Massacre was only two, maybe three generations ago.
You could look that up and let us know.
no one affected by it is alive now. nor are their children, or even their children’s children
You are almost certainly wrong about that, and they deserve to be compensated for the labor that was robbed of their ancestors.
Tax them white devils!
