On Monday, Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson signed an order to set up a Reparations Task Force to work on a plan to make amends for the city.
The mayor’s office says that the task group will look into how policies have affected Black Chicagoans from the time of slavery up to the present day. The task group will then suggest ways to fix the racial injustices that these policies cause.
A lot of people in Chicago are black; they make up almost 30% of the city’s population.
For Johnson, today’s Executive Order is more than just a public statement. It’s a promise to change the future of our city by dealing with the long history of unfairness that has been a problem in Chicago for too long.
The NAACP says that reparations can come in many forms, such as money, help, ownership of land returned, social services, and more.
In his order, Johnson said that the country and city “welcomed, supported, made money off of, and benefited from” the system of chattel slavery. Then he talked about some Jim Crow laws that were in place from 1877 to 1963 and made racial segregation and discrimination legal and continued.
It was these policies, like housing discrimination, redlining, and building highways, that caused “disparities in life expectancy, unemployment, homeownership rates, home value, incarceration, and more,” according to Johnson’s office.
Since the end of slavery in 1865, people in the U.S. have been talking about and debating payments. Some people who are against financial settlements say they are too expensive or unfair to people who are not Black. Some people who want financial compensation say they can fix the unfair situations that were caused by discrimination and have hurt families for generations.
Evanston, Illinois, which is close to Chicago, was the first city in the country to pay reparations in 2021. Over the next ten years, the city promised to return $10 million to Black residents to cover losses caused by years of property discrimination.
Some rights lawyers recently took the program to court, saying that it “discriminates against anyone who does not identify as Black or African American.” This is what the group Judicial Watch said.
Source: ABC News
