a word about direct financial compensation
There have been many types of oppression and discrimination in our nation’s history, but the experience for slaves and American Indians are unique to themselves.
At the core of the moral injury heaped on slaves and American Indians is theft, often through violence. For American Indians, it’s the theft of ancestral lands; theft of natural resources; theft of autonomy; theft of culture, traditions and identity. For slaves, it’s the theft of family; theft of labor; theft of freedom; theft of their homeland.
Sins of this magnitude don’t cause hardship, pain and suffering just for the people its originally inflicted upon. It’s a wisteria type of corruption that twists and tangles – feeding and nurturing new injustices – until it eventually chokes an entire society for generations to come.
For modern-day American Indians and black Americans, it comes in the form of geographic segregation, dangerous neighborhoods, health and income disparities, limited social mobility, fair and affordable housing, credit access, lending discrimination, lack of financial safety nets, and massive wealth and educational gaps. For white Americans, it comes in the form of an invisible but assumed separation from their black neighbors and confusion over what their culpability should be for evils that happened hundreds of years before they were born.
These are immoral harms that transcend time and centuries, and we finally reach a point where a national reckoning is inescapable and a collective debt must be paid.
There is not enough money in the world to reimburse what slaves had already lost as they arrived near Point Comfort, Virginia in 1619 – and continued to lose long after President Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1, 1863.
We believe the best way to rectify past wrongs is to implement policies that specifically target inequities and, working together, will level the playing field once and for all. We don’t say this in the flippant, meaningless way it’s been said by countless politicians in the past – which always ends in broken promises and bitter disappointment. We mean fight, fight, fight until injustices on all levels are finally conquered.
… and for the first time in our nation’s history we can achieve this because 1787 has designed strategies for our social challenges that are empowering, far-reaching, and truly transformational.
1787 Has Seven of these Policy Initiatives:
(click on each)
