As I scrolled through my news feed, crimes, casualties, and human-interest pieces flickered across the screen, mixed in with memes, music videos, and recipes. Within the anxiety-inducing maelstrom, a clear theme stood out to me: Climate change has us all fucked, doubly so if you are a minority. Driving the point home were the seemingly unrelated stories of environmental devastation concurrently unfolding in Jackson, Mississippi, and Puerto Rico. At first glance, they seemed disparate, but my shared identity as an African American from Houston, Texas, and an Afro-Caribbean from Portmore, Jamaica, stitched the two together into a painfully familiar tale…
Reparations
Reparations for Racist Laws Are Gaining Traction at State and Local Levels
Georgia state Sen. Kim Jackson has pretty much given up on the idea that Black Georgians might some day receive reparations for past injustices. “In Georgia, the concept of reparations is a politically dead issue. It will not move,” said Jackson, a Black woman who comes from a farming family and sits on the Senate Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Committee. But leap across the country to California, a leader in this regard. The state launched a Reparations Task Force last year, and is compensating survivors of state-sponsored sterilization. While California is looking comprehensively, advocates in Republican-controlled states like Georgia are…
Landmark California Task Force Calls for “Comprehensive Reparations” for Slavery
California is the first state in the U.S. to establish a reparations task force for Black Americans. On June 1, the Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans issued a 500-page document that traces the history of white supremacy from slavery to Jim Crow through the present. It calls for “comprehensive reparations” for Black people harmed by a historical system of state-sanctioned oppression. “Segregation, racial terror, harmful racist neglect, and other atrocities in nearly every sector of civil society have inflicted harms, which cascade over a lifetime and compound over generations,” the report says. “The California…
Biden Backs Out of Negotiations to Compensate Separated Migrant Families
Human rights advocates were incensed Thursday after lawyers for the U.S. Department of Justice informed representatives for hundreds of families separated at the U.S.-Mexico border that they were walking away from talks over compensating the families, as President Joe Biden had promised. Instead of settling more than 900 claims, the administration signaled it will go to court to determine what compensation is owed to the families, many of whom were forcibly separated for several months by the Trump administration under its so-called “zero tolerance” anti-immigration policy. Lee Gelernt of the ACLU, who is serving as the lead counsel for the…