Reparations are not a fairy tale. The U.S. has a long history of compensating groups for harm — even though they continue to deny reparations for descendants of enslaved Black people. In this video, we explore how normal it is for the U.S. to award reparations and how that precedent makes reparations for the Black descendants of enslaved people a reality today.
This piece features Harvard Professor Cornell William Brooks, a former president of the NAACP and a fourth-generation minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
“Not only do we [the U.S.] have the expertise, we also have the resources,” Brooks said. “So all we need to do is get our government to be as brilliant and innovative, as creative, when it comes to racial harms, as we’ve been with respect to nonracial harms.”
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