On her website entitled “MLK50: Justice through Journalism”,
Wendi C. Thomas has written an impressive number of interesting articles that
are directly applicable to the focus of our course and class discussions.
Thomas’s articles reveal the ways in which structures of institutionalized
racism have remained within the city of Memphis. Thomas wrote an article last
July entitled “Reparations well-intentioned, but insufficient for the debt
owed; City of Memphis gives $50,000 each to the 14 living black sanitation
workers from the 1968 strike”.
This article analyzes Jim Strickland’s pledge to grant a
total of $700,000 from the City of Memphis. Strickland’s program emphasizes the
intended purpose clearly, and his post social media post announces that, “a
more secure retirement for sanitation workers has eluded us for nearly 50
years. Today, I’m announcing that will change.” This article did not mention
it, but I am curious of the economic benefits for the City of Memphis with the
events planned to commemorate the MLK50.
Thomas mentions an article written by a researcher who
conducted an in depth economic research project which eventually concluded that
“it will take 238 years for the average black family to build the same amount
of wealth of the average white family”[1] I
had never seen this concept described in this way before. Wendi C. Thomas
concludes her article with a simple explanation for these economic racial
disparities. She writes that these ongoing inequities present in our society
are “not an accident. The wealth gap is largely the creation of racist public
policy. It will take anti-racist public policy to solve it.” [2]
Working from the viewpoint of creating anti-racist public
policy seems like a very logical way to counteract the systemic and
generational inequities that originated in racist public policies. From what I
understand, for the most part when it comes to replacing racist public policies
the solution is to institute policies that are simply not shown to be racist.
From what I gathered from Wendi Thomas’s article, this will not be enough to
counteract the government-sanctioned policies that have been historically
disadvantaging black communities ever since America was founded. By attempting
to design policies that actively push against this systemic racial inequality,
perhaps it is possible to counteract some of the damage.
Thomas, Wendi C.
“Reparations Well-Intentioned, but Insufficient for the Debt Owed.” MLK50:
Justice Through Journalism, 6 July 2017, https://mlk50.com/reparations-well-intentioned-but-insufficient-for-the-debt-owed-5aa4d327c31f.
[1] Wendi C. Thomas,
“Reparations Well-Intentioned, but Insufficient for the Debt Owed,” MLK50:
Justice Through Journalism, 6 July 2017,
https://mlk50.com/reparations-well-intentioned-but-insufficient-for-the-debt-owed-5aa4d327c31f.
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