Fresh off of his failed “migrant discouragement tour,” New York City Mayor Eric Adams appears to be trying to find something to talk about other than the army of illegal aliens overrunning his city. With that in mind, his team is reportedly reviewing a new bill that would set up a board designed to consider reparations for Black residents based on the city’s “past use of slavery” and implement plans to “prevent recurrence” of slavery in the Big Apple. Considering how much reparations in California have been projected to cost, people must be wondering where he plans to come up with that kind of cash when they can’t even afford to put up shelters for all of the migrants. (NY Post)
The Adams administration says it conceptually supports a controversial bill weighing whether black New Yorkers deserve reparations for slavery, roiling critics who ripped the measure as one of the most “divisive” to ever emerge from the City Council.
Sideya Sherman, commissioner of the Mayor’s Office of Equity, told a City Council hearing on Sept. 19 that a bill by Councilwoman Farah Louis (D-Brooklyn) to create a task force to study the effects of slavery and racial discrimination on the city — and potentially award payments — should be reworked to address “overlap” with both a comparable state bill awaiting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s signature and another by Councilwoman Crystal Hudson (D-Brooklyn).
Hudson’s legislation would mandate the city’s Commission of Racial Equity create a “Truth, Healing, and Reconciliation” process to establish “historical facts” about the city’s past use of slavery and then recommend changes for local government and institutions to “prevent recurrence.”
New York was never “officially” considered a slave state, but unlike California there actually was slavery happening in the Big Apple. In the mid to late 1700s there was even a slave market on Wall Street. Also, the city’s early shipyards produced many vessels that were used in the slave trade. So in that sense, New York City does indeed have a “history of slavery” that could be studied.
But if they do any serious studying, they will discover that all of that activity ended in 1827. Everyone involved in that slave market, either selling or being sold, died more than a century ago. Who would they be paying reparations to? Even if you wanted to pay the descendants of slaves, the records from that era are spotty at best. The city would likely be forced to come up with some sort of plan similar to the proposals we’ve seen in California, where they wanted to simply hand out checks to anyone who is Black, whether their lineage was ever actually enslaved or not.
Of course, then they will be faced with the inevitable question of who qualifies as “Black.” Or, to put it more accurately, who is “Black enough?” Whenever the government start doling out cash, there will be plenty of people willing to show up with their hands out. Would having one Black parent qualify? How about a Black grandparent? Will some sort of DNA testing be involved? You can see how quickly a scheme like this gets complicated.
And then there’s the question of where all of this money would come from. The reparations commission in California came up with a staggering figure in the tens of billions of dollars. Adams is already sounding the alarm over the billions being spent on migrant shelters and the fact that the city needs federal assistance to foot the bill. How would this reparations money just magically appear. The answer is obvious. The bill would be footed by the taxpayers, none of whom ever owned slaves (or if they have should be in prison) or were themselves enslaved. You should be made to pay because you’re bad people. Or your ancestors were. Or something.
And finally, how much effort and resources need to be put into “preventing the recurrence of slavery” in New York City? Slavery is 100% illegal and you can go to prison for it, even in New York. (The exception is the migrant children being sold into sex slavery, but that’s a topic for another day and it’s still illegal anyway.) Is there some sort of current movement to make slavery legal again that we’re not being told about? This entire conversation is farcical, but it’s 2023 so I suppose we’ll have to sit back and watch the same nonsense play out that’s already gripping the west coast.
