If you are reading this, you have resources. Your resources may include a home, a car, a computer, money to pay for non-essential items or experiences, influence at your job or place of worship, etc, etc. In addition, you may have the resource of white skin, and all of the benefits that come with it. As we recognize our resources, we can use them towards rectifying the ways our advantages are related to others’ disadvantages.

Today is Juneteenth, the commemoration of  June 19, 1865 – the day Union troops rode into Galveston, Texas, carrying the news of the end of slavery. This was two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation. People who were enslaved in Asheville first learned of emancipation only months earlier, on April 26.

Significantly, today is a House Hearing on Reparations. The purpose of the hearing, which will be in front of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, is to “to examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice” (The Root). Speakers will include Danny Glover and Ta-Nehisi Coates, whose essay “The Case for Reparations” is a must read.

Related to Coates’ essay is this JMPRO TV video of Marsha Davis of Davis Squared Consulting giving talk on redlining in Asheville at OnTrack WNC’s 45th Anniversary Celebration last month.

Tonight at 7 pm EST, the Movement for Black Lives is hosting a webinar entitled “Reparations and the Law.” Click here to register for the webinar. Visit the Reparations policy proposals page on their website for an impressive overview of research and specific policy suggestions for how reparations can be implemented.

Today, in honor of Juneteenth, spend some time with the links above – read, watch the video, join the webinar… and reassess resources.

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