Every year since 1989, U.S. Representative John Conyers has introduced a Bill; HR 40: “Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act.”.
To acknowledge the fundamental injustice, cruelty, brutality, and inhumanity of slavery in the United States and the 13 American colonies between 1619 and 1865 and to establish a commission to examine the institution of slavery, subsequently de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans, and the impact of these forces on living African-Americans, to make recommendations to the Congress on appropriate remedies, and for other purposes.
Rep. Conyers has introduced many reparative Bills over the years including H.R. 98 (to be named the John Hope Franklin Tulsa-Greenwood Riot Accountability Act) that would overturn the result in Alexander v. State of Oklahoma, providing a remedy in court for anyone deprived of their rights on account of race in the riot or its aftermath, in response to the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921
The riot devastated the Greenwood neighborhood of Tulsa, Oklahoma, a prosperous, racially-segregated community that had been called the “Negro Wall Street” of the United States.
Every year for the last 27 years John Conyers efforts to study the feasibility of reparations have largely been swept aside.
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Recently, American writer, journalist, educator and powerful voice advocating Civil Rights for the African American community, Ta-Nehisi Coates issued a challenge to senator and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders:
Why Precisely Is Bernie Sanders Against Reparations?
That is a very good question to ask. It is also a question that Rep. John Conyers has been asking of every single congress person for decades.
Unanswered. Not even a study to find answers to that question and not a few other important questions has been disallowed by our elected officials.
Ta-Nehisi Coates isn’t that impressed with Bernie Sanders response.
Sanders says the chance of getting reparations through Congress is “nil,” a correct observation which could just as well apply to much of the Vermont senator’s own platform....Sanders is a lot of things, many of them good.
But he is not the candidate of moderation and unification, so much as the candidate of partisanship and radicalism....Sanders should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy.
Ta-Nehisi Coates states in an earlier brilliantly researched and written piece called..
The case for reparations
...that:
Reparations is not one possible tool against white supremacy. It is the indispensable tool against white supremacy.
..and yet, according to Kevin Drum @ Mother Jones who wonders (January 19, 2016):
Coates is unhappy that Sanders is so reticent about reparations, but this strikes me as an odd criticism. A couple of years ago Coates famously wrote an Atlantic article titled "The Case for Reparations," and after reading it I concluded that he was reticent about reparations too.
He certainly made the case that black labor and wealth had been plundered by whites for centuries—something that few people deny anymore—but when it came time to talk about concrete restitution for this, he tap danced gingerly.
- emphasis added
Here are just a couple of relevant paragraphs from Ta-Nehisi Coates that Kevin Drum has highlighted:
....Scholars have long discussed methods by which America might make reparations to those on whose labor and exclusion the country was built. In the 1970s, the Yale Law professor Boris Bittker argued...$34 billion....Today Charles Ogletree, the Harvard Law School professor, argues for something broader: a program of job training and public works that takes racial justice as its mission but includes the poor of all races.
....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....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.
Kevin Drum continues with this:
If you say "reparations," an ordinary person will almost certainly understand it in a very specific way: A disbursement of money to blacks to atone for slavery and its aftermath.
But despite the provocative title of his piece, Coates never squarely endorses this. Instead, he suggests we pass a bill that would study slavery.
He writes approvingly of Ogletree's proposal for job training and public works. And he wants a "full acceptance" of our past along with a "national reckoning" about its consequences.
I'm not being coy when I say that after I read this, I couldn't tell whether or not Coates supported reparations in the sense that most people understand them.
And since I'm sure that's the sense in which Bernie Sanders was answering the question, I'm not quite sure what Coates is criticizing here.
To my ear, Sanders sounded a lot like Ogletree, who Coates seems to have no problem with. So what's his problem with Sanders?
Who holds the higher ground seem less important than that this issue may finally go John Conyers way (HR 40). At least to advance the idea of a study to answer these important question long ignored by too many.
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And: What strikes me is that it is senator Bernie Sanders, his fight against inequality, and his being “not the candidate of moderation and unification” but also according to Ta-Nehisi Coates, a “partisanship and radical” that has received the greatest praise from Ta-Nehisi Coates by this invitation and challenge...
...a recognition that he, and he alone has now garnered the mantle of “radical” enough so that the change that Bernie Sanders has been fighting for for almost a half a century has put him as the top pick to lead on this path towards a better more egalitarian society — As the Norm