RESTORATIVE JUSTICE MATTERS

How Reparations Would Help to Heal A Racially Divided Nation

CA’s Reparations Taskforce report and H.R.40 provide a path forward

“On the Suwanee River” — late 19th century | Photo Credit | The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

In America, racial inequities stretch from sea to shining sea. And if you want to understand how it all got started, look no further than the chattel slavery system. For 246 years, White Americans benefited from human trafficking, torture, and forced labor. Profits from cotton, sugar cane, rice, and tobacco became fuel for the economic engine of the South, sprouting “more millionaires per capita in the Mississippi River valley than anywhere in the nation.” And while the Emancipation Proclamation freed Black Americans of physical bondage in 1863, this document failed to deliver restorative justice.

After the Civil War, President Lincoln encouraged the nation “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Sherman’s Field Order №15 would have redistributed 400,000 acres of land to “newly freed Black families in forty-acre segments.” Still, President Andrew Johnson, a former Confederate, stopped the Freedman’s Bureau from carrying out its mission. We often discuss slavery as America’s “original sin,” but rarely discuss the harm of the broken promise that followed and how the country’s failure to provide restorative justice condemned generations of Black…