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The push to gain reparations for Black Americans is gaining momentum in California and New York. Also, Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) used the Juneteenth holiday to unveil legislation meant to address reparations for Black Americans whose families were impacted by slavery. Despite these signs of progress, polls indicate Black and white Americans’ views on reparations remain far apart.
Straight Arrow News contributor Adrienne Lawrence wonders if African Americans harmed by slavery will ever get the reparations they deserve.
The reparations conversation has been stagnant and long overdue. But given that we just celebrated the third-ever Juneteenth federal holiday, it’s really evident that reparations for African Americans is unlikely to actually happen.
The United States pays reparations daily to those who have suffered. Veterans and their descendants, coal miners who have had black lung disease, those exposed to pesticides, indigenous people, farmers, fishermen, individuals who lose their homes and livelihoods to droughts, flood, natural disaster…reparations are doled out in the U.S. on the regular. But those who built the U.S.? Well, they have never been compensated for their forced contribution and the harm that has followed them this century and a half later since slavery supposedly ended.
The reality is that slavery never ended. It simply took on different and new forms that still very much exist today. Yet, if the United States didn’t have Black people, it wouldn’t stand. We’re not only the backbone of the United States’ prosperity and success and existence as a whole, but also of the American economy, culture, and its future.
Yet to this very day, African Americans have not been given a dime to compensate for more than 400 years of enslavement, rape, murder, theft, and the continued denial of that whole life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness concept. Rather since the purported Emancipation Proclamation, white people have issued African Americans nothing but apartheid — slavery by another name — disparate impact, wage gaps, selective and over-enforcement, and so much more.
