Half a mil to put their thumbs up their asses instead of just literally giving that money directly as reparations
Edit: I want to clarify, I fully support reparations, I’m just extremely frustrated knowing that, under liberal/bourgeoisie democracy, these types of efforts tend to get bogged down with means testing, and sometimes outright turn into thinly-veiled handouts to private corporations. All while the police budget is still increasing YOY.
That said, Evanston (city on Chicago’s northern border) did actually manage to distribute “…$25,000 in no-strings-attached direct cash payments for those eligible. Black residents who lived in Evanston during a 50-year period of discriminatory zoning laws and their direct descendants receive priority for eligibility.” So I don’t want to encourage further reactionary criticisms such as mine towards this specific subcommittee if they are able to achieve at least some form of direct payments similar to Evanston’s program.
inb4 they pocket the money and go “we’ll meet again next year to finish this”
No that’s literally what they’re doing
Ald. Stephanie Coleman (16th Ward), the chair of the Chicago City Council’s Black Caucus, said the subcommittee is likely to be part of the City Council’s Committee on Contracting Equity and Oversight, which is led by Ald. Emma Mitts (37th Ward). That panel will meet for no more than a year, and then transition to a full commission, Coleman told WTTW News.
Edit: I’m going to go back on this specific criticism, as has been pointed out by other commenters, this committee has voiced their intentions to model their program after Evanston, which began with means-testing assistance but had a 2nd phase which instituted “$25,000 in no-strings-attached direct cash payments for those eligible. Black residents who lived in Evanston during a 50-year period of discriminatory zoning laws and their direct descendants receive priority for eligibility.”
There’s still plenty to criticize around the inefficiencies and contradictions of reparation attempts under liberal democracy, but I don’t want to direct my ire at efforts that actually accomplish some material benefit, at least if and until they demonstrate failure. In other words, we should agitate these efforts to do it correctly, and clown on them if they end up with some means-tested liberal nonsense, but not clown on them for attempting it all.
How do people think you go from supporting reparations as a concept to actually cutting checks and deciding who gets what? Are the people doing the work to get from concept to execution supposed to work for free?
This is what running a government looks like. Absent a specific critique about why this amount isn’t needed, the takes objecting to this are just the reactionary “any dime the government spends on anything other than the end product is pure waste.”
I will believe this the minute I see this process resulting in >$500k being given as reparations. Unfortunately creating a committee to study an issue is from a well-established playbook of stringing people along.
“I’ll believe the government can do good when I see it” is a core reactionary idea. Its another strain of we have to purge from ourselves if we’re going to sell people on a system of government that we think should directly provide housing, healthcare, education, jobs, solutions to climate change, etc.
Really, how else would you go from concept to execution? Committes can be used to string people along, but they’re also how you make big decisions in big organizations. Skepticism is warranted, but calling this nothing until the checks clear is not.
This is a government that exists within bourgeois capitalist democracy, aka a government run by the capitalists. Specifically since it’s a municipal government it’s run by real estate developers. Thinking that electing someone with specific beliefs will alter the forces shaping the trajectory of that government is, itself, brainworms.
That’s a fair point, it’s just hard to not be pessimistic when the same city is still spending $2 billion on their police budget and $29 mil to a private company for tents to house migrants (instead of just expropriating some unoccupied office buildings).
I’m not against spending large amounts of time, effort, and money on planning and executing reparations, I just have very little confidence that it can be done under liberal democracy without it turning into some market-based, means-tested program that is most certainly not reparations, all while other systems of harm are still being funded by several higher orders of magnitude. I will word my criticisms better in the future so as not to come off like I’m criticizing the very idea of planning and distributing reparations.
Skepticism is warranted, but there are reparations being paid right now 45 minutes down the road in Evanston. It’s not a pipe dream; there’s an actual working example right there.
We talk a lot here about how social programs in the USSR and Warsaw Pact countries served as an immediate example of how things could be done better, and how that pressured capitalist countries to make concessions in the same direction. Reparations programs can work the same way. We’ve seen this effect with LGBT rights and marijuana legalization recently, too.
Photo of the reparations committee in session
How is Chicago going to pay for reparations and according to what criteria? Collective years lived in Chicago? Reparations to Japanese Americans came from federal funds as a counterexample. Clown show all around.
Those are exactly the questions this subcommittee will answer? How is using a committee to go from “reparations should be paid” to the specifics of how to pay them, and to whom, a clown show? How else would you do it?
Reparations for a national crime isn’t something that should be decentralized to city councils and local governments.
How would I do it? How all the other governments do it worldwide. National apology first. Truth and reconciliation committee afterwards along with reparations on a federal level.
Chicago looking into it is theatrics. It’s only entertaining. Not very useful and they know it.
Reparations for a national crime isn’t something that should be decentralized to city councils and local governments.
Sure, but a national program isn’t happening anytime soon. I don’t see why we should object to local governments doing something, as local governments had plenty of discriminatory policies, too.
Chicago looking into it is theatrics.
This level of pessimism is unfounded. Another Illinois city (Evanston) has already started making reparations payments, and local governments have been ahead of the curve on many issues where the feds lag behind.
Why does this website have to be so weird about race??? These people call people crackers constantly but most of them are crackers when push comes to shove.
Cash payment doesn’t seem like a good solution compared to the “40 acres and a mule” (i.e. means of production) line. Scholarships are alright but feel a bit like a trap when you consider the barriers poor people face in succeeding in college even setting aside tuition.
Nonetheless, on mass line principles, we may as well try and fail this approach since it’s still a small expenditure compared to the MIC and a lot of other bullshit the US has infinite pocket depth for. After it fails, it will have still directly done some good and then the need for a more systemic solution will be made obvious to virtually everyone.
Also it’s kinda wild of the libs to look at the current situation of various minorities and think that “ah yes, we need official documents linking you to a slave ancestor” rather than just helping people without means testing. Because that’s usually what the liberals are trying to do, it can be obvious that you had slaves in your family, but if you don’t have the papers they get off on denying due to technicality. I’ve read through most reparations resolutions and it’s depressing
i also hate how in this discourse that there are currently 2.3 million black people in prison and many are being used for literal legally defined slave work and that it never gets brought up. they act like its so long ago but its literally happening right now. especially when labor is used as a punishment of a crime, its so fucked to keep pressing the profit button once someone has ‘fixed’ what they broke. im talking theft-based and possession felonies that get you in jail for 10-15 years but 10-15 years of labor is way more money and harm than the crime itself. and thats not even getting into labor trafficking from countries like haiti or the fact that jim crow would result in situations that were basically just slavery…
have noted their Black heritage on the census
identify as Black on their birth certificate
im really worried about this bit, i know it was common in the czech community in america to hide that we were czech to avoid anti-slav discrimination. i even have talked to czechs that were forced to live in certain districts because they identified as czech on naturalization papers, it was generally recommended to identify as austrian or german because they got off easier. theres got to be edge cases for white-passing/mixed ancestry black people. i also recall some movements in the 70s demanding everyone to say ‘rather not say’ on ethnicity forms or not fill out ethnicity so as to avoid geographic racial profiling. i wish we didnt have such a shitty government so we could have actual scientific socialist studies on how to get reparations to everyone effected with no one being left behind. i honestly wonder what cuba has done in this field, i cant say im well-versed on afro-cuban history. i do know china has had some really extensive reparations policies to certain ethnic groups, but that is a very different setting.
Yeah NAACP is right. First comes national apology and acknowledgement. Truth and reconciliation commission comes next along with reparations. Standard stuff worldwide.
Dems aren’t actually interested in condemning founding fathers and rectifying past injustice which is why we are getting a committee on forming a committee instead.
“ah yes, we need official documents linking you to a slave ancestor” rather than just helping people without means testing
The one city I know of that has actually started reparations payments – Evanston – is tying them to redlining and other discriminatory policies in Evanston and in the 20th century. I don’t think it’s means tested, either; it’s not based on need, but on if recipients are “descendants of Evanston residents who lived in the city between 1919 and 1969 or suffered housing discrimination after 1969.”
that seems pretty good, but do they need to currently reside there, or does it go to everyone including people that left the city? also isnt that the one othello was talking about as not being enough
