Reparations in Action: A Look at Evanston's "Historic First"
Is Evanston's new reparations initiative the model some claim? Why we should keep the community conversation—not just the policy details—in mind to guide future efforts.
“Historic.” “A model for other cities and towns.” If you caught the headlines last week about the passage of Evanston, IL’s Local Reparations Restorative Housing Program, then you likely read phrases like these. It was certainly newsworthy: Evanston sought to make redress for its earlier practices of redlining, in which Black residents were restricted to living or operating businesses in one small district. That same district also received inferior services and public investment in comparison to other districts in the city. If you went past the initial headlines, though, you may have picked up on a community debate around a fairly big question: is this even reparations?
Evanston’s program provides $25,000 for up to 16 eligible individuals to put towards a limited number of uses, such as mortgage payments, home repairs and improvements, or a down-payment on a home. Eligibility requirements include being of African descent and having either lived in Evanston during the fifty-year period of 1919 to 1969 or directly descending from someone who did. The total to be paid out is a small portion of the $10 million previously set aside for reparations efforts by the city council. That pot of money is funded by sales tax revenue on cannabis sales, with the explicit intention of addressing harm resulting from past drug criminalization policies by directing the revenue to communities such policies most impacted. The Chicago Tribune has a quick rundown of the program.
The intention is clearly reparative, but even among supporters of reparations in Evanston itself, not all are in agreement that the program directing funds to impacted Black home owners should be called “reparations.” Most widely quoted on this is Cicely Fleming, the only alderperson on the city council to vote against the ordinance. Here’s Fleming’s position as captured by Rolling Stone:
Alderwoman Cicely Fleming, who cast the lone “no” vote despite supporting reparations, added that the program inherently upholds the stereotype that poor people “can’t handle their money.” She also claimed it disadvantages people who should be eligible for reparations, but either don’t own a home or don’t plan to buy one.
“I don’t think it’s true reparations,” she said. “If we start out with something that is not clearly modeled after what historic reparations are about, we open up a lack of trust,” said Fleming, a longtime resident who is Black. “There’s no way I could go to African Americans in Mississippi who have experienced true racial terror and tell their city councils to do the same as what we’re doing with housing. I would be mortified.”
Elsewhere, Fleming explained the logic in action she saw at play in the program, as in this interview with NPR:
FLEMING: Because we are kind of repairing the harm or identifying the harm of redlining, the housing discrimination does not mean that is exactly where the repair goes. And so this has kind of been termed as reparations in the sense of, you know, we did a harm as a city, and so we're going to repair the harm in this way. That's taking any choice out for African American people. And I know people have talked about this is going to help us retain or get back some of our African American residents that we lost. This is going to help with generational wealth. And all those things are fine if this is our housing program. But we're taking away any right for you to decide what's best for your family. It's another way, I feel like, to manage Black folk - right? - to say for Black people, we know what's best for you; we're going to do this on your behalf.
SHAPIRO: I think many people who support this program might agree with you that there's more that could be done but say this program is still a good step in the right direction. What would you say to those people?
FLEMING: I would say this program is a good housing program. And I think there's more to be done. I mean, we don't have a feasibility study. I have no idea even using the parameters that are available now how many people we're talking about. I had a couple of older people call me yesterday, and they were super-excited about it. They live out of state. So once I told them they could not use this funding unless they were to move back here and buy a primary residence here, they were, you know, so frustrated. [1]
It’s no surprise that decisions around what constitutes reparations should be less than clear cut. How do we make repair for the harms as wide and as deep as slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and mass incarceration? What is the appropriate form of redress for harm done, and who gets a say in what constitutes appropriate repair? Must the remedy be given in the same form as the harm—housing given for housing taken away? Is there anything that truly constitutes “enough”? Must repair look the same for every individual or community? And how do answers to these more abstract moral questions get resolved in real-world contexts? Those contexts include local governments with limitations on power or means, the potential for unintended outcomes as new programs interact with existing policy (for instance, unintended tax burdens—the inability to exempt direct cash payments from state or federal taxation is one reason cited in Evanston for choosing housing grants instead), disagreement from the community at hand about what is best, and potential political opposition that must be overcome in order to achieve anything at all. It’s a lot to sort through.
Evanston may be instructive for other municipalities not only for having made a commitment to fund ongoing reparations for the next ten years, but also by showing how the answers to those questions get answered by real folks acting in the messy world of politics. Much of Cicely Fleming’s criticism, for instance, seems to flow from the fact that she has different answers to these questions than some of her counterparts on the city council. Her position is worth digging into and better understanding—especially as it represents not only her view, but that of other community members who were trying to slow down the vote on the Restorative Housing Program, despite supporting reparations more broadly. Her remark in Rolling Stone is a good starting point for unpacking that view. Here’s the last part of that again:
“I don’t think it’s true reparations,” she said. “If we start out with something that is not clearly modeled after what historic reparations are about, we open up a lack of trust,” said Fleming, a longtime resident who is Black. “There’s no way I could go to African Americans in Mississippi who have experienced true racial terror and tell their city councils to do the same as what we’re doing with housing. I would be mortified.”
First, there’s an empirical question to be asked, about whether residents in states like Mississippi would indeed scoff at a program providing home ownership grants. Recent reports have suggested that modern day redlining practices, while observable across the country, are especially prominent in the South. According to a 2018 analysis of over 31 million Home Mortgage Disclosure Act records, banks continue to disproportionately deny mortgages to both Black and Latino applicants, and “African Americans faced the most resistance in Southern cities – Mobile, Alabama; Greenville, North Carolina; and Gainesville, Florida.”
But even if Southern Black residents would welcome a grants program such as Evanston’s Restorative Housing Program, does Fleming still have a point? Should we just think of it as a useful housing program, but continue to press for something else that could be meaningful labeled “reparations”?
Fleming’s statement on Mississippi suggests that she thinks any specific reparative act must be both maximal and universalizable —that is, to earn the name of “reparations,” an act must address the scale of harm in its most violent form, and that it be transferable for use in all places where reparations are due. Additionally, in deciding what reparative acts are appropriate, Fleming weights the need for Black families to exercise autonomy—to choose whether or not home ownership is what will most open up opportunity in the moment, or if money would be better used elsewhere—as more important than some forms of structural or communal repair. This is a different emphasis than the housing program, which sees the demographic makeup of Evanston as negatively altered due to its exclusion of Black residents from home ownership and seeks to remedy that within narrow legal bounds. Given the limited number of individual recipients involved, the Restorative Housing Program as currently tailored does seem to address harm to the overall community—its aim is to increase the overall home-owning wealth of the Black community in Evanston—while paying less attention to the individual experience of those who were harmed. Individuals harmed by the past redlining program, as Fleming elsewhere points out, may not benefit at all, especially if the impact was so deep that they were forced to relocate to another city, or if they rent and have no means to purchase a home even with the additional grant. A program that states it will repair harm done but leaves impacted individuals feeling left out may in fact cause additional harm and additional barriers to future reparative acts; as Fleming says, “we open up a lack of trust.”
Evanston’s proposal received adulation from long-time reparations organizers, many who consulted on the program, including N’COBRA (the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America), and NAARC (the National African American Reparations Commission). NAARC invited Robin Rue Simmons, the program’s champion who is not running for another term, to join the commission after the city council successfully voted the program in, a clear endorsement of her work.
In contrast to the “cash payments only” line offered by some in Evanston, these groups advocate an intentionally broad view of what constitutes reparations. Here’s how N’COBRA puts it:
WHAT FORMS SHOULD REPARATIONS TAKE
Reparations can be in as many forms as necessary to equitably (fairly) address the many forms of injury caused by chattel slavery and its continuing vestiges. The material forms of reparations include cash payments, land, economic development, and repatriation resources particularly to those who are descendants of enslaved Africans. Other forms of reparations for Black people of African descent include funds for scholarships and community development; creation of multi-media depictions of the history of Black people of African descent and textbooks for educational institutions that tell the story from the African descendants’ perspective; development of historical monuments and museums; the return of artifacts and art to appropriate people or institutions; exoneration of political prisoners; and, the elimination of laws and practices that maintain dual systems in the major areas of life including the punishment system, health, education and the financial/economic system. The forms of reparations received should improve the lives of African descendants in the United States for future generations to come; foster economic, social and political parity; and allow for full rights of self-determination.
NAARC likewise offers a plan with a broad view of the forms that reparations can take, which includes the establishment of an authority to make grants and loans for housing. However, they also offer a different way to determine if an act is reparative. In a presentation to Evanston’s subcommittee on reparations, the commission offered a three-point definition for a policy or initiative to be successfully reparative:
Initiatives must be determined by the injured
Resources must be administered or approved by the injured
Policy must be specifically targeted to address past harms
This second way of looking at reparations represents a fairly different approach. The first seeks to make a non-extensive list of possibilities, to expand the view of the forms reparations may take and seed some initial ideas. The second is a more process-based definition, concerned with decision-making (points 1 and 2) and the relationship or logic between current policy and past action (point 3). It’s important to note that the local critiques in Evanston not only disagree with the first kind of definition—the form reparations should take—but also contest the process. Fleming and others argue that there was little time for input on the specific program proposal, and that the request by many Black residents for direct cash payments was ignored. Rue Simmons and others counter this critique by pointing to community meetings where hundreds of residents turned out to determine spending priorities for the new tax revenue, and other public hearings on the program proposal itself.
The tension here is not new; it’s the same tension that exists in nearly every democratic process. How much consultation is enough? Is approval by a simple majority enough to warrant an act truly democratic—in this context, truly reparative? Does consultation with or approval by a single representative of the community constitute genuine approval? Ald. Rue Simmons could make a fair argument that as the elected representative of the 5th ward who is simultaneously one of the injured, that she has the ability to determine and administer a program that is clearly specifically targeted to address past harms her own family has experienced. (Rue Simmons’ personal experience is a driving force for the reparations program; there’s a nice write-up in Chicago Magazine about her path to the proposal). Rue Simmons isn’t making that argument, however, but instead claiming that the public meetings and hearings were enough to warrant moving forward with the program. For those active in local government, knowing the reality of how such processes can go and trying to assess how democratic such meetings might have been, there’s sure to be a flurry of secondary questions: How much notice was given? How many meetings? When? What was the format? What kind of outreach was done to make sure all those impacted by the potential programs knew about it and could attend?
If you think we’ve too quickly gotten into the weeds, moving from the generalities of Evanston’s reparations program to the format of its public meetings, pause and consider: what’s your measure for knowing when a given reparative act is successful? Is it when a certain amount of money has been distributed? A certain number of apologies offered? A specific reduction in economic inequality between racial groups?
While policy wonks may want to hold onto such forms of concrete measurement, it should be clear from just this small case study in Evanston that the work for reparations cannot proceed with only such reductive yardsticks. This is especially true if what we wish to do is genuinely repair—not simply to settle some legal score or relieve (on the part of those who have benefitted from white supremacy) a sense of guilt—but to build anew a society that feels truly whole, in which all members experience the values of autonomy and trust that Cicely Fleming lifts up in her critique.
As the movement for reparations at long last makes meaningful headways, those looking to organize and support efforts are going to need to sort through many of the questions raised above and understand that there will not be one simple “right side” on which to stand. We will need, instead, to consider the practical application of all those seemingly abstract moral questions to our particular contexts. To ask, is this act reparative on multiple levels? How is it experienced by the community as a whole and by individuals in their own lives? Does it make a meaningful difference, even if it can never be ‘enough’? How many people will it apply to? We will have to make choices—especially if in positions of decision-making authority, or if an item comes to a ballot, or when figuring out where to put our volunteer organizing energy—including who to follow when some claim those impacted have been consulted and agreed to the proposal, and others claim they have not. Do we take the endorsement of national organizations as a sign of authentic repair? How much community consultation is about creating a space for healing, and how much is just stalling and avoiding a final decision?
The reductive discourse prevalent as a result of social media and discussion via memes and quips is unlikely to allow for the nuanced questioning needed to make sure both the end results and the process around reparations are as strong as they could be. This is why, as real proposals begin to get passed, we must shy away from the temptation to have a quick take that will communicate to others online that we’re on that “right side.” The goal is not to be right; it’s to be whole. It’s not just to create equity and equality, but also healing. This requires more of our already ailing democratic processes than they can usually deliver, even at their best. It requires attention to relationship, to those who do not yet feel as though the relationship has been restored. It means lingering over process criticisms even at moments of historic public triumph. It means, most of all, knowing that there is no program or policy that will be the “endpoint” of reparations. How could there be an endpoint, in our short lifetimes, to repair that which has been ongoing for centuries? We are here to complete as much of the work as we can, to make that endpoint arrive sooner, while holding onto the knowledge that everything we do is just groundwork for future actors. Just the beginning steps.
This is the one point on which there seems to be full agreement in Evanston. No one there, including those who spearheaded and voted for the program, considers the Restorative Housing Program, or their broader 10-year reparations effort, as the end of the line. In a forum sponsored by critics of the program featuring city council candidates, the conversation had some redundant themes. Here’s three different participants, including an incumbent councilperson who voted in favor of the program:
“So in terms of [voting on Resolution 37-R-27] on Monday, it’s a step in the right direction. But I think presenting it as anything more than a step forward in a much longer journey is false advertising.”
“The reality is that we’re not going to get full repair out of any program. I have not heard of any idea that will lead to the immediate full repair of the injury to our community … It’s a step in the right direction, which I think is in line with other reparations programs I’ve seen.”
“I don’t know that this issue is ever done, given the magnitude of the harm that needs to be repaired. There’s not one thing that’s going to cause full repair. That’s the nature of a systemic issue. You’re not going to have a silver bullet that knocks it right out.”
So that’s what we really know from Evanston’s “historic first”: on the path towards meaningful repair, there are no silver bullets, only many more steps to take. It’s why it’s important to pause and listen after victories like Evanston’s—to understand where healing was felt, and where it was not. Such moments of reflection aid us in making sure we’re on the right course. For with a journey this long, the fewer navigational mistakes, the better.
NOTES
[1] For further examples, you can also listen to the discussion of Evanston’s program on Consider This, or read on op-ed written by Fleming.