There’s an argument that floats around during Black History Month, and it tends to be more privileged people being mad about systems that exist where there’s a quota of black people that need to be in management positions, or there’s programs that only exist for black people to access. I want to take some time here to talk about why paying reparations as a state and as individuals is vital to helping our brothers and sisters in need.
Firstly, I want to establish exactly why people were disadvantaged in the first place. We need to recognize that even after slavery was abolished, there were still systems in place to hurt African American citizens. Things like Jim Crow laws, where it was legal to segregate black people, or the fact that they weren’t protected citizens within law, therefore making it legal to steal things like land and property from them with little consequences. This enabled a worse off future since these people couldn’t even have a stable basis in society.
Secondly, why do we still profit off this injustice? Even if we go further back then the Jim Crow laws, we get to slavery. Slavery was free labour for the United States government to reap benefits off. They got richer watching other people suffer. This is an injustice in and of itself, I think it’s incredibly morally incorrect for us to even begin to fathom supporting this. We need to be, therefore, giving back to these people what we stole from them by using their free labour and using their property and livelihoods for.
Lastly, we need to give back to these communities. Whether that looks like helping them out by giving them spaces to go within society (ie. university programs or scholarships specifically for them) or forcing the government to pay reparations for things like slavery that even Canada was not exempt from doing.
We’ve pushed so much injustice in the past 500 years, and even further back than that. We all have an obligation to people we’ve hurt, directly, indirectly, or even profited off of. During Black History Month, try and learn more about these people. It’s only right for us to try and help them, after being the ones who hurt them.