RESTORATIVE JUSTICE

Why One Japanese Lawyer Joined Fight for Black Americans’ Reparations

There is a common thread among their experiences

Businessman working in an open workspace | Photo by kokouu via Pexels

“The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity,” Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. declared in his famous “I Have a Dream Speech,” delivered at the Lincoln Memorial, one hundred years after the Emancipation Proclamation. Despite the passage of time, Black Americans had not made substantial progress, as segregation and discrimination throughout the Jim Crow era deprived them of upward mobility. King described a “shameful condition,” where the descendants of chattel slavery found themselves “languished in the corners of American society,” and, indeed, treated as an “exile in his own land.” And yet, sixty years after King’s speech, the federal government has yet to pay reparations to mitigate racial disparities, the legacy of chattel slavery.

America’s racial wealth gap has never closed, contributing to disparities in health outcomes. While Himmelstein et al. (2022) suggested that paying reparations “aimed at closing the wealth gap between” Black and White people would significantly reduce racial disparities in longevity, resistance to this policy has successfully blocked implementation. “Though supported by most Black…