Oakland, California will begin awarding low-income black families, homeless individuals and foreign nationals $500 a month in a bid to end racial disparities.
According to Breitbart, the program apparently excludes white households “living in equivalent poverty.”
According to CNN, the “Oakland Resilient Families Program” will give the extra cash to families with at least one minor child, selecting recipients at random from an online database
To qualify for the Oakland Resilient Families payments, families must have at least one child under 18. Their income must be at or below the area’s median income: around $59,000 for a family of three.
But half of the available spots will be reserved for very low-income families — those who earn below 138% of the federal poverty level — or, about $30,000 per year for a family of three.
An online, multilingual screening form will be released later this spring and summer, after which families will be chosen at random to receive the payments. The program is also open to undocumented and/or unsheltered families. Because recipients will not be required to work for the payments, the money is not considered taxable income.
The program is funded by private donations instead of tax dollars and will begin with 600 families who will receive the payments over a year and a half—totaling $9,000 per family.
The Mayor of Oakland, Libby Schaaf, pushed for “guaranteed income” in a statement about the program. “The poverty we all witness today is not a personal failure, it is a systems failure,” she said. “Guaranteed income is one of the most promising tools for systems change, racial equity, and economic mobility we’ve seen in decades.”
For the full report, click HERE.
Evanston, IL to Become First City to Give Reparations to Black Residents
Evanston, Illinois is set to become the first city in the U.S. to give reparations to black residents.
The city, which is just north of Chicago, “voted to approve a groundbreaking measure in 2019 in which the city would financially compensate its Black residents to address the wealth and opportunity gaps they have experienced because of historical racism and discrimination,” reports NBC News.
Evanston will give out $10 million over 10 years after raising donations and using revenue from a recreational cannabis tax.
According to officials, the first $400,000 will be used to address housing needs and the City Council is set to vote on the matter on March 22.
In the first phase of the program, residents can obtain $25,000 to put towards homeownership, mortgage assistance or home improvement. In order to qualify, they must have “lived in or been a direct descendant of a Black person who lived in Evanston between 1919 to 1969 who suffered discrimination in housing because of city ordinances, policies or practices,” reports NBC.
Robin Rue Simmons, an Evanston alderman who introduced the legislation said, “Reparations is the most appropriate legislative response to the historic practices and the contemporary conditions of the Black community. And although many of the anti-Black policies have been outlawed, many remain embedded in policy, including zoning and other government practices.”
“We are in a time in history where this nation more broadly has not only the will and awareness of why reparations is due, but the heart to advance it,” Simmons said.
For the full report, click HERE.
Harvard Researchers: COVID Transmission Could Have Been Reduced if U.S. Paid Reparations
Harvard researchers claim that COVID-19 transmission could have been significantly reduced in Louisiana had American minority households received hundreds of thousands of dollars in reparations before the pandemic.
Campus Reform reports:
A group of scholars led by Dr. Eugene Richardson and Dr. Momin Malik looked at differences in frontline work and overcrowded housing by race and used it to compare Louisiana, a racially and socioeconomically diverse state, with South Korea, a more racially and economically homogenous country. Their peer-reviewed study was published by the academic journal Social Science & Medicine.
The researchers wish to see a “reparations plan” of $800,000 per household or $250,000 per individual for descendants of slaves. They believe this would have helped eliminate the wealth gap and could have reduced the spread of the virus.
They wrote in the study, “Reparations that allow people to not need frontline jobs would both spread the risk of these jobs across the population, and may also lead to overall higher wages and better working conditions in frontline work — if people are not forced to take such work out of desperation, especially during a pandemic, then wages and benefits would reflect the risk of these jobs.”
The authors believe, “All Black Americans, both those descended from persons enslaved in the US and those who are recent immigrants to the US, have a moral claim to reparations for the effects of ongoing systemic racism.”
For the full report, click HERE.
