The Need for Reparations: A Berniecrat’s Perspective

As a self-professed Berniecrat, I naively imagined that Bernie was the best we could hope for in 2016 and 2020. He championed Medicare For All, tuition-free public universities, and, perhaps most importantly of all, a Green New Deal. I felt he was the best positioned to enact a mass WWII-style mobilization to tackle climate change, and I felt he sincerely fought for and ached alongside the working class.

But there is one major, transformative policy he consistently overlooked: reparations to African people. My beloved Bernie refused to commit to any specific, reparations-based policy in both 2016 and 2020, and the progressive movement as a whole has failed to conjure up any meaningful policies in support of reparations, preferring to simply voice support for the principle of reparations, not enact substantive policy thereto.

These politically convenient moves are no longer enough. We will no longer be satisfied until we fund a black working class revolution, and that begins with a radical restructuring of and reinvestment in the black community. After all, if we can afford trillions of dollars to bail out multi-billion dollar corporations in response to a temporary pandemic, we can afford trillions more dollars to bail out the black working class from centuries of needless death, horrendous suffering, and racist invalidation.

What we need is nothing less than a sustained, dramatic international response to the clarion call for reparations, calling on all elected officials to pass meaningful legislation to address the ongoing legacy of slavery, colonialism, and the racism it underpins more broadly. As we speak, 783 million people in Africa lack access to clean drinking water, and 2.5 billion people, mostly in the global south, lack access to basic sanitation. Meanwhile, the World Economic Forum projected Americans would spend roughly $1 trillion on Christmas last year. The cost of providing clean drinking water to every member of the human species? $150 billion per year, less than a quarter of our bloated military budget.

From placing stringent economic sanctions on Venezuela to breed more favorable conditions for oil extraction to murdering hundreds of thousands of people in the Iraq war and legitimizing state-sanctioned violence against Palestine, the American empire is guilty of the cardinal sins of imperialism: death, murder, and destruction in the name of profit, never-ending capitalistic growth, and the cutthroat intrigue of empire.

We need to call on world governments to address the massive inequalities that disproportionately affect black and brown folk around the world, as well as advance meaningful policies to address economic inequality here in the US. There can be no justice until reparations become a cornerstone of American and international policy. It is crucial every progressive continue fighting until this policy objective is achieved.