March 2021 Blog: On "Reparations: A First Step in Evanston, or a Prelude to Backlash?"
On March 22nd, the City Council of Evanston, Illinois, voted to offer payments to Black residents and their immediate descendants who were victims of unfair housing practices. Sixteen African American households will receive $25,000 to use as down payments on new homes or repairs for current homes. This may be the first official example of municipal reparations. (See: In Likely First, Chicago Suburb Of Evanston Approves Reparations For Black Residents, March 23, 2021)
Will this be the first step toward broader admission of harm done, or will it mainly lead to racist backlash? Understandably this question might be on the mind of Carolyn Murray, a candidate for Evanston City Council who, if elected, will oversee the future of this reparation program. Back in January a Zoom-bomber hurled racial epithets and death threats at her during a Democratic on-line event.
Will the families who receive funds from this program become targets of further backlash? Journalist Damon Linker thinks reparations are “a recipe for greatly intensified civic anger and resentment.” Such resentment may have contributed to January’s storming of the Capitol by people likely to emphatically reject reparations to Black Americans.
But it was while sitting in that very citadel of democracy that Randall Robinson began his book, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (2000). Robinson’s argument for national reparations begins with his gazing up at the Capitol dome, in awe of its majesty and aware that it was built by Black hands. Between 1793-1802, thanks to the back-breaking labor of enslaved Black men, we now have a magnificent building filled with images of white men. As arguments for reparations grow in force and popularity, so too does the anti-democratic fury of those who want to take America back to the way it was when white supremacy ruled.
Robinson knows that many Americans opposing reparations will consider it an undeserved handout. The distorted trope of “the welfare queen” was eagerly embraced by many Americans during the Reagan era. But, as Robinson argues, reparations are not charity. They simply represent “a debt that is old but compellingly obvious and still valid."
The debt was obvious to elected officials in Evanston, given the "discriminatory housing policies and practices and inaction on the city's part" over the past half century. Due to redlining and racist loan policies, Black citizens were unable to grow intergenerational wealth by passing property on to their descendants. A historical report by Dino Robinson Jr. and Jenny Thompson detailed decades of segregationist and discriminatory practices which had “cumulative and permanent" impact on Black residents in Evanston. Now they are receiving reparation payments.
Alderman Cicely Fleming*, however, asserted that this plan of focusing on housing alone is too paternalistic, arguing that cash payments would better respect the autonomy of victims of racism by allowing them to decide on their personal strategy of healing. She rejects this as true reparations, concluding, “[u]ntil the structure and terms are in the hands of the people – we have missed the mark." Broader and more extensive reparations are due.
Further action:
Probably the most cited link in my 400 Years project is to HR 40, federal legislation proposing the creation of a commission to study and develop reparations proposals for Black Americans. It currently has been referred to the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. Find out who is on that committee here and urge them to report it out of committee favorably.
If you haven’t done so already, please read “The Case for Reparations” by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and then share it with your friends and associates. It makes an important and compelling case for reparations.
Note: In the inaugural year of my blog project I wrote about reparations, in Blog #9: Douglass, Property, and Reparations. In it I emphasize that the wealth embodied by, and created by, Black people who were enslaved is greater than most people imagine.
*BTW, Trevor Noah agrees with Alderman Fleming, as he explained with signature satire.