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On Tuesday night, the city council of Asheville, North Carolina, voted unanimously to apologize. And for what? For the city’s role in historic discrimination against black citizens. They will be offering reparations for their descendants.
In a surprising move, the council of a North Carolina city voted to offer “community reparations” for its Black citizens. They did so in an attempt to apologize for the city’s role in historic discrimination.
The resolution, titled “Resolution Supporting Community Reparations for Black Asheville,” passed 7-0. This is according to The Asheville Citizen-Times. While the resolution doesn’t offer direct payments, it does seek to rectify historical disparities in the form of investment-based solutions.
As its basis, the resolution establishes segregation, imprisonment, and unjust enslavement. It goes on to list alleged longstanding discrimination against Asheville’s Black citizens. This includes things such as the following:
It also claims that Black people die in larger numbers thanks to discrimination in medicine. It states that medical professionals allegedly gave them “inadequate, if not detrimental, health care as exemplified by disproportionate morbidities and mortality rates that result from the generational trauma of systemic racism.”
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Police are mentioned in the resolution, alleging that the Black community is “unjustly targeted” and imprisoned by them. It explains that this prevents Black citizens from “the full participation in the benefits of citizenship.”
Other claims include that Black people have been forced to live near toxic waste sites, kept from sources of nutritious food, and unjustly confined to the routes of public transportation. Not only that, but it could cause some citizens to have issues with bad credit, auto insurance, and more.
The resolution states that “systemic racism was created over centuries and will take time to dismantle.” It maintains that “state and federal governments have a responsibility to adopt programs, policies, and funding to address reparations.”
The goal is to “make significant progress toward repairing the damage caused by public and private systemic Racism.”
The city council apologized as an attempt to make amends for past mistakes. Those mistakes include slavery and segregation. Because of this, the commission aims “to make short, medium, and long term recommendations.”
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