The city of Asheville, N.C., will now be paying slavery reparations to its black residents after the city council approved the sale of city property to fund it, reports Just The News.
The mostly white community will ultimately spend $200,000 on the planning and community engagement process, and $1.9 million on “initial” reparations.
The funding was approved without debate.
Asheville City Manager Debra Campbell is overseeing the planning and community engagement process. Campbell told the city council she launched a speaker series centered around reparations.
“We truly want to have a better understanding of what has been the policies that either currently exist or have existed in the past that have impacted the lives, particularly of black people in Asheville,” Campbell said. “We want to identify and understand the current disparities in the needs and what we should really be focusing on.”
Just The News notes that “Black workers in Asheville made an annual mean wage of $27,998 between 2012 and 2016. White workers made more than any other racial group in Asheville within the same time, with an annual mean salary of $43,553.”
Ashville has a population of approximately 93,350 people, and according to the U.S. Census, 11 percent of the population (approximately 10,270 people) is black. It is not clear what form the reparations will take, but equal single payments to each black resident would come out a mere $185 per person. While it seems unlikely this is the form Asheville’s reparations will take, perhaps the bigger question is: What does the city of Asheville think these reparations will accomplish? Will Asheville’s black residents be exempt from affirmative action after receiving these reparations? If not, what exactly is the point of the reparations? Is it really to help Asheville’s black population, none of whom ever personally experienced slavery in America, or the Asheville City Council, which gets to virtue-signal their wokeness at the cost of $2.1 million?
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