Tennessee’s Largest County Plans on Studying Slavery Reparations
Jose Nino
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Shelby County, Tennessee, which includes Memphis, voted on February 22, 2023 to study reparations for descendants of African slaves. This county is Tennessee’s largest and its recently passed resolution will allocate $5 million to review and find “actionable items” tackling several issues such as greater access to affordable housing and homeownership, health care equity, criminal justice reform, improved career opportunities, and financial literacy and generational wealth.
According to an NBC report, the resolution was handedly passed with the backing of all 8 black members of the Board of County Commissioners, which is made up of 13 members. The resolution’s passage came in the wake of the death of Tyre Nichols, who Memphis police officers beat to death in January.
“Five million dollars won’t right the wrongs of the past,” Commissioner Miska Clay Bibbs stated. “My people are dying on the daily. That’s why I support this.”
However, Commissioner Mick Wright, who opposed the resolution, said the county lacks the $5 million needed to conduct the study.
“We don’t have $5 million available to us — we were actually in the negative in November,” he proclaimed.
The reparations movement is beginning to gain traction nationwide. Earlier this month, Boston officials appointed 10 members to a Reparations Task Force, which was set up to study slavery’s long-standing impact in Boston. Back in June of 2022, the city issued a formal apology for the role it played in the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
Evanston, Illinois; Asheville, North Carolina; St. Paul, Minnesota; and other cities are looking to implement similar measures.
In 2020, California made waves by becoming the first state to enact a law to study how to implement a reparations program for descendants of African slaves. In 2022, the task force published a 500-page report outlining the damages and injustices that descendants of African slaves have allegedly been subjected to. In addition, this report explained how federal, state and local laws, public officials and the courts were allegedly responsible for creating a systemically racist environment that held blacks back.
The California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans — the reparations task force Governor Gavin Newsom created in 2020, recommended the following policy actions that the state can push to address the alleged racial wealth gap:
“Instituting housing reforms, reducing mass incarceration, creating a state-subsidized mortgage program for qualifying African Americans, and offering free tuition to California colleges and universities and expanding scholarship opportunities.”
Indeed, reparations have become mainstream in the US. Such loony ideas serve to escalate racial tensions and reward a key constituency of the Democratic Party. It’s one of several steps that anti-white elites are using to dispossess legacy Americans.
If we want, any form of racial harmony in the US reparations must never be allowed to pass.
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