DEI Corner: LWVMA Reparations Study
As you may know, the Study Committee on Reparations recently issued its report and study guide with the list of consensus questions. You may wonder, “What is the point of a reparations study now?” LWVMA Convention 2023 voted to approve the statewide study on Reparations. It is now up to local Leagues to hold consensus meetings on the topic. Adopting a new position allows us to advocate now and in the future.
In addition, here are some of our colleagues’ thoughts:
— If not now, when?
— This is one step on a long journey to create the kind of future we want.
— We know how long change takes to happen…let’s get started.
— Leaguers are educators in all political climates.
— A study is a good way to understand and share true information about issues.
— We’re in MA where progress on issues is still possible.
— An LWVMA position on reparations can lead the way. LWVUS could then adopt the position by consensus and broaden advocacy efforts.
More cogently, the study of reparations is part of an exploration of where we are now as a country and of how we got here. It is a very real part of our collective path to the future we build.
“There is something inherently beautiful about a story, in its ability to make more powerful arguments than an explicit polemic.” (Ta-Nehisi Coates, Eight Years in Power, p. 298).
Redlining occurred in cities across the U.S., including Boston.
Source: https://www.mass.gov/
Available from Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
In “The Case for Reparations[1]” Ta-Nehisi Coates tells the story of Clyde Ross, a Black man born in 1923 in Jim Crow Mississippi, a time of harsh segregation-enforcing laws and virulent racism. His parents owned and successfully farmed 40 acres of land, but the Mississippi authorities claimed the family owed $3,000 in taxes. The Rosses had no legal protection, and the authorities seized the land. The family was forced to become sharecroppers and to work at the mercy of landowners, who routinely swindled workers out of their wages. This was not the last time that Clyde would experience predation.
After military service, Clyde joined the second wave of The Great Migration of Black people seeking not only better wages and work but also protection of the law. He moved to Chicago in 1947, married, had children, and bought a home “on contract.” This meant the home was not his until he had paid off the contract to the seller. Buying/selling on contract was a pernicious arrangement where sellers bought properties cheaply and then resold them for more than double the price. Buyers like Clyde (and there were many) had no chance to gain equity, and if they missed a monthly payment, they had to forfeit not only their down payment, but also all their monthly payments and the property itself. People who couldn’t pay were evicted, and the contract sellers would resell reclaimed properties to other Black families, who then became the next target of the sellers’ predation.
Clyde tried to get a legitimate mortgage but was told that financing wasn’t available. What the loan officer meant was that mortgages were not available for Black families. In fact, from the 1930s through the 1960s, Black people were shut out of the home-mortgage market. This exclusion, in Chicago and cities across the U.S., was reinforced by federal policy. Congress created the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) in 1934. The FHA insured mortgages, resulting in lower interest rates and smaller down payments for home buyers. The policy intentionally helped White middle-and lower-class people and excluded Black people through a color-coded system of mapping that rated neighborhoods according to how stable they were perceived to “A”-rated neighborhoods, outlined in green, were considered highly stable and therefore good prospects for insurance. Neighborhoods where Black people lived were outlined in red, rated “D,” and deemed risky investments. This process of segregating neighborhoods and denying benefits to Black communities is called “redlining.”
In fact, redlining was pioneered by a government-sponsored loan-awarding organization. When people received a loan to buy a home, they had to sign an agreement forbidding the sale of that property to nonwhite people. Such practices prevented Black people from accumulating wealth, building robust neighborhoods, and achieving a good quality of life. Redlining was outlawed in 1968, but decades of systematic discriminatory policies have lasting consequences for Black communities. Writing in 2014, Coates pointed out that Black neighborhoods were still characterized by a concentration of poverty. This has not changed. According to a report by the Pew Research Center in 2023, Black households are twice as likely as White and Asian households to be in the lowest wealth bracket.
Reparations are largely about people, like Clyde Ross, and their stories, both individual and collective. The descendants of enslaved people still carry the burdens of slavery in the form of redlining, profiling, discrimination, and prejudice. Recognizing the individuality and magnitude of their stories is a start to repairing damage and making amends. We need to face the truth…that America was built on the myth of White (male) superiority and that we have a long history of government-enabled preferential treatment of White people. Stories, like Clyde’s, put a face to those truths.
In 1989, the late Representative John Conyers, Jr (D-MI) took an important step toward validating Black Americans’ stories, reckoning with our history, acknowledging the damage done, and considering ways to repair it. He introduced HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. This bill, which has been introduced every subsequent year, would establish a commission to study slavery and discrimination throughout U.S. history and recommend remedies. After 35 years, the bill is still not law. Enacting HR 40 would be a significant move toward facing the truth of our history and beginning to make amends.
Further reading
Henrietta Lacks and HeLa cells
A 1-page Nature editorial
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-02494-z
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-020-02494-z
The Johns Hopkins perspective:
https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/henriettalacks/index.html
Georgetown University reconciliation fund
https://www.washingtoninformer.com/georgetown-slave-sale-reparations/
Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male
Tulsa race massacre
https://www.tulsahistory.org/exhibit/1921-tulsa-race-massacre/#flexible-content
Link to a daily calendar of stories
https://calendar.eji.org/about
Equal Justice Initiative: essays on redlining, gerrymandering, anti-busing in the north, medical exploitation of black women, etc.
https://eji.org/news/tag/history-of-racial-injustice/
HR40
https://www.congress.gov/bill/118th-congress/house-bill/40
Redlining in Boston
[1] “The Case for Reparations” was published in The Atlantic magazine in 2014 and republished in We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017) as part of a compilation of eight essays.