Tag: reparations

Minnesota Dems Want $100 Million for Reparations, Apologies for George Floyd and Dred Scott

Not to be outdone by California, representatives of the Evil Party in Minnesota on Thursday introduced the “Minnesota Migration Act” in the state legislature “to study and provide reparation grants for American descendants of chattel slavery who reside in state.” This is a reparations bill that is designed to redress, according to one of its sponsors, the “structural institutionalized racism in Minnesota and all of American society,” which they claim “has led to overwhelming Black-white disparities in housing, business investment, economic prosperity, health and wellness, life expectancy, and infant mortality.” To end that structural racism, or at least make up for the damage it has done so far, white Minnesotans are going to have to pony up $100 million.

It’s noteworthy that the sponsors of this act are Minnesota Reps. Samakab Hussein, Hodan Hassan, Ruth Richardson, Mohamud Noor, Athena Hollins, and Cedrick Frazier. All appear to be black, but Hussein, Hassan, and Noor seem to be part of the wave of Somalis (which also included Ilhan Omar) who began immigrating to Minnesota in the 1980s and 1990s. The question thus inevitably arises: if this bill passes, which it very well could in woke Minnesota, will the Somali community be among those who receive the reparations cash, or will they have to line up with Whitey to pay out the money?

The bill calls for the establishment of an advisory council that will, among other things, “determine what form of compensation to African Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States can be achieved.” The Somalis certainly aren’t descendants of people enslaved in the United States, so apparently, they will be among those who are paying for the African Americans’ gravy train.

There are other problems as well. The act stipulates that all members of the advisory council “must be chosen with an emphasis on appointing members who are descendants of persons believed to have been enslaved in the United States, or members of the American descendants of chattel slavery with lived experience of racial discrimination and who were impacted by policies which have caused intergenerational trauma.” That means that at least three of the act’s five sponsors can’t be on this council. What’s more, staffing it is going to be hard to come by if every member has to be the descendant of a slave. You may recall, if you’ve studied American history at all, that Minnesota was admitted to the Union in 1858 as a free state.

Ah, but Hussein, Hassan, Richardson, Noor, Hollins, and Frazier are ready for that objection. Their bill claims that “although slavery was illegal in Minnesota, Dred Scott and Harriet Scott were held in military bondage at Fort Snelling, along with other African Americans who were used for enslaved labor by United States Army agents.” So the bill is going to have the state of Minnesota apologize not just for George Floyd, but for Dred Scott. According to the Minnesota Historical Society, “it is estimated that throughout the 1820s and 1830s anywhere from 15 to more than 30 enslaved African Americans lived and worked at Fort Snelling at any one time.”

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No Math Behind San Francisco’s $5M-per-Person Reparations Proposal

No mathematical calculations justify a San Francisco committee’s recent proposal to provide $5 million in reparations to long-term black residents of the city, according to a report by the Washington Post.

As Breitbart News reported last month, the committee, formed in 2020 amid the Black Lives Matter movement, “proposed that each long-term black resident of the city receive $5 million, though California entered the Union as a free state in 1850.”

The proposal came despite the fact that the city is facing a staggering budget deficit as businesses and residents have fled.

Now, the Washington Post reports, “conservatives” (among others) are questioning the price tag, which was largely invented out of thin air:

“There wasn’t a math formula,” said Eric McDonnell, chair of the reparations committee and the principal of Peacock Partnerships, a San Francisco-based consulting firm. “It was a journey for the committee towards what could represent a significant enough investment in families to put them on this path to economic well-being, growth and vitality that chattel slavery and all the policies that flowed from it destroyed.”

…

San Francisco’s $5 million proposal, magnitudes larger than amounts being discussed in other communities, has drawn intense backlash from conservatives who lambaste the idea as financially ruinous for a city with an annual budget of $14 billion that is still recovering economically from the pandemic. The proposal doesn’t explain who would qualify, but if even a fraction of the city’s 50,000 Black residents met the criteria, it would consume a huge amount of the city’s annual budget.

Separately, the State of California has its own reparations committee, which recently considered a more modest proposal to pay each black descendant of slavery up to $233,000 in reparations.

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Black Reparations Inspiring a Multicolored Pandora’s Box of Intersectional Demands

Until a few years ago, the idea of paying financial reparations to descendants of African slaves was dismissed as a fringe idea.   

Now a notion that President Barack Obama once rejected as impractical is becoming public policy. California offers a dramatic example as officials there review a proposal that could pay in excess of $1 million each to some black residents, while more than a dozen U.S. municipalities are moving ahead with their own race-based programs to redress the legacies of slavery.  

But the reparations movement is bigger and wider than that. Its rise in the United States has inspired a global movement committed to redressing perceived historical injustices to all manner of aggrieved groups. The causes include gay reparations, climate reparations, colonial reparations, university reparations – and Roman Catholic Church reparations for officially sanctioning colonization, slavery, and genocide in the New World. Scholars, activists and legislators across the United States and Europe and in former colonies are drawing on the logic and language of the black reparations movement and international human rights law to make the claim that their causes also deserve atonement and compensation for past wrongs.   

Some warn that reparations open a controversial and bottomless Pandora’s Box, given history’s long catalogue of official policies that criminalized or discriminated against sex workers, polygamists, Jews, Catholics, Slavs, and the Roma, among a vast array of potential claimants.  

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Boston Mayor Formally Announces Reparations Task Force

Boston Mayor Michelle Wu announced the members of the city’s Reparations Task Force at the Museum of African American History during a press conference on Tuesday. The task force will study the impact of slavery on Boston and eventually come out with a plan to pay cash reparations to black citizens. Other leftist states and cities — including California — have advanced plans to pay reparations after forming similar task forces.

Mayor Wu, a Democrat, said the program will help to build a better Boston for everyone. “This conversation has been generations in the making, and we are appointing a multigenerational task force to reflect the full breadth of that history and struggle,” Wu said. “We will be another step closer to reconciling our complicated history with our vision for a more connected, more inclusive, more equitable Boston for all of us.”

Boston’s task force will propose reparation payments for those who can document that they are descendants of slaves. Other municipalities have debated on paying reparations to all black citizens regardless of whether they descend from slaves, though Boston has laid out that requirement.

The announcement comes two months after the Boston City Council unanimously agreed to create the reparations committee, The Boston Globe reported. Boston’s reparations task force will study “Boston’s participation in slavery,” and asses “the city’s attempts to repair the harm done by this practice; and then making recommendations on what forms repair could take.”

Five commission members were required to be “descendants of American freedmen, or Africans enslaved in the United States.”

The task force is hoping to complete its work and come up with a payment plan by 2024.

“We want to make sure that we’re grounded in the community,” Joseph D. Feaster Jr., a former Boston NAACP president and member of the commission. “We want to be transparent, we want to be inclusive, and we want to be thorough, and we want to be intentional.”

In announcing the task force last June, Boston — which was the epicenter of the abolition movement prior to the American Civil War — issued a formal apology for slavery and “the death, misery, and deprivation that this practice caused.”

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Disney+ Cartoon Demands Reparations And More With ‘Slaves Built This Country’ Song

Disney has gone for woke yet again with a recent episode of the cartoon series “Proud Family” — which featured kids singing a song about reparations that America “owes” to black Americans and about how “slaves built this country.”

The recent episode that aired on Disney+, titled “Louder and Prouder,” reviews the history of Juneteenth when the kids discover their town’s founder was a slave-owner. The song opens with the line, “This country was built on slavery — which means slaves built this country” — and that line was repeated over and over throughout.

“We the descendants of slaves in America have earned reparations for their suffering,” the song continued. “And continue to earn reparations every moment we spend submerged in a systemic prejudice, racism and white supremacy that America was founded with and still has not atoned for.”

In the cartoon, that last line was punctuated by four black students glaring while the only white student on the stage with them held a sign that read “still has not atoned for.”

“Slaves built this country,” they shouted again, claiming, “We made your families rich,” as they listed plantation owners, northern bankers, New England ship-owners, the Founding Fathers, and current senators among those who had profited on the backs of slaves.

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Chair of California’s Reparations Task Force Says Black People are Really Owed $1 Million Each

A few weeks ago, I reported that a nine-member California Reparations Task Force has estimated that black state residents could receive more than $223,000 each in reparations for the enduring economic effects of racism and slavery.

To put that amount in perspective, it has been estimated that it would cost around $569 billion to compensate the 2.5 million black Californians. That total is more than California’s $512.8billion expenditure in 2021 – which included funding for schools, hospitals, universities, and other civilization-essential services.

Now, the chair of California’s Reparations Task Force has said that black people are really owed $1 million each for “harms.”

Speaking with the Rev. Al Sharpton on MSNBC, Kamilah Moore said her task force found that California’s redlining housing practices targeting black Americans between 1933 and 1977 has had a direct effect on today’s homeless community.

Dubbing housing discrimination as one of the ‘five state sanction atrocities’ against black people, the panel initially recommended to California lawmakers that the state pay up $223,200 to each black resident.

Moore previously said economists on the panel estimated that black Californians descended from slaves were owed $1 million per person in reparations.

. . . . Prior to the task force’s first public meeting last month, Moore discussed the group’s work with economists on how to put a value on the ‘atrocities’ that impacted the black community.

‘They came up with $127,000 per year of the life expectancy gap between Black and white Californians,’ Moore said during a panel at Harvard. ‘That comes to just under $1 million for each Black Californian descended from slaves.’

Moore noted that ‘California can’t pay all that,’ so the task force will be spending the next six months hammering out an adequate value and payment method to recommend to state lawmakers.’

So, I guess the $223,000 each is a compromise we should be grateful for.

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Reckless Reparations Reckoning

The last time racial reparations made the major news was on the eve of September 11, 2001 attacks. The loss of 3,000 Americans, which for a time fueled a new national unity, quickly dispelled the absurdities of the reparation movement, and turned our attention toward more existential issues. 

Now the idea is back in vogue again. Here are 10 reasons why the nation’s—and especially California’s—discussions of reparatory payouts are dangerous in a multiracial state, and why reparations are not viable either in an insolvent state or a bankrupt nation at large.

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Black activists hold armed rally to demand reparations in Virginia

Multiple BLM-affiliated groups held an armed rally in Richmond, Virginia demanding reparations for descendants of former slaves.

Video showed BLM757, BLMRVA, and the Fred Hampton Gun Club participating in the rally on Monday, armed with rifles in the gun-free zone of the State Capitol.

Police did not enforce the gun-free zone. However, the group complied when police told the armed activists to move back toward a sidewalk because they did not have a protest permit. 

According to independent journalist and documentarian Ford Fischer, the group was advocating for reparations as well as the passage of HR40, a congressional bill to study the subject.

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San Francisco reparations panel pitches $5M — each — to black residents

A San Francisco panel studying reparations has proposed a one-time payment of $5 million to each black resident of the city deemed eligible as recompense for the “decades of harm they have experienced,” according to a report on Monday.

“A lump sum payment would compensate the affected population … and will redress the economic and opportunity losses that​ ​Black San Franciscans have endured, collectively, as the result of both intentional decisions and​ ​unintended harms perpetuated by City policy​,” the San Francisco African American Reparations Advisory Committee said in a draft report issued last month, Fox News Digital reported. ​

The proposal could cost the city, which has a 2022-2023 budget of $14 billion, roughly $50 billion, the Daily Mail reported.

The committee also proposed wiping out all debts associated with educational, personal, credit card and payday loans for black households.

The 15-member pan​el was established by San Francisco supervisors in May 2021. A separate task force created by California’s legislature is also studying reparations.

The city group’s report says: “Reparation​ ​must be adequate, effective, prompt, and should be proportional to the gravity of the violations and the harm suffered.​”​

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St. Louis mayor plans reparations committee for black residents

St. Louis Mayor Tishaura O. Jones signed an executive order to establish a volunteer panel that will determine the degree to which black residents of St. Louis have suffered from racism. The stated goal of the committee is to explore the history of “race-based harms” in St. Louis and reveal the “present-day manifestations” created by said history.

As the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, Jones came to the conclusion that the panel was needed after a “growing tapestry of equity-based analyses” shed light on the city’s history of violence, segregation, and exploitation that she says has left it as one of the most divided cities in the country.

“I look forward to reviewing this commission’s work to chart a course that restores the vitality of Black communities in our city after decades of disinvestment,” the mayor remarked in a statement. “We cannot succeed as a city if one half is allowed to fail,” she declared.

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