Making Reparations The Case for Educational Reform

Research Proposal - Reparations for Blacks: Helping Impoverished Communities through Other Educational Reforms

Despite some modest progress in recent decades, glaring race-related inequalities still exist across the entire spectrum of the human condition in the United States today. Indeed, African Americans (hereinafter alternatively “blacks”) have shorter life expectancies, lower salaries and a lack of access to high quality health care services compared to whites, but these disparities are especially pronounced with respect to education. Because education is the key to addressing the myriad other problems facing the African American community today, it is vitally important to identify opportunities to directly address this issue. Therefore, the purpose of the proposed study is to explore educational reform in the United States through an anti-racism and anti-oppression lens, examining reparations as a way to address racism and oppression. In sum, educational reparations and curriculum restructuring will help America progress as a nation and address anti-racism and anti-oppression in truly meaningful ways.

1) The identification of a problem or question to be examined

The death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police department in May 2020 resulted in widespread national and global outrage in the past several decades. There were calls for reparations for blacks in the U.S. even prior to this deadly incident, though, but Floyd’s death did underscore the urgency of this type of restorative racial justice for African Americans today (Conley, 2021). Indeed, the case for reparations began immediately following the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 (Conley, 2021). Over the course of the past century and a half, demands for reparations have intensified and the issue remains central to America’s future as a democratic republic.

It is important to note, however, that calls for reparations have taken a back seat to the multiple other pressing challenges facing the nation. For instance, according to Coates (2019), “In fact, there is a bill about reparations that’s been sitting in Congress for thirty years — but now reparations for slavery and legalized discrimination are a subject of major discussion” (para. 3). Few people today, including even the most ardent racists, would likely argue that the four million African Americans who were enslaved prior to the Civil War suffered some degree of deprivations, and reparations of some type remain the primary means of addressing these longstanding injustices. What are reparations? According to definition provided by Black’s Law Dictionary (2008), reparations are “Payment for an injury or damage [or] redress for a wrong done” (p. 1298). In other words, in this context, reparations are not only appropriate, they are long overdue as discussed further below.

2) Justification of the need to study that problem/question

Notwithstanding some spurious arguments that Africans actually benefited from slavery, the reality of slavery was that these individuals were violently robbed of their freedom and their labor. The fact that slavery existed at all given the Founders’ pledge that “all men are created equal” is perplexing to many modern Americans, but concessions were made to slaveholding state then and these concessions continue to be made today in the form of institutionalized and systemic racism that remains a lingering vestige of slavery in the United States long after the Emancipation Proclamation was promulgated in January 1863. In this regard, one proponent of reparations maintains that, “Virtually every institution with some degree of history in America, be it public, be it private, has a history of extracting wealth and resources out of the African-American community” (Coates, 2019, para. 4).

“Behind all of that oppression was actually theft. In other words, this is not just mean. This is not just maltreatment. This is the theft of resources out of that community” (Coates, 2019, para. 4).

3) Research plan for examining the problem/question

It is reasonable to posit that if newly emancipated African Americans were provided with the full range of their constitutionally guaranteed rights, the United States would be a far different country at present. Hate and prejudice, though, are not against the law and racism is intergenerational in nature, tending to perpetuate itself from one generation to the next. Therefore, the question of the need and appropriateness of reparations requires a critical review of the scholarly arguments for and against, as well as the underlying rationales that are used in their respective support.

Conclusion

The American experiment is not over, but it is threatened on many fronts today. Beyond the multiple existential challenges that are currently arrayed against the country, the need for reparations remains a fundamental issue that demands a timely and informed response. Consequently, the study proposed herein will help address this need by assessing the arguments for and against reparations, and determine how educational reform and curriculum restricting can overcome these constraints to racial justice in the United States today and in the future.

References

Black’s Law Dictionary. (2008). St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Company.

Coates, T-N. (2021, June 10). Ta-Nehisi Coates revisits the case for reparations. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/ta-nehisi-coates-revisits-the-case-for-reparations.

This author wrote a seminal case for reparations in 2014, including those involving education, that is frequently cited by proponents as justification. These arguments will provide a valuable addition to the proposed study’s analysis concerning the rationale in support.

Conley, J. (2021). To Teach the University is to Teach Reparations: A Class Project. Radical Teacher, 119, 41–51.

The primary research conducted by this author involving modern university students provides an insightful assessment concerning opposing views about reparations. This resource will be useful in framing in the arguments against reparations in the proposed study.