(New York) After California, where the idea of financial reparations to compensate for the legacy of slavery and racism on African-Americans is gaining ground, the State of New York will in turn look into this delicate and controversial question, its Democratic governor announced Tuesday.
“In New York, we like to believe that we are on the right side of history, that slavery was a creation of the South and the Confederate States,” said Governor Kathy Hochul, the fourth most populous in the United States. (20 million inhabitants) which includes the megacity New York and more rural regions up to the border with Canada.
But, his press release emphasizes, “there were, before the American Revolution (1776), more enslaved Africans in New York City than in any other city, with the exception of Charleston, South Carolina, and the population of enslaved Africans made up 20% of New York’s population. These slaves could be employed as servants or in construction in New York.
By signing a new law adopted last June by the local parliament, Kathy Hochul gave the green light to the creation of a commission of experts responsible for “examining the legacy of slavery, the discrimination subsequent to against populations of African descent” and their ongoing impact, for example on access to housing, education, or incarceration, underlines an official press release.
While slavery was abolished in New York State in 1827, before federal abolition in the United States (1865), it “was an integral part of the development of New York State” and its ” consequences […] can still be observed today,” adds the State.
The commission’s task, no later than one year after its first meeting, is to make proposals “for actions to remedy these long-standing inequalities.”
Firmly anchored on the left, California was the first American state to have set up such a committee after the wave of anti-racist demonstrations caused by the death, in 2020 in Minneapolis, of George Floyd, an African-American killed by the police. His report, submitted last June, recommended that the State pay financial reparations to communities victims of this discrimination.
Last March, the city of San Francisco, still in California, was the scene of a lively controversy after the presentation before the city council of a “reparations” plan to compensate for the legacy of systemic racism, which proposed to award five million dollars to every African-American in the city. An “absurd” and unrealistic project from a budgetary point of view, according to the local Republican opposition.