Evanston, Illinois is a leafy suburb located a few miles north of Chicago that now carries the infamous distinction of being the first municipality in the United States to offer Black residents cash payments under its reparations program.
In 2019, the Evanston City Council voted in favor of a resolution “to end structural racism and achieve racial equity.” This included a $10 million fund for housing vouchers and a $10 million fund for direct cash payments.
Four years later, the Reparations Committee has launched its long-awaited cash payment program to eligible Black residents. What took so long?
According to Robin Rue Simmons, chairwoman of the committee, “The biggest challenge has been staffing IT and logistics in terms of taxation. How will certain types of benefits, namely cash, impact residents that are receiving other government-funded benefits and not strip away those very important benefits like housing and food access and health care and so on?”
In other words, it took four years to figure out how the city could dole out cash payments to 16% of its population without running afoul of IRS rules while also ensuring that these people would remain eligible for all sorts of government handouts via the state of Illinois and/or the federal government.
As of this week, the city began dishing out cash payments that will total $25,000 each to 140 recipients.
So, who is eligible for the $25,000 payday? One would assume that the reparations would apply to Evanstonians who can directly trace their roots back to slavery. However, that would be incorrect.
According to the city’s reparations website:
“Is (sic) Reparations only for African American/Black Evanston residents who are United States direct descendants of slaves?
No. The program identifies eligible applicants as Black or African American persons having origins in any of the Black racial and ethnic groups of Africa. The person must reside in Evanston at the time of disbursement of funds.”
This is an important point because the town of Evanston was incorporated in 1863, during the Civil War. It also happens to be located in Illinois, which was a fervently anti-slavery state that outlawed slavery in 1818, when it officially entered the Union as a “free state.”
So, any current Evanston resident that happens to be of African-American descent is now eligible for a $25,000 payday even though they need not prove that they are indeed descendants of slaves. Just think about how arbitrary that is.
Yet, it gets worse. The funds come from taxpayers, meaning that a large percentage of Evanston residents who had absolutely nothing to do with slavery, including the city’s large Hispanic population, are footing the bill for those who need not even prove they have any family legacy of slavery.
In reality, this is nothing more than a major wealth redistribution scheme based on achieving so-called equity.
Reparations are not a solution; they are a politically motivated effort intended to victimize a small segment of the population at the expense of all others.
If Evanston actually wanted to achieve equity and end structural racism, perhaps it should begin by offering school choice vouchers to every single Black family in the city. That alone would be significantly better than dispensing cash to a certain group of people simply because they happen to be African-American, without any strings attached.
