I spent much of 2019 as state director of Marianne Williamson’s campaign for the presidency in New Hampshire. While her campaign never found widespread support, she highlighted one issue in every appearance, which now should be taken seriously.
Ms. Williamson made paying reparations to the descendants of slaves in America a moral pillar of her campaign. In her detailed talks, she traced the history of brutal and systemic racism from the earliest days of this nation through the Civil War, the terror of reconstruction and Jim Crow, right up to the present day. She argued for billions of dollars in financial reparations to be distributed through an independent commission, made up of black leaders, charged with investing the money in African American communities.
On Memorial Day, in an interminable 8-minute-and-46-second video caught on video, a white Minneapolis police officer named Derek Chauvin asphyxiated and killed George Floyd, a 46-year-old black man, by kneeling on his neck. The uncomfortable truth is that white people in America have been kneeling on black people’s necks for centuries, both literally and figuratively.
The international furor ignited by Chauvin’s senseless act, protesting police brutality directed against people of color in this country, may grow or it may fade. During the COVID-19 pandemic, people of color in the United States have disproportionately been its victims, highlighting long-standing racial inequality, wealth inequality, discrimination in education, housing, health care and employment opportunity.
So, perhaps the pandemic was the tinder and George Floyd’s murder was the spark for a singular moment in American history. Perhaps this is the moment when America wakes up to its guilty past and undertakes systemic reform designed to address centuries of white supremacy.
The events of recent days highlight the absolute necessity of a national reckoning with the underbelly of our collective past. The stain of racism, hate and violence against black people in America is a painful one and uncomfortably vivid.
How can the sins of centuries of oppression and systemic white supremacy be addressed? The first step is reparations, billions of dollars of targeted investment poured into disadvantaged communities from inner cities to rural America. The United States paid reparations to Japanese-Americans wrongly interred during World War II. Germany paid Jews reparations in the process of self-reflection and healing from the Holocaust. The precedents exist and the time is right.
The brilliant writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, in a stunning and comprehensive article published in the Atlantic in 2014, made the argument for reparations. At a time when America’s first black president occupied the same White House now the bastion of a cowardly racist, he argued that reparations would lead to the spiritual renewal necessary to heal the American psyche and banish white guilt.
“And so we must imagine a new country. Reparations – by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences – is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely. The recovering alcoholic may well have to live with his illness for the rest of his life. But at least he is not living a drunken lie. Reparations beckons us to reject the intoxication of hubris and see America as it is – the work of fallible humans. Won’t reparations divide us? Not any more than we are already divided. The wealth gap merely puts a number on something we feel but cannot say – that American prosperity was ill-gotten and selective in its distribution. What is needed is an airing of family secrets, a settling with old ghosts. What is needed is a healing of the American psyche and the banishment of white guilt. What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices – more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal.”
I commend the entire article to those reading this piece. The case for reparations is strong. The time for reparations is now.
(Paul Hodes represented New Hampshire’s 2nd Congressional district from 2007-2011. He is running for state Senate District 15.)