Let the Reparations Begin!
With each humane act, rampant hate gets diminished
I woke up this morning to read that the Evanston City Council approved the nation’s first reparations plan March 22 on an 8–1 vote. The sole dissenter was a Black woman who didn’t like that the money had strings attached. And I get that. It’s disrespectful. But I believe in what my brother-in-law calls “success by approximation.” It’s far better to approve a flawed plan now and then work to make it better than to wait forever for a perfect one to arise.
I’m not Black and I don’t live in Evanston, but you better believe this plan benefits me — because it benefits us all. For every act of humanity, great or small, weakens the huge metastasizing fungus of Hate that is running rampant in the United States and across the world.
After reading about the spa killings in Atlanta, in which a shooter sought to “remove temptation” by murdering Asian sex workers; after reading about a brain-dead policeman explaining that the shooter had “had a bad day, and this is what he did;” after reading about the grocery store murder spree in Colorado where 10 people were killed; after reading gun enthusiasts on Twitter shame people asking for gun control for “politicizing” the deaths…I NEEDED this good news, this one bit of evidence that we are not a doomed species intent on raping and polluting and murdering each other out of existence.
In the reparations vote, the Evanston City Council agreed to distribute $400,000 to Black residents in amounts up to $25,000. “Under the plan, the money can be used to help buy a home, pay a mortgage, or for home improvements,” according to this story in the Chicago Sun-Times.
And yes, that’s not enough money. And yes, it’s too bad the residents can’t choose what to spend it on. But thank goddess and the Evanston City Council for taking this bold step. As my Grandma Claire used to say, the longest journey begins with a single step. And every single example of kindness and taking responsibility for wrongdoing encourages and makes space for 10 more.
Perhaps you’ve heard about the butterfly effect? That’s the hypothesis in Chaos Theory (which tells you right there that super smart people thought of it) that a butterfly flapping its wings in one country can cause a tornado in another one several weeks later. What I understand from that is EVERYthing is connected. So if I pick up a wallet you dropped and return it to you, maybe one fewer monster will go on a murder spree.
Or maybe you’ve heard of the “wallet test?” That’s the assertion by the World Happiness Report that believing your wallet would be returned if you lost it is more important to your overall happiness than unemployment, income, or major health risks. In other words, trusting others will do right by you is what matters most. And seeing Evanston do right by its Black residents increases my overall trust in my country and the human race.
In the big picture, I see the opposing forces of Love and Hate as gendered. Love is feminine. Hate is masculine. That doesn’t mean that all women are loving and all men are hateful, but that both principles exist within us, and both can be useful, but we need to keep them in balance.
Currently, though, the world is hypermasculinized, which is why hateful male monsters go on murder sprees. I like Mona Eltahawy’s synopsis in Feminist Giant: “God save us from the ‘bad days’ of cis white men and the violence they commit by and for their dicks.”
In order to restore a healthy balance, we need to lift up and encourage generous feminine acts like reparations, in which we demonstrate that we care for and take responsibility for each other, that every act is at least as consequential as a butterfly’s wings, and that we’d return your lost wallet if we picked it up.
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