New York City Moves Forward With $1.2 Million Reparation Study

New York City’s racial equity commission plans to use $1.2 million in taxpayer funds to pay for researchers to study reparations.The New York City Commission on Racial Equity, also known as NYC CORE, wants a team of at least six researchers to spend a year looking into the “historical harms” experienced by black New Yorkers because of slavery. Team members are required to have expertise in black history, community-based participatory research, genealogy, legal analysis, and economics.“At a time when our government officials are re-writing history and advancing policy to further anti-blackness, NYC CORE remains steadfast in our commitment to our constitutional rights and advancing reparations study and process grounded in the people’s history and voice,” the commission’s chairwoman, Linda Tigani, said in a release.The researchers will be required to produce a “harms report” and a final report by July 1, 2027, that includes policy recommendations and a process for redress by the city government.The commission says it is establishing an organizing network of community groups to help the research team gather and deliver “truth testimonies.” Those groups will receive grants that could total more than $200,000 in additional taxpayer funds.The 15-member commission calls the study an “important step in examining the historical harms experienced by Black New Yorkers through slavery.” New York had legal slavery as early as its founding as a Dutch settlement in the early 1600s, but abolished it 199 years ago.Mayor Zohran Mamdani is a proponent of reparations and has pledged to champion policies to create reparations. “The Mayor’s Office of Equity & Racial Justice is committed to using every lever at our disposal to understand how the legacy of slavery in this city has shaped the lived experiences of black communities, to document and quantify those harms, and to assess what is needed to move forward. Repair begins with truth,” New York City’s chief equity officer, Afua Atta-Mensah, said.The city council’s minority leader, Republican David Carr, questioned the program in an emailed comment to The New York Sun. “If this administration really wanted to help black families, or any families for that matter, they would stop chasing them out of our city with sky high taxes and expensive and burdensome government mandates, rather than pushing this divisive waste of taxpayer money that will ultimately do nothing to make New Yorkers’ lives better,” he wrote.The New York state government is in the middle of its own reparations study. A reparations commission has been meeting since 2024 but is behind schedule and up to $5 million over budget.A growing list of cities and states are pursuing reparations programs. The Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, became the first locality to run a reparations program, but the road has been rocky. The 6-year-old program has not received as much funding as expected from a 3 percent sales tax on recreational marijuana sales in the city of 75,000. The program had to suspend making payments last year due to a lack of funding, but new payments are expected to take place this year.The Evanston program is also being sued because only black residents were allowed to apply. The conservative advocacy group Judicial Watch filed the suit on behalf of six residents claiming the program violates the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment because of the city’s use of race as an eligibility requirement to seek payments.Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Detroit, and St. Paul are in various stages of studying or implementing their own reparations programs. California and Maryland are considering reparations at the state level.The conservative Project 21 black leadership network argues that race-based reparations will not solve anything. “The left keeps trying to ride this tired hobby horse,” Project 21’s chairman, Horace Cooper said in a statement. “Progressives aren’t concerned about the real issues that black Americans, like other Americans, face — providing for their families and pursuing the American Dream.”

New York City Moves Forward With $1.2 Million Reparation Study

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