#hr40

[Image Description: A green square with text at the top that reads "Reparations Roundtable Weekly Support" and at the bottom that reads "bit.ly/RRgeneralfund2021 $2500 Needed! bit.ly/RRgeneralfund2021" The center of the square has the following circle of graphics from left to right: A green grocery bag in front of a lighter green shape, text: Groceries $450. An orange and blue megaphone in front of a yellow shape, text" Organizer Support $1200. Cleaning supplies in front of an orange shape, text: Household Necessities $150. A blue circle with a white person's hand uplifting a pink heart with an EKG trace, text: Healthcare $200. A white and orange house with a tag that says RENT, text: Rent $500]

Reparations Roundtable is a project of Black Lives Matter Louisville and Voix Noire. We collect funds from white folks and distribute them directly to Black MaGes* as mutual aid, under the guidance of Black community organizers working tirelessly to uplift their communities. 

We need $2500 this week to sustain our commitments. These commitments include assisting with rent, medical care, groceries, and household necessities. We also assist Black organizers who are out there fighting for justice. Some of them started out as folks we assisted and transitioned to community organizing. Others have been organizing in their communities for years. None of them are involved with raising these specific funds, but they all do a lot of work in their communities to uplift and liberate Black lives. They often don’t have the chance to live their own lives because of it, and we pay them for their labor and thank them by paying reparations.

I'm raising $100 to do my part. Who will help me? Just 10 people with $10 gets it done. Remember, no matter how long HR40 idles in Congress, reparations are owed! 

Give now at:

Direct link to the fund: bit.ly/RRgeneralfund2021

Venmo: @amanda-darer 

Cashapp: $teababe27

Everyone, please take a moment to go to this website and send a message to Congress to get HR40 moved forward. This video discusses what HR40 is, but in short, it will allow for studies to be done into slavery, Jim Crow Laws, and the current racial landscape in America, in order to work towards making real reparations for Black people in America.

Quick info on what HR-40 currently is & how to  fix it! 💙

Fixing HR-40 is crucial as the bill currently doesn’t do enough to bridge the wealth gap for African Americans, among other things. 

This petition urges for Congresswoman Shelia Jackson Lee to fix the current bill.

This petition allows you to write a personalize message to your representative. PLEASE personalize your message to emphasize how Sandy Darity’s edits to the bill are needed for the bill to be effective to Black Americans. 

The edits that must be made to HR-40 are recognized by the official publication of the NAACP, their thoughts are here.

Aside from petitions, find out who your senators + representatives are.

When the Emancipation Proclamation was signed in 1863, the black community owned less than one percent of the United States’ total wealth. More than 150 years later, that number has barely budged. The Color of Money pursues the persistence of this racial wealth gap by focusing on the generators of wealth in the black community: black banks. Studying these institutions over time, Mehrsa Baradaran challenges the myth that black communities could ever accumulate wealth in a segregated economy. Instead, housing segregation, racism, and Jim Crow credit policies created an inescapable, but hard to detect, economic trap for black communities and their banks.

The catch-22 of black banking is that the very institutions needed to help communities escape the deep poverty caused by discrimination and segregation inevitably became victims of that same poverty. Not only could black banks not “control the black dollar” due to the dynamics of bank depositing and lending but they drained black capital into white banks, leaving the black economy with the scraps.

Nick Visser at HuffPost: 

A House committee on Wednesday advanced an effort to create a commission that could consider how to provide Black Americans with reparations for slavery.

The bill is commonly known as H.R. 40 and was first introduced in 1989 by former Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.), referring to the Civil War promise to provide newly freed slaves with “40 acres and a mule.” That pledge was never fulfilled and was later rescinded by the U.S. government.

Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee voted 25 to 17 to advance the legislation, with all Republicans objecting.

“Here we are today, marking up for the first time in the history of the United States of America any legislation that deals directly with the years and centuries of slavery of African American people who are now the descendants of those Africans,” Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas), the bill’s new sponsor since Conyers’ retirement in 2017, said Wednesday. “We’re asking for people to understand the pain, the violence, the brutality, the chattel-ness of what we went through.”

If passed, the bill would establish a 13-member commission to study the lasting effects of slavery and racial discrimination, and later present “appropriate remedies” to Congress. It’s unclear what those remedies would look like, who would qualify for them or if they would have any financial value.

The bill would also include considerations for a “national apology on behalf of the people of the United States for the perpetration of gross human rights violations and crimes against humanity on African slaves and their descendants.”

Despite Wednesday’s vote, the legislation still faces a steep climb to become law. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) said he would consider bringing the bill to a floor vote, but it may take time, according to The Washington Post.

The case for reparations has long been a fraught political issue, and most Republicans and some Democrats remain firmly opposed to it.