ASHEVILLE. THE first city in America to make the historic move of voting to approve a reparations resolution for black residents.
The very first of its kind in the United States.
Formal apology
The North Carolina city of Asheville’s city council voted unanimously for the resolution, issuing a formal apology for its participation in slavery and racist policies implemented in the past.
The city, 83 per cent white and 13 per cent black, now plan to invest in areas where black residents face disparities.
This is not the first time reparations for heinous crimes against a race have been paid.
Since 1952, the German government has paid over $80 billion in pensions and social welfare payments to Jews who suffered under the Nazi regime.
Payments were also made to the State of Israel as the heir to those victims who had no surviving family. The money was invested in the country’s infrastructure, and played an important role in establishing the economy of the new state.
Reparations is the act making of amends through compensation to those who have been wronged.
Free slave labour
Britain was built off centuries of free slave labour. However, in the UK not a single shilling of reparation, nor a single apology has been granted by the British state to people it enslaved or their descendants.
In 2015 British tax payers finished paying back one of the largest loans in history, the equivalent of £300bn in today’s figures to finance the repayments of slave owners for no longer having slaves.
Generations of Britons are implicated in a legacy of financial support of one of the most egregious crimes against humanity. Yet Britain maintains a guilty silence about the source of its wealth.
Such reparations in the UK would help in the fight for the black community to finally overcome disparities which have impacted black people in the UK for generations.
The slave trade was key in the development of the UK economy – healthcare, financial, legal, educational and commercial institutions all emerged and strengthened by the slave trade.
Disparities
Despite this, all these institutions have failed black Britons for centuries; with disparities still being prevalent today as it ever has been.
In healthcare for example, black mothers were five times more likely to die in pregnancy than white mothers, between 2014 and 2016 according to the UK Confidential Enquiry into Maternal Deaths.
Results from COVID-19 now show BAME people represented 16% of all deaths to up to 28th May from the virus. It is estimate that the deaths of black Africans are 3.7 times higher than might be expected by geography.
When the COVID-19 crisis was at its peak, black people were also more likely to be fined or arrested by the Metropolitan Police for breaching lockdown rules.
As of mid-May, black Londoners accounted for 26 per cent of Fixed Penalty Notices and 31 per cent of arrests for breaching lockdown in the capital.
In social terms, according to the latest year of data, black people were still 9.5 times more likely than white people to be stopped by police. Black people are subsequently arrested at more than three times the rate of white people in England and Wales.
They are four times more likely than average to be physically restrained, almost six times more likely to be struck with ‘less lethal’ firearms, and seven times more likely to be shot with conventional firearms.
Black defendants are twice as likely to be denied bail and are more likely to serve prison sentences which are 50% longer than those for white people.
Victims
At the same time, black people are more likely to be the victims of crime, at a rate of 60 per 1,000 in 2018/19 compared to 42 per 1,000 among their white counterparts.
In education terms, black people in the UK are 21 times more likely to have university applications investigated for suspected false or missing information, figures show.
Generations of Britons are implicated in a legacy of financial support of one of the most egregious crimes against humanity. Yet Britain maintains a guilty silence about the source of its wealth. Such reparations in the UK would help in the fight for the black community to finally overcome disparities which have impacted black people in the UK for generations.
Samuel Brooksworth
The data reveals that 419 black British applicants to undergraduate courses in 2018 were highlighted as a cause for concern, compared to 181 white British applicants, despite there being far fewer black applicants.
Further studies show that even when black students come from the same socioeconomic background as their white counterparts, there is still on average a 15% negative disproportion in the grades they receive in higher education.
Finally, £3.2bn a year. This is the total loss of wages that black and ethnic minority employees lose out on compared to their white counterparts who are doing the exact same work. It is no secret that black people earn less than white people when it comes to salaries.
Inequalities
The differentiation between the two races has become a taboo subject with only about 3% of large companies reporting their ethnic pay gap results.
Even with stats showing such blatant inequalities within organisations, the majority of companies in the UK choose to ignore this.
Black people living in the UK then tend to be worse off than their white counterparts with 22 per cent of black children living in low income and materially deprived households. The national average is 12 per cent according to the ONS.
These stats show there is work to be done and a reparation scheme as seen in Asheville is the starting point.
Hopefully this will be the catalyst to address financial compensation to help fight many of the social disparities to a race who built the western world, but have then been disproportionately mistreated in the UK for generations.
If the UK can learn anything from Ashville, it will be the following – it is always the right time to do the right thing.
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Her Majesty’s Parliament in 2017 gave £75m to honour the suffering of Jewish people in Germany over which Her majesty’s Parliament held no jurisdiction; authority or power.
If Her Majesty’s Parliament can see fit to pay reparations for events in Germany over which Parliament held no jurisdiction; then Her Majesty’s Parliament should pay Reparations for the wealth gained from the forced and brutal labour of African people in the Caribbean.
This wealth from African forced labour made Her Majesty’s Parliament the wealthiest on Planet Earth.
The British will never repay repatriation for the inhumane treatment blacks folks received in the colonies the UK once ruled, a lot of these European countries don’t see black folks as human beings, we were only seen as chattels of an inferior set of people that needed to be used as slaves and live a life just like animals. The basic human rights of black folks were denied by these European colonial powers and our rights to exercise our potentials were taken away, yes they did repay the Jews of what they did to them, it was embarrassing to the Germans to be so cruel and brutal to people who looked like them, when some see it as nothing but white violence against white folk. The blacks are still been dehumanized, utterly destroyed and abused even now in this twenty first century where we ought to see changes and people are more tolerant and accepting to others, is it happening, no people are still race profiling blacks as thugs, criminals and blacks are up to nothing good, but dealing in drugs and stealing. Since the invention of smart phones, few folks can flip the pages of history and get a glimpse now of what black folks used to endured as a people years gone by and we can see it in living colours happening now.