Last month, a subcommittee in the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing to discuss House Resolution 40, a bill that would allow for studying and developing a plan for reparations that would be paid to Black Americans.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) introduced the legislation, which many Black leaders and organizations have championed for decades. The National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC) and the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America (N’COBRA) have worked to develop the language of this bill and promote its message to the public.
Ron Daniels, convener of NAARC, has been an outspoken proponent of reparations. Daniels, who is president at the Institute of the Black World 21st Century and former distinguished lecturer at City University of New York, talked with Street Roots about NAARC’s 10-point plan for implementing reparations nationally.
Ron Daniels is the convener of the National African American Reparations Commission and president at the Institute of the Black World 21st Century.
Joe Opaleski:“Reparations” means many things, and it’s often characterized as a lump sum of money paid to those who have been harmed, but there’s more to it than that. What is the best way to describe reparations?
Ron Daniels: Reparations, in a universal sense, is repair — the repair for damages, which are either a physical, cultural or mental identity inflicted by a nation or group of people on another. It involves a process by which the offending party must, first and foremost, acknowledge, then apologize. Then there’s a variety of things that are related to remedy restitution — non-repetition of the activity and so forth — and these are deeply embedded in international law.
As it applies to Africans in America, or African Americans, it is the repair of the damages which were inflicted as a result of the holocaust of enslavement — the transatlantic enslavement and the institution of enslavement here in the United States. But it’s more than that.
It is also for all of the derivatives: racially exclusive policies and practices that emanated from one of the original sins, like the Homestead Act, where many people in this country who were not Africans were able to take advantage of huge land grants that were made to people moving West; the Federal Housing Authority in the Second World War that Black people were not able to take advantage of; the GI Bill, which was awarded to whites but not to Blacks; and redlining and gentrification.
The notion of cash payments is something that we also have some constituencies pushing for, as if this is the only form of reparations, and obviously it’s not. If you look at the 10-point program of NAARC, we make a point of laying out that there can be direct benefits in those instances of individuals who have been harmed directly, contemporarily or even in the past — for example, Tulsa(where in 1921, 800 people were hospitalized and between 75 and 300 were killed in an act of racial violence), where you have one surviving person who has never been awarded anything, beyond this bogus apology. So that is one category.
1. A Formal Apology and Establishment of an African Holocaust (MAAFA) Institute
2. The Right of Repatriation and Creation of an African Knowledge Program
3. The Right to Land for Social and Economic Development
4. Funds for Cooperative Enterprises and Socially Responsible Entrepreneurial Development
5. Resources for the Health, Wellness and Healing of Black Families and Communities
6. Education for Community Development and Empowerment
7. Affordable Housing for Healthy Black Communities and Wealth Generation
8. Strengthening Black America’s Information and Communications Infrastructure
9. Preserving Black Sacred Sites and Monuments
10. Repairing the Damages of the Criminal Injustice System
But in reality, there’s a larger category of what we call community benefits, and community benefits can accrue in a number of forms. It might be land; it might be the resources to build hospitals, or educational institutions, or economic development or the building out of communications infrastructure.
The reason why that’s important is if you look at the destruction of Black Wall Street or the Greenwood neighborhood, even if all of the individuals had been compensated in one form or another, even if it had been cash payments, you still have the destruction of a community. In that respect, the community is larger than the sum of the parts. How do you repair that?
The other thing that’s important is we also want to distinguish reparations from ordinary public policy.
For example, now, there’s a great deal of emphasis on equity. Now, equity is good, but equity talks about what will occur in the future. It does not deal with the basic issues of systemic and structural institutional racism attendant to enslavement. While this is good, and we applaud the emphasis on equity, it’s not reparations. Nor is universal basic income reparations. There are a lot of good public policy options that meet current needs. They’re good policies, but reparations is distinctive in that it derives in the way that I articulated it from the beginning.
Opaleski: H.R. 40 would establish a commission to study reparations. It had a hearing in a house subcommittee last month, but the bill has largely languished since 2017. Is there a reason to be optimistic that it could pass this year?
Daniels: It’s unfortunate to use the language “languished” because that is not the case either.
The initial bill, H.R. 40, has languished only in the sense that it never got more than 50 sponsors. However, it was a huge success as an educational tool. In 1989, at this stage, the idea of reparations, even for many African Americans, was an idea that (was) this pie in the sky. “Why did we want to work on this, we’ll never get it, let’s just focus on the present.”
So what happened? H.R. 40 was seen as an educational tool. Plus, it came right after the Japanese (Americans) had actually been concretely awarded reparations. It meant that individuals endorsed H.R. 40, there were co-sponsors. It was an incredibly powerful educational tool. For many years, it was used like that.
But the other thing that has to be recognized: H.R. 40 is no longer a study bill. It is a bill to study and develop reparations proposals. Why is that important? Because it is the National African-American Reparations Commission, along with N’COBRA that went to Congressman John Conyers and said, “The study phase, the organizing phase, the educational phase, is over. We now have more than enough studies. We now need to concretely talk about what will reparations look like.”
The current bill was rewritten with the expert hand of the National African American Reparations Commission and N’COBRA to be a remedy bill. So now, it’s not just a question of whether reparations will be granted out of the commission that will be enacted; it is in what forms?
That bill we’re very optimistic about. In the last Congress it had 173 sponsors in the House of Representatives. Cory Booker’s bill, which did not have the same title, had something like 30 to 40 co-sponsors in the Senate, including the now Vice President Kamala Harris.
That is huge progress in terms of the moving forward of the bill, and on Juneteenth 2019, there was another historic hearing on H.R. 40 that was watched by, literally, millions of people across the country and throughout the world.
(Senate Majority Leader) Chuck Schumer and (House Speaker) Nancy Pelosi are fully on board, as is Steny Hoyer, the top leadership in the Democratic Caucus. Jerrold Nadler, who is the chair of the Judiciary Committee, which is where this bill is lodged, has prioritized H.R. 40 as the No. 1 among the top three initiatives that are being supported by the Judiciary Committee.
It is moving, and not only that — there is such a huge movement behind it. The coalition that the National African American Reparations Commission convenes, which includes organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for American Progress and National Council of Churches, N’COBRA, of course, Human Rights Watch. This coalition has really been organizing and getting communications out, doing social media campaigns. And so the “why-we-can’t-wait letter” that Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee, this very courageous and visionary leader of this effort and lead sponsor, put forth, now has over 400 organizations across the country in support of it.
Plus, the post (George) Floyd inflection, the Black Lives Matter demonstrations that engulfed millions of people in the streets across this country — we’re at a moment where this bill is on the verge of being enacted in the House of Representatives.
The issue is, can it pass in the Senate? Because of the threshold of getting 60 senators on it in the absence of blowing up the filibuster. Or it could be enacted by presidential executive order? And everything that we’re hearing from President Biden is that he is fully on board with H.R. 40, so we are extremely optimistic.
But even when it is passed, there will still be a reparations movement, because we want to ensure that the people who sit on this commission are people who have an understanding of reparations, and we want to build out a strong movement so that the 10-point program, and the kind of work that has been done by N’COBRA, becomes a frame of reference for reparations.
Because at the end of the day, as Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee has so brilliantly articulated it, reparations is not just about a check anyway. It’s not even about all the benefits that we’re talking about, because you can’t pay for the atrocities and the horrific underdevelopment and brutality of enslavement. There’s no amount of money. Including, in Women’s History Month, the huge degradation and rape and breaking up of families that Black women endured; you can’t pay for that.
The real issue is that it will strike at the heart of structural, institutional racism in this society. H.R. 40 is the only all-encompassing policy prescription that gets at structural, institutional racism, and in that regard, it becomes a transformative piece of legislation.
Armed national guards and African American men stand on a sidewalk during the 1919 race riot in Chicago.
Opaleski: NAARC is critical of what it calls the “conglomerization of electronic and print media,” saying it has been “devastating to the maintenance of Black America’s information and communications infrastructure.” Could you speak to NAARC’s proposal to support a strong Black media, and why that’s so important?
Daniels: One of the liberating things that has happened is social media. Obviously there’s some areas in which there needs to be reforms, but social media has allowed people to get around the conglomerization of media. But still, I would dare say the vast majority of people in the United States of America still look at the mainstream media.
The problem is that it’s controlled by so few people, and the ability to actually own media was severely undermined when the Fairness Doctrine was eliminated, and when the ability was granted to radio stations to own as many stations as they chose to own.
What happened was many Black stations were just gobbled up, and even if they are now stations that do like the urban music, they’re these code words for Black music and so forth. In many instances they’re owned by outsiders, and they no longer serve to function like a WAOK in Atlanta, Georgia, that has a talk format, the format that WLIB used to have in New York, where it was listener oriented and people engaged and learned from it.
That’s why one of the points in the 10-point program deals with independent media. Our ability to have the resources to build independent media so we can reach not only Black people, but we can reach the world in terms of educating people about the kind of transformative agenda that reparations represents.
Opaleski: You mentioned earlier how integral housing has been as a tool of segregation and economic oppression against Black people, and that it continues to have an impact in denying families of building generational wealth. What do you want to see done with housing?
Daniels: Well first of all, we would like to be in a position to have land where we could actually develop the social ownership of housing.
We’re big advocates for socially responsible economic development. By that we mean that we can have cooperatives, community economic development corporations, and when it comes to housing, where the most important of vehicles is, can you control the land. So we are big advocates of community land trusts, which are beginning to develop quite extensively.
We want to be in a position to not only have people who are homeowners be able to maintain their homes. And that’s something that you see that’s happening in Evanston, Illinois, which is an initiative that we certified. There’s a modest effort there to close the wealth gap by enabling people to have relief from their mortgages, do home improvements and those kinds of things.
But we also want people who are renters, who are unhoused, to have the ability to also, either individually or in cooperatives, be able to have social ownership, so that the wealth is no longer just individualized; it is what is the wealth of the community. And the basis of that, very often, as El Hajj Malik El Shabazz (Malcolm X) said, is land.
Opaleski: Another major point in the 10-point reparations plan is criminal justice reform. What do you see as the priorities for reparations in regard to the criminal justice system?
Daniels: We need a release of all political prisoners and prisoners of war.
The people who were victimized by COINTELPRO, people who have been languishing, some of them in prisons for decades, on trumped-up charges. And there are others who decided to even pick up arms or to commit acts of liberation, which are characterized as terrorism. We want these people released, and that would be a part of a negotiated reparations settlement.
Beyond that, as Michelle Alexander documented in her book “The New Jim Crow” so powerfully, the War on Drugs is one of those racially exclusionary policies that targeted and harmed Black people in so many ways, in terms of the loss of family, the splitting of families, the caste system that stunted our ability to break out of it because if you had an arrest you couldn’t get a job, you couldn’t get a scholarship, you couldn’t get a barber’s license, all of those things.
So we very much support the idea that there must be repair in this area, and a part of that is the total decriminalization of all drugs, which is a public policy prescription. But also, that those persons who were harmed must have the ability to benefit from any kind of legalization or decriminalization of drugs. They must have the ability to invest in these industries and be entrepreneurs and, quite frankly — this is my own personal opinion — I favor, again, social ownership.
I want the formerly incarcerated persons, or returning citizens, to be able to form their own groups, and be able to benefit from this form of entrepreneurship so they’re not dependent on grants and the largest foundations and so forth.
The other thing that becomes incredibly important is enabling, because one of the things that’s happening today — it’s really institutional racism without people really recognizing — it’s one thing to say that anyone, including someone that’s formerly incarcerated, can own or apply for a license; it’s another to have the capital to be able to do it. So we need a fund. That’s what a reparations fund would do; it would allow this fund to provide the capital for social ownership of dispensaries, either medical or recreational facilities, as a tool of economic development, as an engine for economic development.
The restitution for the War on Drugs is clearly a key area in that regard.
And just to clear the record, reforming the 13th Amendment to take out that language that says you are free except in those instances of previous incarceration, people actually believe that that applies; it doesn’t really apply. But symbolically it ought not to be there; it should never have been there, because in some ways it became the predicate for the convict lease system, and the rationalization of the convict lease system, and the rationalization today of free prison labor and things of that nature. And in some people’s minds, this whole notion of you having been criminalized means that you should not therefore have full citizenship, you should not therefore have full rights in this society.
Opaleski:You briefly mentioned Evanston, Illinois, where NAARC has endorsed a $10 million reparations initiative. Other small towns have pledged to create reparations plans, like Asheville, North Carolina, and Providence, Rhode Island. What’s the difference between local and national reparations movements?
Daniels: The federal legislation will have the biggest impact, because that’s where the dollars are. That’s where you can find the trillions of dollars that are required in order to actually have a major transformative impact in terms of reparations.
Local reparations initiatives are important, but if you look at Evanston, for example, $10 million, even if it were $20 million, it is not enough. But it’s important, because municipalities have to be held accountable for their practices — corporations, colleges and universities that have benefited from or were in complicity with slavery, financial institutions and families.
So Evanston becomes a model of how a community can organize itself with the proper criteria and definitions of reparations to create an initiative that will provide some modest reparatory justice at the local level.
Once H.R. 40 passes, and there are prescriptions that may be around housing, education, economic development that have to be implemented, if you already have a reparations initiative in place in Evanston, or in Asheville, or in Providence, it will be in position to be able to administer those reparations. There’s a synergistic relationship between them.
California took a huge leap forward in that the California legislature passed a bipartisan bill, which was signed by Gov. (Gavin) Newsom, which is almost a carbon copy of H.R. 40.
The other thing that becomes important about this is the education, is understanding what happened in history, which is a really a flaw across the board.
I teach racial ethnic politics, or I did as distinguished lecturer at City University of New York. It was getting students to understand real history. What happened to the Chinese? What happened to the Japanese? What happened to Native Americans? Many people have no clue. So, in California, even as I was looking at it, they’re talking about things that I was not aware of, the way in which a “liberal progressive state” is (complicit) in many forms in perpetuating aspects of racial exclusionary policies, and so education becomes important.
It is cleansing the soul of America in a way that really creates the preconditions highly aspired to by the Founding Fathers, who were imperfect, but they talked about a more perfect union. It is poetic justice that it’s the reparations movement that may actually be at the forefront of bringing that into possibility.
Opaleski: How will we know when this country has achieved full reparations for slavery?
Daniels: I think in some ways it is a process. I think we will be able to measure the degree to which the wealth gap is closed in this country, the degree to which there was an implementation of the kind of provisions that we’ve talked about in the 10-point program, and when there is a new, more democratic economy.
Because at the end of the day, there’s a tension between racialized capitalism as it exists and the demand for reparations as is being articulated.
So this is something that may take a while. What kind of progress are we making on closing the wealth gap? That’s one of the major indicators. Not only individual wealth, but how are we beginning to look at a Tulsa (Black Wall Street), in terms of the Black community being revitalized, not only in individual terms, but in collective terms.
When we’ll get there, I don’t know. It’s like Martin Luther King said: “I may not get there with you.” But clearly, we’re on the road towards reparatory justice given the passage of H.R. 40, and what it portends in terms of possibilities.
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