This week’s article is a continuation of the effort to get reparations for Black Americans in the U.S.A. My mind, however, is still on Trump’s current attempts to wreck the U.S. economy and government (Wreck-It-Ralph!). Through his slash and burn tactics in pursuit of whatever he’s doing, he has continually lost in court, at least 150 times, according to recent estimates. He has also continually demonstrated that he will ignore court decisions and still do what he wants and generally not what America needs.
There is a serious showdown coming. This administration is doing — and will do — very serious damage to America’s government, economy, and standing in the world if it is not stopped and stoppped soon. Part of the reason Mr. Trump has gotten back into office and is being allowed to run roughshod over country norms is the lack of quality political science education in U.S. schools nowadays.
Too many Americans have rather consistently in the last few years demonstrated a profound ignorance of how U.S. politics and governance operate in the modern world, clearly demonstrated by the lack of public outrage over Trump’s tactics getting the credit rating of the entire U.S. economy downgraded recently. People do know what losing one’s credit status means in real life. That state of affairs should be addressed before it is too late — if it’s not already too late now. American citizenry ignorance of how politics work in this country is a vast and growing problem here.
But let me pivot to this week’s topic. A few days ago, against the expressed wishes of some politically influential members of both the U.S. Congress and Maryland’s state government, Gov. Wes Moore, who is himself a well-educated Black man, vetoed a bill to establish a Maryland state commission to study reparations issues in Maryland. His stated rationale was that enough study has already been done, and it was now time to take some concrete action beyond merely more study.
Additionally, he said the state had already conducted “sufficient studies on the legacy of slavery, he was already enacting policies and “a culture of repair” in the state to address the harms of slavery, and there was, in any case, no money in the bill to properly fund the establishment and operation of a state Reparations Commission. He argued that the “scholarship on this topic (reparations in Maryland) is already both vast in scope and robust in scale,” and that, in fact, his administration was already working to address the historical injustices related to Black folk in the state (where Harriet Tubman started freeing slaves). But, here he is, an informed, highly intelligent and very popular Black governor in the U.S., definitively rejecting a substantial reparations goal.
Currently in the U.S., the gold standard of creating a state Reparations Study Commission and final recommendations to do tangible things to correct slavery’s legacy in a state is the California State Reparations Commission established through a bill introduced by former Assembywoman and head of the California Legislative Black Caucus, Shirley Weber. The final report, famously delivered June 29, 2023 and containing over 115 policy recommendations, was delivered to the California Legislature. Implementing any of those recommendations, with the exception of the state’s formal apology to its Black population for allowing slavery in the state in spite of the state’s constitution specifically forbidding slavery in the state, has been incredibly difficult so far.
Though Maryland was trying to replicate California’s example, the fact remains that in California little to nothing has been done to implement any of the commission’s recommendations, and, to be frank, there’s little chance of more being done this year. Even though the U.S. Congressional Black Caucus is still pursuing H.R. 40 (the federal reparations bill) in Congress and the national reparations leaders are still shouting for more state commissions to be established, the fact of the matter is that the various reparations groups, regional and national, must immediately hunker down and devise a new reparations plan. Otherwise, the effort to get some kind of national and state reparations relief, is doomed for now, and possibly forever. Without a new national reparations architecture, the reparations effort in the U.S. is doomed for the present, and possibly evermore. There must be more planning and less profiling on this issue.
Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, which is a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or non-governmental organization (NGO). It is the stepparent organization for the California Black Think Tank which still operates and which meets every fourth Friday.