FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
The case for reparations to descendants of enslaved people is quite simple: African-Americans were forcibly taken from their homes in Africa, enslaved and forced to work for white Americans for over 250 years in abysmal conditions with no remuneration. The “40 acres and a mule” promised to each black family upon emancipation was never delivered. Even after emancipation, practices such as sharecropping and enactment of Jim Crow laws ensured that African Americans were economically hamstrung, effectively barred from participating in the American Dream. These practices continue to this day, evolving with the times.
The U.S. made reparations to Japanese-Americans who were incarcerated in U.S. camps during WWII.
Germany made reparations to holocaust survivors and Israel after WWII as payment for the holocaust.
It’s time.
Sankofa means “Go back and get it,” or the idea that in order to move forward into the future we must learn from our past. The Sankofa bird is pictured with its feet facing forward, while it reaches back and brings forward a precious gem or seed from the past. We chose a white Sankofa bird to symbolize the idea that white people must look at our past; the goal of reparations is to begin the truth-telling and atonement process.
As with every other state in the union, Colorado has quite a history of institutional racism. And yes, when Colorado was just a territory, there were certainly instances of Southerners bringing enslaved people to our state. Our history is complicated and much of it has been erased from our textbooks. It's just as important to study local histories of oppression as it is to understand our national history.
Repair is needed at both the local and national levels because harm has occurred at both the local and national levels.
Read more about Colorado's history of Institutional Racism HERE
Reparations are absolutely due to Native Americans for harms caused by federal policies such as removal, forced placement on reservations, Indian wars, assimilation, removal of children to boarding schools, forced adoptions, relocation, termination that caused disruption of tribal communities and suppression of tribal societal institutions, cultural erasure and genocide. Federal policies inflicted near total and irreversible damage to Native people and their societies: tribes lost 98 percent of their land and 95 percent of their population.
Care must be taken to distinguish the need for reparations for damages to native communities detailed above versus the satisfaction of Native American rights, which are based in treaties and subsequent federal laws that implement the rights reserved in those treaties. Fulfillment of broken treaty guarantees is thus not considered “reparations.”
The term reparations, therefore, must be considered separately in the context of each community's history.
Reparations Circle Denver and the Denver Black Reparations Council are focused on reparations to African Americans. We stand in full support of reparations to Native Americans, though these issues are not the focus of the fund.
Harm happens at the local level and must therefore be repaired at the local level. Our belief is that if repair begins at the local level, it will provide momentum for the national reparations movement as well.