[Peace-discuss] Ricky Baldwin letter in today's paper

[David Green]

Scott Reeder’s version of the reparations debate is a cartoon. True, our
present reality, which benefits a few more than most, is largely an
outgrowth of the seeds planted with the brutal ownership of human beings.
But there’s more.

Wealth accumulates over generations. A few can make light of small loans of
a million dollars from dad, while most are lucky if we can afford health
insurance for our kids or help with a car or tuition.

Much less African-Americans, who now own about 7 cents on the dollar
compared to white families overall, not just by accident or individual
choices, but by policy.

After slavery, sharecropping and Jim Crow barred black families from
gaining what white families did.

Well into the 1950s, African-Americans were shut out of good jobs, shunted
into segregated housing and denied postwar FHA loans available to whites,
detailed in “The Color of Law” by Richard Rothstein.

Brief progress in the 1960s and 1970s ended with disproportionately black
mass incarceration, reversals of affirmative action, dramatic tax cuts for
the rich, social program cuts and union-busting, hitting black families
hard.

Then leading up to the 2007-2008 collapse, banks targeted black
communities, long denied access to credit that similarly situated whites
enjoyed, for toxic loans that then imploded, wiping out decades of hard-won
accumulation.

Those who profited from this nightmare must now repair the damage.

A wealth tax could fairly subsidize the accumulation previously denied,
support community development and fund a Green New Deal we all deserve.

RICKY BALDWIN Urbana
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