POV: It’s Time for Reparations and Transitional Justice for African Americans

The country needs truth-telling and acceptance of our moral, legal, political, and sociocultural responsibilities. This is a transformative moment in history in the United States as well as in the rest of the world. Despite myths of a post-racial society as a result of many positive social transformations, we are today again forced to examine our inheritance of America’s great sin—slavery and its subsequent legacies of Jim Crow segregation, systemic racism, and dispossession of African Americans. The lens of iPhones, nightly reports by the media, the Black Lives Matter movement, protests against extrajudicial powers of the police, and the murder of Black people with impunity are exposing the fragile underbelly of this society, and what we see is the stark reality of structural racism and visceral inequality.