Where Do Young Black Americans Fit In The Fight For Reparations?

By Lincoln Anthony Blades


In December 1864, a month before Congress passed the 13th Amendment to officially abolish slavery, Confederate soldiers brutally massacred formerly enslaved Black folks along the shores of Ebenezer Creek in Effingham County, Georgia. After the carnage, Union General William T. Sherman met with abolitionists, preachers, and the formerly enslaved to answer one crucial question: “What can the government do to help Black people?” 


It was at that meeting that Garrison Frazier, a 67-year-old Baptist minister who spent the opening 60 years of his life in slavery before purchasing freedom for himself and his partner, said: “We wish to be placed on land up until we are able to purchase it and make it our own.”


Four days later, Gen. Sherman issued Field Categorize No. 15: the “40 acres plus a mule” rule that would allocate 18,000 formerly enslaved families each with 40 acres of land along the coast of South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Yet it was ultimately overturned by anti-Black President Andrew Jackson, this was the opening attempt from the federal government to issue Black Residents of the United States with reparations. In the years and decades that followed, Black Residents of the United States noticed themselves so frequently battling for generic civil rights, that the idea of reparations started to seem increasingly like an impossible dream.


Today, reparations isn't an idealistic fantasy, so much as it is a distant possibility. The June 2019 hearing contained by the Home Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties to discuss H.R. 40, a central segment of legislation that calls for a “commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African-Americans,” was a sign of progress. This bill was introduced by former Representative John Conyers (D-Mich.) In 1989 in almost every Congress since; Representative Sheila Jackson (D-Texas) started sponsoring the bill right after Conyers retired in 2017.


The hearing, which featured testimonies from author Ta-Nehisi Coates and documentarian Katrina Browne, was contained on June 19, or Juneteenth, which marks the official ending of slavery In the
U.S.. While their deeply researched and impassioned speeches laid out the case for why reparations are required to fix the harm the Black community suffered at the hands of the government, a majority of white Residents of the
U.S. are still instead of the idea of reparations in any form. That includes Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who on June 18 told a crowd of reporters, "I don't think reparations for something that happened 150 years back for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea."


Such a comment is extraordinarily simplistic: Yes, reparations must contend with slavery, and related horrors spanning hundreds of years.The literal economic foundation of America rests in the forced labor of Black people, several of whom were tortured while in their time as slaves. And while slavery is where the reparations discussion starts, it is far from where it ends. Black Residents of the United States are still navigating financial and societal inequities lobbed at them from both the U.S. Government and society’s residual racist structures.


plus it could be a mistake to discuss the most pressing characteristic of this debate without hearing from the generations who may actually around to be able to see reparations get enacted. Among those young people is Coleman Hughes, the 23-year-old Quilette columnist who instructed them Juneteenth hearing that he believes reparations would “divide the nation further” and “insult several Black Residents of the United States by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors.”


Nevertheless as Michigan State Representative Jewell Jones told MTV News, comprehensive reparations would atone for so much more than slavery alone. “We've been getting fucked for hundreds of years. It's gonna take a lot more than cash to create us whole," he said.

---

Reparations have often been understood as cash that could be supplied to Black Residents of the United States for the physical, financial, and mental suffering that Black folks have been subjected to by the U.S. Government and the nation at large.


According to Professor Darrick Hamilton, a stratification economist who is the Executive Director of the Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity at Ohio State University, “reparations is compensation as well as the acknowledgement of why you have that compensation, for harms that limited the ability of an entire population, based on their racial identity, to assemble assets and pass those assets down from one generation to the next either through exclusion from certain public policy, or through outright seizure, or through theft.”


And harm is undeniable: For decades, the Ku Klux Klan and other white supremacist, domestic terrorist groups lynched Black boys, girls, and children, and otherwise intimidate the collective Black community from trying to vote or live as equals to white people. Jim Crow laws, which existed In the
U.S. Between 1877 and the 1960s, enforced segregation to the detriment of Black Residents of the United States. And throughout America’s post-World War II economic boom, Black folks of all economic and academic levels were subject to government-sponsored white supremacy in the form of the government theft of Black-owned land, discriminatory housing policies, and the racist rise of mass incarceration. Black veterans were intentionally barred from accessing several of the advantages set forth by the Servicemen's Readjustment Act of 1944 (better referred to because the G.I. Bill). By 1956, as soon as the bill ended, 1.2 million Black veterans noticed themselves largely locked out of the financial and academic gains planned to millions of other non-Black servicemembers.


“After slavery, we were weak prone to fraud, we were weak vulnerable to whitecapping, basically terroristic violence to seize property. We were weak prone to a state apparatus in which the police force was used to impose terror on the community. This was all codified and sanctioned by the state,” Hamilton told MTV News.


While in the latter half of the 1900s, Black families were forced into economically neglected, low-income housing due to redlining, in which the government decides to strip a populace of funding based on how several minorities live there. The Fair Housing Act of 1968 did not adequately counter housing discrimination, where landlords frequently denied housing to people based on the color of their skin. Not only did this unequal economic and housing treatment specifically disadvantage Black communities and privilege white communities, nevertheless Black folks also had to deal with the war on drugs, and the rise of mass incarceration.


Today, Black families experience far different levels of wealth and successfulness from white families, which economists and historians can trace back to seminal moments in federal and state policy (as well as outright theft and violence against Black people). Centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, housing discrimination, school segregation, and mass incarceration have all added up to what is known because the racial wealth gap. Coates, who wrote the 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations,” laid out this infuriating history while in the Residence hearing on June 19, 2019. He also thoroughly countered McConnell by asserting that not only are the perpetrators of state-sponsored, anti-Black pillage still alive — so are the victims.


According to the National Asset Scorecard for Communities of Color (NASCC) studies team, Black households, at the median, have one-thirteenth of the wealth of white households, which can be traced back to generational transfers and inheritances. There’s also the matter of the pay gap; on average, Black boys make 69.7 cents to white men’s dollar for the same sort of work, while black ladies make only 60.8 cents. And white children have a higher end head begin in life than Black children because their families weren’t barred from living in better neighborhoods, going to better schools, or acquiring better jobs solely based on the color of their skin.


And according to Tiffany Dena Loftin, the Director of the Youth & College Division of the NAACP, the time for young people to jump into this conversation is currently, otherwise it may soon be also late: "For young people, the longer we take with each other to a conversation on what reparations could look like, the more generations of Black folks who are further away from racial justice, financial justice, and education justice."


The fix isn’t a matter of bootstraps mentality, or of putting the burden on a single to be even more qualified. Black people with some college education actually suffer higher unemployment rates than white people without a high school degree, according to a study conducted by the NASCC. Black students leave college with an average cash advance balance of over $34,000, around $5,000 more than all other students, and 20 percent of Black students are expected to default on their school cash advances by 2023. And because Black Residents of the United States have higher debts and fewer assets than their white counterparts, there’s no way to accrue generational wealth and no way to pass it on to their descendants, often making a vicious spiral of inequity.


According to Jones, who was elected to Michigan’s state legislature once he was 21,  permanent structural change in America's institutions could be the perfect benefit for the Black community. "We could supply free college and apprenticeship programs, corporation startup funds, bundles of houses and resources to rehab them, and automatic savings accounts for all Black children,” the now-24-year-old told MTV News.


Ultimately, Jones believes "it could be stupid to give each person a check, especially without education. Giving someone dollars and access to markets that are already monopolized isn't the key without creating space for us to learn and get engaged.” Yet he’s still hopeful that change can occur: “I do think we can get very creative in terms of distributing reparations," he adds.


“This whole thing about who should get a check, and should we cut checks, you know, I understand those questions,” Coates told Democracy Right now! on June 20, adding that the reason for HB 40 is to ask those questions and attempt to discern at least some answers. “If we don’t actually have a study, we can’t actually answer those questions. You can’t ask a doctor to create a diagnosis before there’s an actual examination.”


Currently, one of the debates amongst the pro-reparations crowd is who should qualify in the opening place. Some advocates, like Professor Sandy Darity, the founding director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University, believe that the program should be specifically targeted to American descendants of slavery.


Nevertheless the debate surrounding who should receive reparations might be equal parts divisive and premature, Loftin warns: "Before we have a conversation about who should and shouldn't be getting it, let's visualize if we even get it first. While all of the fighting is happening, Black people are being pushed out the margins."


categorize in attempt to make sure that the reparations debate keeps it up and continues to successfully evolve, there really are two crucial characteristic of engagement that must occur immediately: education and inclusion. “In categorize for the country to further engage young people about reparations we have to begin with what reparations are and how we’re having this conversation to start with,” says Loftin. “In most of our classrooms young people of color don’t learn their true history — and then in most cases, don’t learn about the racial disparities as it relates to economic injustice.”


Jones believes that if we make the conversation more tangibly based in the future, it will pull more young folks into the discussion. "Young folks care, although for several it's just a hot topic that keeps up conversation," he mentioned, adding: "It hasn't been tampered with and explored enough to discover what realistic reparations could look like."