The city council of Asheville, North Carolina, voted 7-0 on Tuesday in favor of a resolution, which will give reparations to “black Asheville” in the form of tax dollars which will be targeted to the city’s black community.
Reparations will not be paid to individual citizens but will include provisions for increasing minority homeownership, access to affordable housing, increasing minority business ownership opportunities, promoting “generational” wealth equity and closing gaps in education, healthcare, employment, and criminal justice.
The resolution calls for the city to establish a Community Reparations Commission, whose job will be to “make short, medium and long term recommendations that will make significant progress toward repairing the damage caused by public and private systemic racism.”
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The resolution — titled “Resolution Supporting Community Reparations for Black Asheville” — accuses white America in general and the City of Asheville in particular of unjustly enslaving, segregating, and incarcerating black people. The resolution went on to say that blacks in Asheville have historically been denied fair access to housing, paid discriminatory wages, and “systematically excluded from historic and present private economic development and community investments.”
The resolution’s chief proponent is Councilman Keith Young. Young believes that the resolution was necessary to combat the “systemic” racism that he believes exists in America today.
“Reparations is a very complex issue and requires a solution that looks beyond a one-time payment or check,” Young told CBS News. “The same systemics that have allowed Confederate statues to go up and disparities in policing to continue are the very same systemics that recycle itself generation after generation.”
So in Asheville, reparations will not be a one-time payment and apology for past societal sins, but really a new way of life for the city.
“Systemic racism was created over centuries and will take time to dismantle,” the resolution stated.
“It’s set up to be something that will live beyond the current council and the current city manager to continually look at these issues that are affecting Black individuals in this country,” Young explained. “We need to be made whole in areas such as healthcare, education, employment, criminal justice, business ownership, home ownership and overall equity and, of course, generational wealth.”
And that process, apparently never ends according to Young. “Hundreds of years of Black blood spilled that basically fills the cup that we drink from today,” Young concluded.
The resolution also apologizes for the city’s role in the slavery of black people.
The City Council of the City of Asheville:
(1) apologizes and makes amends for its participation in and sanctioning of the Enslavement of Black People;
(2) apologizes and make amends for its enforcement of segregation and its accompanying discriminatory practices;
(3) apologizes and makes amends for carrying out an urban renewal program that destroyed multiple, successful Black communities.
The resolution also called for private entities, the State of North Carolina, and the federal government to begin the process of creating their own reparations programs.
The City Council allowed some time for the community to weigh in on the new resolution and some citizens spoke out against it. A man who identified himself as Eddy from West Asheville claimed that “white privilege” was something that depended upon experience. “My white privilege is I grew up on a farm, we milked cows, we bailed hay. That was my white privilege.”
Another citizen, Jacqueline Morrison of Montford, argued that the city’s black police chief, its black city manager, and its black council members were an “indication that Blacks can succeed in Asheville.” Montford further referred to the resolution as “offensive.”
But Councilwoman Sheneika Smith countered, “[Slavery] is this institution that serves as the starting point for the building of the strong economic floor for White America, while attempting to keep Blacks subordinate forever to its progress.”
This new call for reparations is not limited to Asheville. The reparations movement in America has gained steam in the wake of death of Minneapolis criminal George Floyd while in police custody in May. On Wednesday, Mayor Jorge Elorzsa of Providence, Rhode Island, signed an executive order, which promises to pursue a “truth-telling and reparations process,” in the city. Other cities and states are also considering reparations legislation.
So, at the time when supposed “white guilt” is at its apex, the leftists invested in this wealth-redistribution scam can be commended for striking while the iron is hot. But resolutions such as these have nothing to do with racial equality. This is about politics — pure and simple. This is about rewarding a so-called victim group with government goodies in exchange for votes — even on the local level.
Where does it end? If so-called reparations can be used to right any historical wrong shouldn’t Councilman Young also be going after the Africans on the so-called Slave Coast, who freely sold other blacks into slavery? Don’t the Jews deserve reparations from current day Germany for the Holocaust? Should current-day Turkey be forced to pay the descendants of the 1.5 million Armenians that the Ottomans slaughtered? The list of historical wrongs done by one people to another is endless.
You simply cannot right historical wrongs with money. You can, however, buy votes with money and that’s what this reparations movement is about.
Photo: traveler1116/iStock/Getty Images Plus
James Murphy is a freelance journalist who writes on a variety of subjects. He can be reached at [email protected].
