Reparations, in some form, are necessary

To the editor:

Re: “It’s not useful now to go back and calculate reparations” in the Aug. 30, 2024, edition. 

At the first public meeting of The New York State Community Commission on Reparations Remedies, Sen. James Sanders, co-sponsor of the bill that led to the creation of the commission, remarked, “What you’re doing is not for right now. What you’re doing is for generations to come.”

The commission is currently developing recommendations that will focus on community and capital investments rather than lump sum payments to descendants of slaves. It will determine “how the state of New York may provide for appropriate laws, policies, programs, projects and other recommendations to reverse such injuries.”

It has only been 60 years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Many readers are young enough to have been second-class citizens in their own country. In July, the Supreme Court blocked a grant program helping Black women-owned businesses, despite the fact that less than 1 percent of venture capital investment goes to these businesses. 

Recent studies of COVID housing and business loans have found, even controlling for credit score and income, Black borrowers were less likely to receive loan approvals and faced higher interest rates than equivalent white applicants. 

These are just a few examples of the skeletons and statues of slavery and racism that plague us today.

Today, the United States remains home to sundown towns scattered across the Midwest and the South. Places where, for the “crime” of staying in a motel for the night, I might have washed up dead or be lynched by the next morning. These are places that will not vote for Kamala Harris solely based on the color of her skin, her ethnic origin or her gender. Barack Obama was the president of those towns for eight years.

This country will not move past the specter of discrimination by acting as though it is not real. To do so is insulting to the reality of millions of people. Instead, we must empathize with each other’s past and improve each other’s futures.

Reparations Commissioner Dr. Darrick Hamilton indicated the need for “new systems that truly empower all of us so that we can have a human rights economy.”

The late Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. said, “True peace is not merely the absence of tension; it is the presence of justice.”

Dr. King believed in reparations as a necessary step toward healing this nation.

Marcelo Lopez