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The Alameda County Board of Supervisors has approved the formation of a commission that will create an action plan to address inequities caused by slavery and discrimination against Black residents.
The commission will be appointed by the board and have up to 15 members from a variety of backgrounds. Members may include someone who was displaced by gentrification and a person who was incarcerated.
Board President Nate Miley said at the March 28 meeting that the board is not proposing putting checks in the pockets of African Americans, though that could happen. Other forms of reparations may occur, too.
“Today, we as Black people live under the shadow of slavery,” Supervisor Keith Carson said. “It wasn’t 150 years ago, it wasn’t 250 years ago, it continues to persist today.”
Black people comprise the largest number of homeless individuals in the country, Carson said, and thousands of Black people were experimented on. Earlier in his comments, Carson referred to the Tuskegee experiment in which researchers did not obtain the consent of the men who participated or offer penicillin even after it was widely available to treat syphilis.
Black people in the judicial system “have never received equal protection under the law,” he said.
Black people have been kept out of “institutions of higher learning” and they are lowest paid people in the job market, Carson said.
“The United States government has documented its participation in making drugs available to Black communities,” he said.
Then the government built bigger prisons, he said, put Black people in prisons for long periods of time and enacted three strike laws.
Other jurisdictions have formed committees, commissions or task forces. The state of California is one. San Francisco formed a committee of 15 members that will submit research to its Board of Supervisors, according to a presentation by Caleb Matthews from Miley’s office.
Los Angeles formed a reparations advisory commission in June 2021 and Asheville, N.C., and Evanston, Ill., are working toward reparations, the presentation said.
Appointments to Alameda County’s commission are expected to occur no later than July 1, Matthews said during the presentation.
The commission would report bimonthly to an ad hoc committee of the board with the goal of adopting reparations by July of next year.
Matthews defined reparations as making amends “by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.”
He named five areas of reparations. Three of those are compensation such as cash payments, restitution such as the return of land, and the provision of rehabilitative services such as medical or legal services.
Other forms of reparations may come in the form of policy reform, public apologies and memorials.
Fun Fact #1: California had nothing to do w/ slavery
Fun Fact #2: USA is over 31 trillion in debt
This has to be a joke at best! More money to help the people that live on welfare and social assistance. I’m white and would like some of that free money!
Willy: You see, California isn’t following the words of MLK. They are judging by the color of someone’s skin and not the content of their character.
According to Harvard historian Henry Louis Gates, in 1830, 3,776 free American blacks owned 12,907 slaves.
Free Blacks were selling their own sons, daughters, husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, etc. prior to the end of the Civil War.
There were about 1,500,000 white causalities during the Civil War:
– 620.000 killed
– 476,000 wounded
– 400.000 missing/captured
The policy of “forty acres and a mule” was devised by Union general William T. Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15, issued on January 16, 1865. 400,000 acres of land was to be distributed to the newly freed slaves. The Civil War basically ended April 9, 1865. In the fall of 1865, Democratic President Andrew Johnson overturned the reparations and returned the land to South Carolina, Georgia, and Florida. Shortly afterwards the Democrats founded the KKK and started to create Jim Crow laws.
What about reparations for the Whites that helped the Blacks?
Why is there a desire to give money to the families of Black slave owners?
What about “cancelling” the Democratic Party for the continued enslavement of the Blacks when the fought to free the Blacks like the Republicans did?