HISTORIC OPPORTUNITY

For Black people in America, the fight for justice and safety can feel like a cruel game of musical chairs.

The dull beat of antiblackness is always humming in the background, commanding us round and round in familiar cycles of protest, resistance, organizing and documenting our trauma. Sometimes the odious beat seems to stop, offering what feels like a respite — for those lucky enough to survive the last cycle.

Last week marked the one-year anniversary of George Floyd’s murder by White police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis. This week marks the 100year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. And in between these two grim milestones, we have the three-day Memorial Day weekend to remember and reflect on those lost in past cycles of violence.

We need to throw something powerful into these spinning gears — and, in fact, there is an option standing before us that might be big enough. As the pressure and visibility of reparations efforts ramp up across the United States, this country has a historic opportunity to free itself from the vortex of racism and white supremacy.

In his groundbreaking 2014 Atlantic essay “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-nehisi Coates wrote that the payment of reparations would “represent America’s maturation out of the childhood myth of its innocence into a wisdom worthy of its founders.” It seems to me that more than nine minutes of video of a Black man’s murder has now cracked that myth of White innocence.

In April, the House Judiciary Committee voted to advance a bill on slavery reparations forward to the full House. H.R. 40, which aims only to form a commission to study possible reparations proposals, is the legislative equivalent of a conversation starter. But the bill has been stalled in Congress for more than 30 years, so clearly this is a conversation that the United States has been desperate to avoid. Let it begin.

Other efforts are underway around the country. Survivors and descendants of the 1921 massacre testified in Congress this month on a separate bill for Tulsa reparations. In California, a task force has been appointed to study reparations proposals. The city of Evanston, Illinois, adopted a reparations plan for victims of housing discrimination in the city and their descendants.

In Texas, efforts to pass reparations for Black communities are building in the city of Austin. In April, the city of Marshall in Harrison County, which had been one of the largest slave-holding counties in the state, advanced a resolution for reparations and an apology for slavery. The bill was eventually voted down — the city’s Black council members voted yes, while the White council members voted no — but activists are not giving up.

The fact that serious reparations proposals are becoming more mainstream is a cause for hope that the United States might finally grow up. As school kids, my friends and I used to joke about reparations — not because the concept of some form of recognition and repair to Black people was laughable, but because we knew White people were not about to recognize and correct the harm they caused to Black people. Later we would learn that the U.S. paid reparations to the families of the Japanese Americans it forced into internment camps. That was the right thing to do — but by what possible logic would the same not be done to address generations of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation?

That serious reparations proposals are becoming more mainstream is a cause for hope.

Some of what we’ll hear in this conversation: Direct cash payments are unfair. The crimes were too far in the past. The bill would be too high. Or, even more crudely, Black people should get over the past. But the past is always present. There are reminders everywhere, when it comes to White and Black relations, that it is not Black Americans who should get over the past, but White Americans.

As Coates wrote in 2014, the shining mark of America’s shameful legacy is the persistent wealth gap between White and Black Americans. The past is deeply present in that. We are stuck in the past, too, when officials in Oklahoma have so far refused to repay even the few living survivors of the Tulsa massacre. The past is present in shocking police violence against Black people, and in continued White dominance of important institutions — business, media, politics — across society. And we will for sure remain stuck in America’s factory settings when Republican legislators across the country seek to suppress the research and scholarship that would prevent students and teachers from even holding discussions on reparations.

A Memorial Day for the ages, indeed. The fact that Gop-led state governments are attacking scholarship on racism in this country reveals one truth: The United States has lacked the courage to face what it owes to Black Americans. Reparations will be the real test of whether the United States is interested in changing that — or would rather dance around its moral responsibilities for another hundred years.

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The former president’s super-spreader events may have been celebrations for his cult-like followers, but what a pleasure to have an administration doing the work to run the nation.