Studying What Has Happened

Mayor Jorge Elorza [Providence, Rhode Island] signed an executive order Wednesday to begin examining the feasibility of establishing a reparations program in Providence for residents of African heritage and Indigenous people.

City leaders have no estimate on how much a reparations program would cost or how it would work, but Elorza said studying the issue will be the “first step in accepting the role Providence and Rhode Island has held in generations of pain and violence against these residents and healing some of the deepest wounds our country faces today.”

“As a country and a community, we owe a debt to our communities of African and Indigenous heritage, and, on the local level, we are using this opportunity to correct a wrong,” Elorza said in a prepared statement Wednesday.

I was delighted to read this in the Boston Globe on Tuesday morning. Like so many others, I have been at a loss for what concrete steps can help us move from where we are as a country to where we long to be. The depth of our collective problem is daunting. Centuries of brutality and inhumanity directed against Blacks and Native Americans.

Of course, anywhere we look in history we see humanity’s capacity for brutality. Peoples of all skin colors and origins colonize and enslave each other. To outsiders, the ‘others’ may look exactly the same, but from the narrative of supremacy, we are the chosen people and they are the ones who are preventing us from having what is rightfully ours.

Perhaps the thing that is most astonishing about human beings is how morally justified we can feel we are doing the most horrific things to each other. How we can compartmentalize our lives so completely that we can make a value of being kind and hospitable to some small subset of people while we enslave and degrade others without a second thought.

The complex interwoven world implicates us all in this web of subjugation and oppression. The growing and morally unjustifiable income gap in our country means that children here in America grow up with food uncertainty – not knowing when or how they will get their next meal. Health care is already rationed according to the color of your skin and your capacity to pay for services and insurance.

Of course, humans have always done this to each other. Some are rich and some are poor. I don’t have a problem with inequality, but I do have a problem with a society that claims to be based on freedom and equality where the basics of shelter, medical care, food and dignity are not given to everyone.

I’m fully behind the movements to reform policing in our country—not just a few new rules to bar especially heinous police behavior, but a rethinking of the function of police and how they are held accountable to the communities they serve. And this bold move that Providence, Rhode Island and other cities across the country have announced toward conversations of truth and reparations seems to be another step in the direction of hope.

Whatever reparations might look like – from policies that favor the people who have for so many generations been actively oppressed to payments of cash to allow people to buy houses or begin businesses – to begin to talk and listen is most important.

As Mayor Elorza says: [this will be the] first step in accepting the role Providence and Rhode Island has held in generations of pain and violence against these residents and healing some of the deepest wounds our country faces today.” The first step must be to talk about, to hear, to listen, to see some of what has happened. Until we, collectively, begin this painful conversation where we speak and listen to the truth of peoples’ experiences, we cannot move forward.

Personal Practice – Search out some stories you have not heard–particularly stories of Black Americans. It could be an op-ed in your local paper or from friends or in books or films. The point of listening is not just to feel guilty and powerless—though this may likely happen. The point is to listen, hear and acknowledge. There may be steps you and I need to take, but the first step is to open our hearts to stories we have not yet heard.