REPARATIONS REMAIN JUST A DREAM

US presidents come and go, but true to the nature of the duopoly, that is the Democrat and Republican parties, who swap places in the White House every four to eight years, represent little in terms of policy change. Almost 57 years after his death, and 11 US presidents later, the goals the Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr (1929-68), fought to achieve remain elusive. Listen to this speech by the icon, where he points to the government’s reluctance to address racial and historical injustices despite extending favour to European settlers.

Near the end of the US Civil War, the government promised once-enslaved Africans that they would receive 40 acres of Confederate land (a total of 400,000 acres of indigenous territory along the southeast US coast) and a mule. However, US President Andrew Johnson broke this promise following US President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination. While some oppose transferring former plantations to Africans as reparations because it doesn’t take into account that European settlers originally displaced indigenous people, the idea stands that no reparative process is in place.

The experience of Black people in the US highlights the role systemic factors play in subjugating a group across generations, regardless of how hard one pulls on their bootstraps.

The absence of restitution for slavery, the implementation of discriminatory laws known as Jim Crow, and present-day structural racism manifest in the racial wealth gap. White people hold 10 times more cumulative wealth than Black people. A 2021 US Federal Reserve study found that Black households would hold five times more wealth in a world without racial wealth inequality. Jonathan Welburn, a researcher at the think tank RAND, says, ‘Yesterday's segregation is today's wealth gap. We like to pretend that we live in a race-neutral, merit-based society now. That this is all in the past, but you can't erase history. It shows up in our wealth. For many, it shows up in the lack of wealth.’

Sources

40 acres and a mule

https://www.history.com/news/40-acres-mule-promise 

Racial wealth gap

https://www.rand.org/pubs/articles/2023/what-would-it-take-to-close-americas-black-white-wealth-gap.html  

Speech

https://reparationscomm.org/reparations-news/martin-luther-kings-case-for-reparations-still-rings-true

https://ibw21.org/commentary/kings-poor-peoples-campaign