Page 18 - IAV Digital Magazine #451

iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine
'Reparations Happy Hour' Invites White People To Pay For Drinks
By Christopher Carbone, Fox News
On Monday night, a bar in Portland, Oregon hosted peo- ple of color and gave them $10 as they arrived — a symbolic gift funded primarily by white people who were asked not to attend the “Reparations Happy Hour.”
A local activist group, Brown Hope, wanted the event to be a space for people of color in a mostly white city to meet, organize, discuss public policy and potentially plan vari- ous actions.
The notion of full- scale reparations — sought by some as compensation for the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow and
the large wealth
gap between white and black U.S. households — was supported by 58 per- cent of black people and 46 percent of Hispanic people in a 2016 poll.
However, 68 percent of white Americans do not support repa-
rations; when the topic was brought up during the 2016 pres- idential campaign, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said it
was “divisive” and unlikely to get through Congress.
The economist Robert Browne
once estimated a fair value for reparations of $1.4 trillion to $4.7 trillion and wrote that reparations should ''restore the black community to the economic position it would have had if it had not been subject- ed to slavery and dis- crimination.''
Eric J. Miller, a pro- fessor at Loyola Law School, said the case for reparations involves a reckoning with the country's his- tory.
“Part of our history is our grandparents par- ticipating in these acts of terrible vio- lence [against black people],” he told HuffPost. “But people don’t want to acknowledge the hor- ror of what they engaged in.”
“The cognitive disso- nance of learning that your property is got
and preserved on the back of the misery of others is not an incredibly nice thing to live with. So peo- ple would rather dis- count it,” Miller said.
Cameron Whitten, the 27-year-old activist who organized the event, said that atten- dees felt seen and valued by the Portland event — but noted there are much larger goals.
“We’re creating a platform to make sure our leadership is being seen and hon- ored,” Whitten told Blavity. “This isn’t
just, ‘We’re here to socialize.’ We’re here to do the work. In a place like Portland, where our community is so fractured ... our first step is to bring us back together, and then from there organize and mobi- lize to create policies to create justice in our communities.”
There was enough interest in the idea, which was funded by about 100 people who were mostly white, to hold other happy hours, which will be called
"Reparations Power Hour" to accomodate those who don't drink.
Whitten anticipated some of the criticism he's faced, telling the New York Times the event is not meant to diminish the serious- ness of reparations.
In 2014, the writer Ta- Nehisi Coates made the case for repara- tions in the Atlantic. H.R. 40, which was introduced in Congress in January 2017, would study various reparations proposals.
iAV - Antelope Valley Digital Magazine