The decision taken by the Asheville municipal council on Tuesday, July 14, is historic: unanimously, the seven elected representatives of this town in North Carolina with 83,000 inhabitants adopted a resolution requesting the implementation of ” economic reparations for the inequalities caused by slavery in the city’s black community.
The municipality apologized for its participation in the trafficking of its black inhabitants, then in the application of the rules of racial segregation, for some in force in the United States until 1965. Before asking the services of their administration to do everything to “Foster wealth creation over several generations, social mobility and opportunities for members of the black community”, and provide an answer to “Systemic racism which has developed over centuries and whose dismantling will take time”.
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Reaction to protests against racism
Almost two months after the death of George Floyd, during his arrest by the police in Minneapolis (Minnesota), the announcement of Asheville marks the symbolic passage of a new stage in the responses brought by American authorities and communities to demonstrations against racism and police violence.
Other municipalities have announced the launch of reforms to their police services, or removed from public space symbols of the repression of the black minority in the history of the country. But encouraging the “repair” of the damage caused by slavery by means of direct financial compensation or by aid measures specifically targeting the black community remained, until Asheville’s decision, on the order of interrogation among national political leaders.
“It is simply not enough to move statues, said Keith Young, one of seven elected city councilors (made up of two blacks and five whites), when voting on the resolution. Black people in this country face problems that are essentially systemic. ” In addition to setting up a reparation commission in the city, the council also calls, in its text, for initiatives on the part of the states and the federal administration.
A “little spark that will open a debate”
“I hope that we will be, perhaps, a small spark which will open a debate not only in the city or in North Carolina, but everywhere in the country”, enthusiastic the first deputy mayor, Gwen Wisler. On July 15, the mayor of the city of Providence, in the state of Rhode Island, published a decree to initiate a “Truth and reparation process”, without going as far as the elected officials of Asheville. In California, the lower house of state parliament approved the creation of a commission dedicated to “Designing reparation proposals for African-Americans”.
In the resolution text, the elected representatives of Asheville repeatedly mention the question of housing to underline that the greatest poverty, on average, of black families in the United States is the direct consequence of a deprivation of wealth of their ancestors – that equality before the law would not be enough to compensate.
The “Blacks Have Been Rejected From The Real Estate Market By Racist Practices”, they say, from the public and private sectors. The marginalization of the neighborhoods where blacks live in urban development programs, they write, always has consequences for the current living conditions of African-American communities.
“Black poverty is not white poverty”
As of its unanimous vote, the resolution received criticism regarding the scope of the measures announced. “Parcel repairs, taken at this level of government, cannot cover the entire debt of racial injustice”, considered Duke University law professor William A. Darity Jr. in the New york times, which estimates at 10 or 12 million million dollars the amount of this injustice (which is equivalent to three or four times the total expenditure of the local and national authorities in the United States, according to the American daily newspaper).
In a long text by journalist Nikole Hannah-Jones, published in his magazine at the beginning of June and entitled “What is due”, the New york times already returned to the question of “reparation” with the descendants of slaves. By quoting, among others, a famous American citizen to show that the question has been raised for several decades: President Lyndon B. Johnson. He said in 1965:
“The poverty of blacks is not the poverty of whites. These differences are not racial differences. They are simply and only the consequence of an old brutality (…), but we must face them, and they must be surpassed, if we want to one day live in an era where the only difference between blacks and white people is the color of their skin. “
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