America has a problem. America has a sickness. It has a pandemic that goes by the name of generational racism. It’s time that America dedicated itself to solving this problem, to healing this sickness, to repairing the damage that been done to generation after generation.
Typically “reparations” are thought of in financial terms. It’s thought of as providing a cash payment as an offset for the wrong that has been done. In many cases, those payments have already been provided. The family of Eric Garner was paid $5.9 million in an out of court settlement. Walter Scott’s family was paid $6.5 million in a settlement. Trayvon Martin’s family settled a wrongful death suit for an undisclosed amount. Philando Castille’s family reached a $3 million settlement. Michael Brown’s family won a $1.5 million settlement. There was a $10 Million settlement paid for Mortgage Discrimination in 2013 and LA residents won a $2.5 Million Housing Discrimination settlement in 2017. The money flows easily when the time is right.
This needs to be about more than just mere money. How much is the life of your loved one really worth? How much would you pay to be free of a lifetime of bigotry, discrimination, terrorism and death? This needs to be about repairing the problem.
America needs to have a racial reconciliation commission. We need to a full accounting of what has happened and what is currently going on. Yes, going all the way back to when the first African slaves were brought to our shores in 1619. We need a full accounting of the 400 years of terror. Slavery. The Civil War. Reconstruction and the Klan. The destruction of Black Wall Street in Tulsa OK. Plessy v Ferguson. Brown v Board. The Tuskegee Experiment. The scourge of lynching. Jim Crow. The point where all the Southern Democrats left the party and became Dixiecrats because Truman desegregated the military. The point where Goldwater opposed the Civil Rights Act because he thought private business owners should be able to discriminate at will. The Voting Rights Act. Busing. The rise of private schools as a means of avoiding racial integration. The implementation of the EEOC and Affirmative Action. The gutting of Affirmative Action by the Supreme Court and state actions. The gutting of the Voting Rights Act. The rise of vote ID laws and racial gerrymandering. Ongoing housing discrimination, loan discrimination, and job discrimination. We need to look at red-lining. And the racial terrorism and death that has been implemented by many of our local police forces. We need to look at cases of reverse racism, and where racial hoaxes — ala Jesse Smollet — have been attempted. We need to address food deserts, job deserts and how pollution has been funneled into our inner cities.
We need a commission that lays it all out, where we’ve been, where we are and where we need to go. We need to honestly look at ourselves. We need to cut through the denials, the distractions and the bullshit.
America is a racist nation.
Now, what are we going to do about it?
We have laws in place, laws against discrimination and bigotry. The fact that something is illegal doesn’t mean that it doesn’t still happen. It does. Murder is illegal. Robbery is illegal. Those still happen, so does bigotry.
Can we reach out and change the heart of a bigot? Can we make people who think of themselves as non-racial understand their own racist actions?
Possibly not. But we can show them and make them face what they are. We can challenge them to change.
Housing discriminators need to be documented and outed.
We need to renew our efforts against lending discrimination.
The people who perpetrate these types of discrimination need to lose their license and be taken out of the industry.
As I stated before in my diary Being Born Black is a Death Sentence we need to enable Federal Law enforcement to investigate acts of violence and murder under color of authority. Local police with their local prosecutor can no longer be allowed to investigate themselves, we need outside eyes and an outside perspective.
We need to change what we’re doing now, we need to find new approaches, new solutions because what we’re doing is not working. It needs to be an all hands on deck effort.
And it needs to start now.