When President Trump floated the idea of a nearly $2 billion “Anti-Weaponization Fund” for people “horribly treated” by the federal government, he inadvertently reopened the debate about reparations for Black Americans.
Suddenly, in a galling case of white grievance envy, it’s not such a far-fetched idea.
Trump, who has since backed off the measure, created the fund as a means of providing a “systematic process to hear and redress claims of others who suffered weaponization and lawfare.”
Those who could benefit include Jan. 6, 2021, rioters Trump pardoned — the people who pummeled Capitol Police and smeared feces on walls. The government would also extend apologies to people with claims against the government.
Consider the double standard.
When President Clinton visited Uganda in 1998, he consciously avoided a formal, legal apology. He used softer language, fearing reprisals from those on the political right who didn’t want Clinton apologizing for America.
“Going back to the time before we were even a nation, European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade. And we were wrong in that,” Clinton said then.
Now that payments and apologies have been considered for Jan. 6ers, is it really such a stretch to consider the same for Black Americans, who have an infinitely better case?
There’s more to it than 265 years of enslavement and 99 years of segregation. The case also includes racist narratives that justified slavery and the unbroken denial of the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection under the law from our PAST to OUR PRESENT.
The founders used race as an organizing principle, and the nation has followed that decree.
Consider the gynecological experimentation performed without anesthesia. The Tuskegee syphilis experiments, a U.S. Public Health Service project which stretched from the early 1930s into the early 1970s, in which researchers observed untreated syphilis in Black men, to determine whether the disease caused greater cardiovascular or neurological damage in Black men compared with white men.
Consider the Tulsa and Rosewood massacres, and the thousands of lynchings during and following Reconstruction. Government funding for white suburban homebuyers that explicitly excluded Black homebuyers. The initial exclusion of Black Americans from Social Security and the GI Bill.
Consider redlining, racial neighborhood covenants, and low-ball home appraisals.
Consider COINTELPRO, a series of covert and illegal projects conducted between 1956 and 1971 by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. It surveilled, infiltrated and disrupted organizations and people like Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and the Black Panther Party.
Consider that cemetaries and even “Christian” hospitals in this state once practiced segregation.
Consider racial profiling, police terror, all-white juries, mass incarceration fueled by 100-to-one crack laws, attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion, and the current rush in the formerly Confederate South to slash already scant Black Congressional representation.
And so much more.
Despite this history, the majority of John Roberts’ Supreme Court today would have the public believe that structural, institutional racism no longer exists, while it unfolds daily in the lives of African Americans.
For years, the late Michigan Sen. John Conyers introduced HB-40, which would create a study of reparations. It met stonewall resistance. It could not even be discussed.
In a 2023 NPR interview, the host said Conyers’ proposal rose from the grounds of the U.S. Capitol, adding, “some of that building’s most recognizable architecture is one of many still visible legacies of slave labor.”
This so-called debate really isn’t a debate. The facts are not in dispute. African Americans remain the only people ever considered property. This was theft on a mass scale. Theft of bodies. Theft of property. Theft of opportunity.
People fear this discussion because it shatters our country’s grand illusion of equality. Pull that pin, and the nation’s egalitarian tower crumbles. These are the people who want inconvenient history eradicated from textbooks and banned in classrooms and museums.
Indigenous Americans received reparations. Japanese Americans received reparations. Enslavers received reparations after losing their human property. Italian American family members received reparations for an 1891 lynching in New Orleans.
Now, we’re talking about compensating Jan. 6 rioters.
Members of the Trump’s party have tried to shout down the proposal.
The people who could most readily claim horrible treatment, the folks who’ve arguably fought the hardest for the country yet denied full citizenship, cannot count on the decency of having their experiences acknowledged, let alone compensated.
As shameless as the case for Jan. 6ers may be, it would be even more galling to continue to ignore the systematic denial of equal protection under the law for African Americans.
Consider the double standard.
Mark McCormick is the former executive director of the Kansas African American Museum, a member of the Kansas African American Affairs Commission and former deputy executive director at the ACLU of Kansas. Through its opinion section, Kansas Reflector works to amplify the voices of people who are affected by public policies or excluded from public debate. Find information, including how to submit your own commentary, here.