The Case for Reparations
- Jon Bullock
- Jun 17, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Jan 8, 2021
Since the ratification of the 13th amendment, which abolished slavery in the United States, Black Americans within the United States have been subjected to unequal, discriminatory, unjust, systematic racism. This execrable treatment takes place in several different areas, some include places of employment, school institutions, daily commutes, residential neighborhoods and communities.
After the conclusion of the Civil War in 1865 and slavery finally came to be abolished, many former slaves were led to believe that they would receive forty acres and a mule. Instead receiving harsh discriminatory treatment, which more times than none often resulted in a deadly struggle for freedom, equal treatment under law, and basic human rights for citizens within the U.S. Constitution being fully honored. Facing horrific and heinous constant threats from groups such as the KKK, mobs of wicked, iniquitous white confederate southerners (which would later transform into other hate/supremacy groups), local law enforcement, and our unjust judicial system. The fourteenth amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees citizens equal protection of the laws, continues to fail in doing so in several cases for Black Americans since being ratified in 1868. With the recent murder of George Floyd sparking a worldwide global protest in the support of “Black Lives Matter”, it is long overdue and time for a change. We have been held under deplorable conditions since our emancipation, denied rights under our own democracy, and neglected from the very country that was built on the backs of brutally forced, free, atrocious slave labor of Black American ancestors since the early seventeenth century.
Areas we could use the reparations in would be in the form of individual and collective public benefits. These benefits should simultaneously build wealth and eliminate debt among Black citizens. The individual benefits were averaged out to around $2.1 trillion, which is equivalent to $153,000 to every Black American born in the United States, based off of 2019 information. These descendants should be eligible for financial compensation from the lasting effects of close to three hundred years of slavery in the United States, over one hundred years of Jim Crow segregation laws, multiple unjustified lynchings and mass murders, nearly two hundred years of police brutality and an unjust judicial system, that was never created to give Black Americans any justice. Black Americans have faced these issues, and continue to suffer from many more abominable crimes and violations committed against them. These acts of injustice have taken place ever since the ancestors of Black American’s were both traded by African leaders to European slave traders or kidnapped and forcefully taken against their will, from Africa to the United States and faced the world’s worst, most brutal enslavement.
A smaller list of collective public benefits should include tuition free to 4 year and 2 year colleges and universities upon meeting qualifications. Tuition should also be of equal opportunity and available for public and private universities. Student loan forgiveness for descendants of enslaved Black Americans. Amongst Black American college graduates, debt continues to be a significant barrier within the wealth gap compared to other races.
Down payment grants and housing revitalization grants for descendants of enslaved Black Americans. Instilling these housing revitalization grants into the Black communities, will help Black Americans to refurbish existing homes in neighborhoods that have been neglected. These neighborhoods were neglected due to a lack of government and corporate investments in predominately Blacks American communities.
Below I’ve listed a few examples of major reparations cases paid out to other ethnic groups, along with a few facts of the ethnic injustices within the country.
-Japanese-Americans received an apology and reparations on behalf of the US government when President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act in 1988, authorizing $20,000 to each camp survivor. (82,000 people)
-Stemming from the Holocaust, Israeli leaders David Ben-Gurion and Chaim Weizmann, German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer agreed to pay $3 billion German marks in reparations to Israel between the years of 1953 and 1967. Germany also agreed to pay $450 million German marks to the World Jewish Congress.
-The Obama administration awarded $12 million for assistance to Holocaust survivors (Jews). The allocation from the Department of Health and Human Services to the Jewish Federations of North America, to be disbursed over five years, was part of an initiative launched in late 2013 by Vice President Joe Biden to address the needs of survivors in the United States, a quarter of whom live below the poverty line. https://www.timesofisrael.com/obama-administration-earmarks-12m-for-holocaust-survivors/
-The U.S. government has agreed to pay a total of $492 million to 17 American Indian tribes for mismanaging natural resources and other tribal assets, according to an attorney who filed most of the suits.
-Jim Crow era from 1877-1968, which were created to marginalize African Americans by creating segregation laws. These segregation laws denied African Americans the right to vote, maintain adequate jobs, receive sufficient education, and forcing colored people into slums and ghettos with disreputable resources and living conditions. https://www.history.com/topics/early-20th-century-us/jim-crow-laws
-COVID-19 Crisis mostly victimized blacks “99,000” deaths marking the deceased at 89% and ever-changing. Rate for blacks is 2.4 times as high as the rate for whites and 2.2 times as high as the rate for Asians and Latinos. https://www.apmresearchlab.org
-African Americans are more than twice as likely to have died from COVID-19 as other Americans. African Americans lack adequate access to healthcare, inability to work from home due to employment restrictions, chronic health conditions, and household density are likely reasons why. https://www.snacks.robinhood.com
-Black men in America are 3.5 times more likely than whites to be killed by law enforcement, 1 in every 1,000 black men will die at the hands of the police. https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/police-violence-pandemic/2020/06/05/e1a2a1b0-a669-11ea-b619-3f9133bbb482_story.html
-In 2014, African Americans constituted 2.3 million, or 34%, of the total 6.8 million correctional population.
-African Americans are incarcerated at more than 5 times the rate of whites.
-The imprisonment rate for African American women is twice that of white women.
-Nationwide, African American children represent 32% of children who are arrested,
42% of children who are detained, and 52% of children whose cases are judicially
waived to criminal court.
-Though African Americans and Hispanics make up approximately 32% of the US
population, they comprised 56% of all incarcerated people in 2015. https://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/
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