Rebalancing labor relations so that workers are empowered would be an effective way to address racial wealth disparities and atone for the legacy of slavery, a scholar argues.
Forty statues represent the children of a former plantation in the ‘Children of Whitney’ installation in Edgard, Louisiana.
(AP Photo/Gerald Herbert)
There are major obstacles in confronting the social movement for reparations for the slave trade. Such reparations are a moral imperative, but politically, successfully obtaining them will be hard.
U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee is spearheading fresh efforts in Congress to address reparations.
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Anne C. Bailey, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Former enslaved persons never got ‘forty acres and a mule,’ and their descendants have been denied reparations for the legacy of slavery. Will Joe Biden be the president to change that?
No guessing who in this 1864 depiction may have been compensated after slavery ended.
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History is full of examples of nations paying out to compensate for slavery. But the money never went to those who suffered under the system, only those who profited.
Tourists pose for pictures at the Cape Coast Castle in Ghana.
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Some calls to resolve racial inequities in the US have raised an idea with roots more than a century old: community land trusts to assemble property for the benefit of Black Americans.
The US is upping the blame game with China for COVID-19.
Jim Lo Scalzo/EPA
There is unlikely to be a strong legal claim for reparations from China for COVID-19.
A human skull on display in Berlin in 2018. Germany handed back human remains seized during the Namibia genocide from 1904 to 1908.
EPA-EFE/Hayoung Jeon
An oral history based biography of a survivor of colonial genocide in Namibia indicates instances of humanity during an entirely inhumane era.
Health justice funds could be used to support Black and Indigenous health initiatives and provide mental and physical health services to deal with the impact of transgenerational trauma.
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Several presidential hopefuls have offered proposals to close the racial wealth gap, from baby bonds to reparations. A simulation suggests policies short of direct aid to blacks won’t do the trick.
Slavery is not so far removed. Anderson and Minerva Edwards met in the 1860s as enslaved laborers in Texas, had 16 children and lived into their 90s in a cabin a few miles from the plantations they once worked. They are photographed here in 1937.
U.S. Library of Congress
Old injustices don’t simply disappear with time – they tear a nation apart.
Author Ta-Nehisi Coates, left, and actor Danny Glover, right, testify about reparation for the descendants of slaves during a hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Capitol Hill on June 19, 2019.
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
Reparation opponents who oppose truth and reconciliation by insisting that America’s “original sin” of slavery is in the distant past should heed the lessons of Canada and South Africa.