Our Reparations Future

Monday, April 19th from 9:00am to Friday, April 23rd, 2021 5:00pm (PT)
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About

Our Reparations Future is an action campaign to shift the conversation on racial justice, calling on folks to support initiatives that are investing in black communities. We believe that we must also advocate for what we replace systems of injustice with. We want to highlight organizations that are actively centering reparations in their work.

Volunteers are encouraged to create media/artwork/poems/etc to share their understandings, beliefs, and stories and how they relate to reparations. We encourage folks to share personal stories in support of reparations while also tying them to inspiring organizations and activists leading reparations work around the country (including Brown Hope) by tagging them on social media and using the hashtags #ourreparationsfuture and #shiftthenarrative. For folks who are not on social media, you may submit photos and videos of your creations to felipe@brownhope.org.

For those who are able to support Brown Hope monetarily, we encourage you to donate through this link: https://www.brownhope.org/main-site-donation

Monetary donations allow Brown Hope to provide services and programming, including the Blackstreet Bakery, Equity and Beyond, the Black Resilience Fund, and Power Hour. Power Hour is Brown Hope’s reparations program for Black, Brown, and Indigenous people in Oregon.

Why Reparations?

When people think about reparations, they immediately think about people who've been dead for 100 years.

- Ta-Nehisi Coates

In 2016, the United Nations' Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent, which includes leading human rights lawyers from around the world, presented its case in support of reparations. "In particular, the legacy of colonial history, enslavement, racial subordination and segregation, racial terrorism and racial inequality in the United States remains a serious challenge, as there has been no real commitment to reparations and to truth and reconciliation for people of African descent," the report stated. "Contemporary police killings and the trauma that they create are reminiscent of the past racial terror of lynching."

Even with the recognition of historic harms based on reparations, U.S. political support for reparations is extremely lacked. In PBS article titled “Millennials may eventually shift public opinion on slavery reparations,” the agency released Marist Poll which stated: 68 percent of Americans say that reparations should not be paid to descendants of slaves, according to the poll. Among the races polled, 81 percent of white Americans said no to reparations for slave descendants, the highest number among all races. However, support among Millennials is around 40%, showing increased support over time.

Every year since 1989, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act has been submitted to the US Congress, which calls for comprehensive research into the nature and financial impact of African enslavement as well as the ills inflicted on black people during the Jim Crow era. Every year, the bill fails.

Conversations around reparations are starting to make their way into mainstream media. Check out this recent segment from The Daily Show with Trevor Noah and this NPR article.

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