Story at a glance
- The city of Evanston, Ill., has set a date to vote on a citywide reparations plan that aims to close the racial gap in housing.
- Other cities, like Asheville, N.C., have brought up the idea of paying reparations.
Following the June 2019 resolution that passed in the Evanston, Ill., city council pledging to combat systemic and institutional racism through legislative measures, the city moved one step closer to financing reparations for its Black residents.
Local outlets report that the Evanston city council has scheduled a vote on reparation payments for March 22.
These payments, issued to Black Evanstonians, will be funded by revenue that comes from legal marijuana sales, legalized for adults aged 21 and over thanks to the Illinois General Assembly’s passing of the Cannabis Regulation and Tax Act in 2020.
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Part of the city’s reparations plan is to use funds from a 3 percent tax on marijuana sales to finance a $10 million initiative called the Restorative Housing Reparations program. This would oversee the distribution of $25,000 worth of housing funding per resident.
Should the housing plan pass, it would make Evanston the first city to formally issue reparations to rectify previous discriminatory housing policies.
The option of implementing reparations in the form of government investment was touted during the Black Lives Matter protests in the Summer of 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Floyd’s death, a symbol of the centuries of racist policing and law enforcement policies in the U.S., highlighted institutional racism as an insidious and lingering artifact of a time in the country when slavery was legal.
Among the calls for structural reform, including abolishing police departments to prevent future unnecessary deaths of Black Americans and reengineering the criminal justice system, reparations gained traction as a way for the government to compensate Black Americans for lost wages due to centuries of economic exclusion.
Another city that made policy steps towards issuing reparations was Asheville, N.C., whose city council brought forth a vote that could allocate $1 million in community reparations to its Black residents.
The vote has since been placed on hold.
As part of Evanston’s larger plan to issue reparations, Mayor Stephen Hagerty (D) and Northwestern University President Morton Schapiro have participated in the Northwestern Good Neighbor Racial Equity Fund that allocates resources to underserved businesses, homes and residents in Evanston, with a focus on dismantling systemic racism.
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