Tag: slavery

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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California Reparations Committee Recommends $223K Each for State’s ‘Black’ or ‘African American’ Residents

A California committee formed to determine how much in reparations black people should receive due to slavery and past discrimination has determined that each of the 2.5 million California residents who identify as “Black” or “African American” should be paid $223,000 each for “housing discrimination.”

The total cost of reparations just for housing — there are four other causes for reparations the committee will consider — would be more than $569 billion. That’s $40 billion more than the entire state budget.

The committee has also recognized mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses, and healthcare as other causes for reparations.

The committee was created in 2020 after the Democratic legislature authorized its formation. It has until June 2023 to submit its recommendations.

“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the task force, told the New York Times.

Californians eligible for reparations, the task force decided in March, would be descendants of enslaved African Americans or of a “free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.” Nearly 6.5 percent of California residents, roughly 2.5 million, identify as Black or African American. The panel is now considering how reparations should be distributed — some favor tuition and housing grants while others want direct cash payments.

That’s the stickiest issue of all. Who is eligible and how do you prove it?  How much “black blood” will you need to claim any of the cash? These issues are impossible to adjudicate fairly, but no one on the commission is concerned about “fairness” It’s a punitive form of “justice” and needs to be stopped in its tracks before it gets started.

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‘We’re not going to move on’: Hakeem Jeffries cosponsors slavery reparations bill

Democratic Rep. Hakeem Jeffries, the potential House Democratic leader who has been endorsed by outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, is a cosponsor of the slavery reparations study legislation currently pending in the House.

Formally titled the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, H.R. 40 passed out of the House Judiciary Committee in April 2021, but it has not been put up for a full House vote.

The bill would establish a 13-member commission to “examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies.” The United States declared its independence from Great Britain in 1776.

“Year after year, decade after decade, century after century, we’ve come a long way,” Jeffries said during a Brookings Institution discussion addressing “structural racism” in U.S. public policy institutions in February 2020. “But, you know, some notion of truth and reconciliation, how do we move forward toward a more perfect union, I think has got to be part of any conversation connected to H.R. 40.”

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Four States Voted to End Slavery — But Not Louisiana. Here’s Why.

Voters in Vermont, Tennessee, Oregon and Alabama amended their state constitutions to abolish slavery and indentured servitude this week — but a similar initiative failed in Louisiana, garnering embarrassing headlines for a former slave state that remains infamous for modern mass incarceration and forced prison labor.

Louisiana voters rejected an amendment to the state constitution aimed at outlawing slavery and involuntary servitude on Tuesday, underscoring the challenges faced by a growing movement to abolish slave wages and coerced labor inside prisons nationwide. Activists campaigning to end prison slavery say the vote was mired in confusion and misinformation after Rep. Edmond Jordan, a Black Democrat and sponsor of the amendment in the state legislature, advised voters to reject its compromise language and send it back to the drawing board.

However, Amendment 7’s passage would have been at least a symbolic victory for formerly and currently incarcerated organizers in a state known for the Louisiana State Penitentiary, home to the notorious Angola prison farm located on a former antebellum plantation. Activists cite Angola as a well-known example of “modern-day slavery,” although coerced and extremely low-paid prison labor is pervasive far beyond rural Louisiana.

“We knew the amendment didn’t go far enough, but we need to start somewhere,” said Morgan Shannon, director of partnerships at the Power Coalition for Equity and Justice, in an interview. The social justice group is one of several that campaigned in support of the amendment.

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Walmart, GM Lobby U.S. to Hide Import Data that Could Reveal Slave, Child Labor

The Associated Press (AP) reported Tuesday that a coalition of major U.S. companies, including Walmart and General Motors, is quietly lobbying the government to make certain import data confidential — a change that would make it much more difficult for journalists and human rights activists to link imported goods to abusive labor practices abroad, including forced labor in China’s Xinjiang province and child labor in Africa.

Human rights lawyer Martina Vandenberg called the closed-door proposals “outrageous” and said American corporations should be “ashamed that their answer to this abuse is to end transparency.”

“Curtailing access to this information will make it harder for the public to monitor a shipping industry that already functions largely in the shadows,” agreed University of British Columbia professor Peter Klein, a prominent analyst of global supply chains.

In essence, the corporate executives who make up the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Commercial Customs Operations Advisory Committee proposed “modernizing” import/export procedures in a variety of ways, one of which would make “data collected from vessel manifests confidential.”

This would frustrate the current practice of journalists using shipping manifests to determine where goods manufactured or harvested with abusive labor practices were sent, a key tactic in pressuring U.S. companies to stop allowing forced labor into their supply chains.

As the AP pointed out, this seems directly contrary to CBP’s commitment to “boost visibility into global supply chains, support ethical sourcing practices and level the playing field for domestic U.S. manufacturers.” Corporate public relations departments have also been assuring American consumers they wish to cleanse their supply chains of forced labor and child labor.

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Anti-Historical ‘The Woman King’ Lies About Africa’s Slave Trade

“The Woman King,” a new “historical action epic” starring Viola Davis, has been treated to laudatory reviews by the corporate press. It has been called “indelible and truly inspiring” in an ABC News review which features the subhead “Black women only — no white saviors need apply.” The Daily Beast labeled it “an absolute blast of a cinematic experience,” praising its “thick layers of history.”

Set in 1823 in the West African kingdom of Dahomey (modern Benin), the movie pits the innocent Dahomans, protected by the elite all-female Agojie army, against the evil Oyo Empire, which operates as a brutal arm of the European slave trade and wishes to force Dahomey into providing slaves. Dahomey is portrayed as a kingdom that only wishes for peace and autonomy, whose king, Ghezo (John Boyega), is looking for alternatives to the awful trade in which his tribe has been reluctantly forced to participate. Besides manfully defending the citizens and king of Dahomey, the Agojie, under their leader Nanisca (Davis), are also proponents of ending the slave trade and replacing it with the cultivation of palm oil.

Throughout the film, Dahomey is presented as a small, put-upon kingdom that only seeks harmony and desires the destruction of the evil trade in human bodies — led by greedy Europeans — which plagued the region. In the words of the Los Angeles Times, “The Woman King” is an “incredible true story” about “this amazing group of female soldiers who caused such an act of resistance that slavery paused for a time.”

The problem? Almost none of this is true.

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‘Crime Against Humanity’: UN Finally Confirms China’s Forced Labor Camps For Uyghurs

A U.N. investigation led by the United Nation’s Special Rapporteur on contemporary forms of slavery, Tomoya Obokata, found it “reasonable to conclude” that China is subjecting the Uyghur ethnic minority group in Xinjiang province to forced labor.

China presents the state-mandated labor programs, where subjects are involuntarily transferred to “low–skilled and low–paid employment,” initiatives to alleviate poverty and provide vocational training to Uyghur, Kazakh and other minority groups residing in the semi-autonomous Xinjiang province, but an independent analysis of available information points to forced labor, the report, dated July 19, states.

Allegations of forced labor rose in 2018 when the U.N. and others said China’s “re-education camps” in Xinjiang violated human rights of the Muslim minority group, The New York Times reported, but the U.N. has not yet likened practice to slavery

“The Special Rapporteur considers that indicators of forced labour pointing to the involuntary nature of work rendered by affected communities have been present in many cases,” the report stated.

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