No checks are in the mail, but New York is inching closer to considering reparations as an answer to harm tied to slavery.
State lawmakers have put the threshold question on the doorstep of Gov. Kathy Hochul, backing legislation creating a study commission on “reparations remedies” — as part of the continuing reckoning over slavery, systemic racism and inequality that kicked into higher gear after George Floyd’s murder and Black Lives Matter protests in 2020.
“I would have to review it and consider it and think about it,” Hochul said ahead of Thursday’s legislative action. A reparation study bill passed the Assembly, 104-41, and the Senate, 41-21, moving the issue to the governor’s office after years of trying.
The action wasn’t confined to Albany. A series of bills addressing the same history was introduced in the City Council on Thursday. The moves, however incremental, nudge the city and state closer to a thorny public policy debate that is gaining increased attention.
In California, a task force recently proposed a series of recommendations for compensating descendants of the formerly enslaved, including cash payments pegged in excess of $1 million, for lost wealth and opportunity dating to the state’s birth in 1850, though such payments appear far off.
“We find ourselves at a historic crossroads, where the shadows of the past collide with the dawn of a new era,” said City
Councilmember Farah Louis, a Brooklyn Democrat.
The measure before Hochul calls for a commission to study the generational impacts of slavery and segregation in the Empire State, where “enslavement is a defining feature of New York City’s origin story,” as the Montgomery, Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative put it in a 2022 report. New York abolished slavery in 1827.
‘Right reparations and remedies’
The state panel would be charged with creating the “right reparations and remedies,” according to a bill summary by state Sen. James Sanders Jr., a Queens Democrat and…
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