Paying present generations back for more than 200 years of slavery and systemic injustice in New York State — merely talking about the debt owed to people of color, Black Americans in particular — seems an act of defiance these days. The current occupant of the White House scarcely came up during a hearing this week held in Old Westbury by a state commission appointed to study the implementation of reparations for past and present evils.
Slavery and the debt owed to Black Americans are among the subjects the Trumpist thought police are seeking to erase from their telling of United States history. Despite Washington's racist hostility, the people taking part in the Commission on Reparations and Remedies hearing on the State University of New York campus projected a sense of endurance. The question was not whether reparations should be made at all, but rather what form they should take.
There was a powerful subtext, too. The commission was created by the New York Legislature and signed into law by Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2023; continuing the work represents how the fight for justice, even keeping fact-based history on the table, now falls to the states. The Trump administration has moved aggressively to whitewash the national story in its effort to redefine what it means to be an American. People of color who might align themselves with the regime are welcomed; all others are to be overlooked at best, and sent to overseas prison hellholes, if they resist.
Through my own work with the Plain Sight Project, I have grown to understand the ubiquity of slavery and economic exclusion in our own town and across the North, too. Given three minutes to speak at the Old Westbury hearing, I pointed to a list of more than 1,100 names of enslaved and free people of color who lived on the East End from the 1650s through the 1880s. I told the commission, too, of the ubiquity of slavery here, that if a person had a street named after them, odds were that they had been an enslaver. No community during the Colonial and early national period that I have researched was not involved with slavery in one way or another.
Ending my short remarks, I described how members of my own family tree had been enslavers and that some sliver of the change in my pocket was derived from the labor of people who had never been paid for their work. A woman in the audience yelled, "I'll take some!" She had a point. Thankfully, the commission is looking for ways to settle at least a fraction of that debt.
The commission's next meeting is June 11 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City and one will be announced in Brooklyn for a date in July. In the meantime, it is taking public comment at [email protected] or by phone at 518-473-3997.