Why It’s Finally Time for Oregon to Pay Reparations

not this shiat again

Why It’s Finally Time for Oregon to Pay Reparations



Repaying the debt owed to Black Oregonians is not only necessary, it’s very feasible.



So if I come to your job / Take your corn on the cob / And take a couple kernels off / Would that be alright with you?

Andre 3000, What a Job (2007)

Re•pair: to restore by replacing a part or putting together what is torn or broken

IMPOSSIBLE
Rep. Shannon Jones Isadore is the only Black woman in the Oregon Legislature. Her grandfather, a Mississippi-bred World War II veteran, returned to the United States from France after being discharged with honors, first to Louisiana—then Portland, Oregon.

He got a job, built a life here, and planted deep roots across several decades.


In 1978, he fell sick with cancer. It was then he learned he had been denied access to a lucrative Veteran Affairs benefits program offering vets the most valuable asset in this country: land.

“During his time in the VA hospital, he learned of more veterans—some of them with lesser ranks—who had received land grants,” Isadore said last year. “The only difference? They were White, and he was Black.”


The freshman lawmaker was testifying in support of a reparations package that would include a task force to study how reparative policies could be issued in Oregon.

“He died that same year without ever receiving the compensation he was owed,” she continued. “This was especially painful because he and my grandmother were farmers—imagine what they could have done with that land if it had been rightfully allocated to them.”

The reparations package failed. It didn’t even pass out of committee.

Juneteenth spends its fifth year in the sun as a federal holiday this June 19th. However, for many Black communities nationwide, it’s been cause for celebration for more than a century-and-a-half. Born from the cotton fields of Galveston, Texas, this holiday marks the day when enslaved Black people there learned they were finally free, more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation.

Two. Years. Later.

Despite the horrors of such an embarrassing delay, Juneteenth is above all, a joyous occasion—one that calls us to to imagine beyond the confines of impossibility. It was not long ago the abolition of slavery seemed implausible to most.

How we glare at that notion today.

However, questions still persist: “Who?” “what?” “when?” “where?” “why?” and of course, the classic, “How would we pay for it?” are lobbed around like bombs bursting in air when the question of reparations is posed.

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