New York state will create a commission tasked with considering reparations to address the persistent, harmful effects of slavery in the state, under a bill signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul on Tuesday.
It comes at a time when many states and towns throughout the United States attempt to figure out how to best reckon with the country’s dark past, and follows in the footsteps of similar task forces established in California and Illinois.
“In New York, we like to think we’re on the right side of this. Slavery was a product of the South, the Confederacy,” Hochul, a Democrat, said at the bill signing ceremony in New York City. “What is hard to embrace is the fact that our state also flourished from that slavery. It’s not a beautiful story, but indeed it is the truth.”
The law, which was passed by state lawmakers in June, says the commission will examine the institution of slavery, which was fully abolished in New York by 1827, and its ongoing impact on Black New Yorkers today.
The 1% of this country have fucked everyone. How about everyone except them gets reparations?
This nation as a whole instituted slavery and Jim Crow. Yeah there were only a percentage of the population that had slaves but the government legalized it, instituted systems to maintain it, and instituted Jim Crow afterwards. Just like how the Nazis committed atrocities against the Jews during WW2 this nation committed atrocities against African Americans for hundreds of years. No one questions the fact that Germany owes the Jews reparations even though most Germans didn’t commit those crimes but when it comes to African Americans and the US everyone has an opinion.
Red lining and white flight I imagine are alive and well in the state with the most segregated school system in the country. (Or is it just NYC that is the most segregated?) Policy choices continue to send black new yorkers down a worse path than white ones. Stop and frisk is here and now. I always felt that reparations for slavery would be best spent in the school system, but NY would really have to pull a lot more strings to correct for the second class citizenship caused by slavery. To be fair, I’m glad Hochul is trying to correct so many wrongs in her state. But I’m also angry that Eric Adams is in office right now.
How about fixing modern-day slavery first? – see: for profit prisons and “labor leasing programs”
Whataboutism
I’ve always contended the sale or profits of slave built buildings and infrastructure held by the US government could be used to fund programs to help descendants of slaves and be redirected to educational grants.
there hasnt been any slavery in New York in basically 200 years. no one affected by it is alive now. nor are their children, or even their children’s children.
A lot of the old money that built New York, like the Vanderbilts, Goldman, and Lehman families became rich on the backs of slaves. The ancestors of the slave owners inherited that wealth and with it the debt to the ancestors of their slaves.
And it should be those families paying reparations.
You sound like this guy in the article:
State Senate Republican Leader Rob Ortt said in a statement that he believes New York’s recommendations will come at an “astronomical cost” to all New Yorkers.
But this doesn’t necessarily mean cash reparations:
California in 2020 became the first state to create a reparations task force. The group handed its two-year report to state lawmakers in June, who then introduced a bill that would create an agency to carry out some of the panel’s more-than 100 recommendations, including helping families with genealogical research. But turning those proposals into policies could be difficult, given the state is facing a heavy budget deficit.
Other states, including Massachusetts and New Jersey, have considered studying reparations, but none have yet passed legislation. A Chicago suburb in Evanston, Illinois, became the first city to make reparations available to Black residents through a $10 million housing project in 2021.
no one affected by it is alive now. nor are their children, or even their children’s children.
You’re wrong there. All the descendants of the white slave owners are people who profited from slavery through inheritances.
People apart from the Uber elite get inheritance? Unless they die suddenly, I assumed it all went to end of life care or scammers
What percentage of Americans are descendants of slave owners? a lot of Americans didn’t even immigrate to the untitled states until after slavery was abolished.
What percentage of Americans are descendants of slave owners
it’s a vanishingly small number. only around 6% of all Americans were slave owners. some were killed during the civil war, others in succeeding wars (notably WW1 and WW2) - the current number is unknown as that isnt really tracked, but it’s unlikely to be more than 4% of the current population.
you cant really fault the decedents for what happened 200 years ago though - they werent there, their parents, and even grandparents werent born yet. for most families it’s been 5 or 6 generations (or more). getting reparations would be something that should have been attempted 200 years ago. it’s simply laughable to consider it now.
I can tell you that nearly 100% of black Americans were descendants of slaves and parents/grandparents that lived through Jim Crow and institutionalized racism (hard to say exactly what % since we completely destroyed any possibility of tracing most of their history or genealogy). The Tulsa Race Massacre was only two, maybe three generations ago.
You could look that up and let us know.
no one affected by it is alive now
Millions of people are still affected. Black people are much poorer on average, which leads to a circle of misery involving everything from access to education, to crime rate, to perpetuation of racism, that keeps them down.
Just because the original victims and perpetrators are dead doesn’t mean the crime is not creating new victims every day.
no one affected by it is alive now. nor are their children, or even their children’s children
You are almost certainly wrong about that, and they deserve to be compensated for the labor that was robbed of their ancestors.
Tax them white devils!
