There’s been talk of implementing some form of reparations for those discriminated against because of their race for years now, at least for as long as I can remember. Plans have floated about, talking of putting cash payments into the hands of discriminated African-Americans or those whose late and great, great, great grandpappies may have endured the horrors of slavery. But for just for as long, no one has been able to come up with a solid plan to make any of those ideas actually work.
However, more recently, with the rise of liberalism and the belief that systemic racism has permeated every fiber of American existence, the idea has gained both popularity and leaders who can devise a plan.
And so, in 2019 and continuing on into 2020, the city of Evanston, Illinois, a northern suburb of Chicago, made plans to become the first American city to hand out reparations to its deserving residents. The only problem is that now that the project has been approved of and passed, as of a mostly white male March city council vote, reality has set in and things aren’t, well, let’s just say, they aren’t going as planned.
So what’s the problem?
Well, for starters, the program is still vastly unheard of, let alone understood by most Evanston residents.
As a black Evanston resident and founder of a group known as Evanston Rejects Racist Reparations, Sebastion Nalls told The Guardian, “There’s still so much misinformation or lack of information that black residents here in Evanston still don’t understand what this program is.”
For example, Nalls says that most or at least a healthy amount of Evanston’s residents believe they will be getting “direct cash payments,” as that is what the plan originally talked about giving back in 2019. However, that’s not what’s happening.
Instead, the current plan is to give housing grants to black families in the area who can demonstrate that they’ve been negatively affected by discrimination. Now, to some of you, this may not seem like a bad idea. After all, housing costs are some of the most expensive bills any family ends up paying for.
However, as authors of “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century,” A. Kirsten Mullen and William A. Darity recently wrote in a commentary for the Washington Post, “This is a housing voucher program, not reparations – and calling it that does more harm than good.”
Both authors agree that the basic idea or principle of the program is “a good step to take.” But it’s just not what is really needed or should be expected from “reparations.”
But there’s another problem with the plan. Naturally, it’s all about the money.
You see, when the plan was introduced, it had to come up with a way to pay for these reparations. And as usual, the liberals behind it offered up a tax hike. But unlike taxing the rich and elite, the plan was to a 3 percent tax on local recreational cannabis sales, which are now legal in the state.
Undeniably, this sounded good at the time, as it seemed to check a number of liberal boxes. However, as I said before, reality doesn’t always work the way you planned.
While the program was designed to give out $25,000 housing grants to needing black families, the amount of money given and the amount raised for its funding is simply not enough. To understand this, you have to know that the city’s average costs for one single-family home are about $300,000. And $25K does little to cover that.
Secondly, the reparations fund only contains a measly $400,000 in total. That means, at $25,000 a pop, only 16 families or households would be helped by the program.
And so hundreds of black Evanston residents are rejecting the offer of “reparations.”
As Nalls has reiterated, this just isn’t enough, not for any individual family or the city as a whole.
And authors Darity and Mullen agree. According to their calculations, it would take upwards of $14 trillion to make reparations actually work on a national scale.
Where they think the US government can come up with that amount is beyond me. We didn’t have the funds to spend $5 trillion on COVID, and yet we did…
