Reparations

Reparations

Reparations Task Force Chair: 
Rohn Hein (UU Church in Cherry Hill)
Contact: reparations@uufaithaction.org

Unitarian Universalists have a long history in the fight for racial justice, from advocating for the abolition of slavery, to supporting the Civil Rights movement, to participating in the Black Lives Matter movement. This history of combining hands-on work for social justice with the free search for truth and meaning continues in the work of our Reparations Task Force.

While the concept of reparations is not new, it has never been the subject of formal systematic study in the United States. Given the role of slavery from the birth of our nation to its emergence as a world democracy and financial super power, that we as a country have never studied the effects of the emotional, social, financial, and societal trauma on its victims is shocking. A bill called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African American’s Act, has been languishing in Congress for over two decades. In response to this stagnation, many states and localities have taken to introducing legislation that would form their own task forces to study the issue as well.

UU FaithAction NJ’s Reparations Task Force, along with its coalition partners, advocates for the passage of S386/A938 which would create a New Jersey Reparations Task Force that would examine the issue in depth and make recommendations based on its findings. Read the letter to New Jersey elected official signed by diverse organizations.

Take Action Now

Sign the Petition to Support Reparations in New Jersey.

Sign-up to participate in the 2023 Common Read for Reparations.

Resources

Special thanks to Dionne Ford, author of Slavery’s Descendants, for compiling this list.

  • Books
    • The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome by Alondra Nelson. She was recently appointed Deputy Director for Science and Society for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy.
    • The History of White People by Nell Irvin Painter. Painter, a New Jerseyan and incredible scholar, explains the construction of race, and the role it would play in New World slavery. Our own Ralph Waldo Emerson gets a whole chapter for his book “English Traits” and its promotion of stereotypes. 
    • Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route by Saidiya Hartman. Hartman basically takes the journey “home” for every Black American descended from enslaved people and confronts the void left by the Maafa of slavery. She was recently awarded a much deserved MacArthur grant.
    • Loving: Interracial Intimacy in America and the Threat to White Supremacy by Sheryll Cashin. “It is impossible to understand America’s persistent race business without examining its origins, and antimiscegenation was an enduring protagonist,” Cashin explains in her introduction.  This book uses the landmark Loving vs. Virginia case where “miscegenation” laws in this country were finally struck down and the phrase “white supremacy” was used for the first time by the Supreme Court to look at our long history of laws around sex and race.  Also, Cashin pays homage to the Unitarians in the opening paragraphs of the book!
    • A Black Women’s History of the United States by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross. This is an accessible and comprehensive volume of Black women’s contributions to US history generally and to reparations in particular as far back as the colonial era.
    • On The Courthouse Lawn: Confronting the Legacy of Lynching in the Twenty-First Century  by Sherrilyn A. Ifill. I have no idea how this is not required reading in history classes.  Maybe it will be now.  It’s certainly as effecting as Bryan Stevenson’s highly acclaimed book.  It’s the kind of thing folks should read before heading down to the Equal Justice Initiative’s memorial to lynching victims.
    • Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo,”  by Zora Neale Hurston. This is the story of Oluale Kossola, aka Cudjo Lewis, who until recently was believed to be the last survivor of the last slave ship, Clotilda, which arrived in the United States in July 1860. New scholarship shows that Matilda McCrear who also arrived on the Clotilda was the last survivor. She lived until 1940. This is necessary reading for every American in my opinion.
    • Slavery’s Descendants: Shared Legacies of Race and Reconciliation This is a compliation of essays written by members of Coming to the Table, an organization that brings together descendants of enslavers and enslaved people to heal the historic harms of slavery. It includes several examples of personal reparations.
    • Darkening the Doorways and Black Pioneers in a White Denomination, by Rev. Dr. Mark Morrison Reed
    • The Warmth of Other Suns by Isabel Wilkerson
    • Caste: The Origins of our Discontent, by Isabel Wilkerson
    • In Their Own Words: A Conversation With Participants in the Black Empowerment Movement Within the Unitarian Universalist Association, January 20, 2001
  •  Links
    • Former UUA President Bill Sinkford’s call for a Truth, Repair and Reconciliation Commission in 2007
       https://www.uua.org/racial-justice/history/engaging/104381.shtml
    • Findings of the UUA Truth, Repair and Reconciliation report https://www.uua.org/files/documents/gibsongordon/080501_truth_repair_review.pdf
    • 2017 General Assembly speaker, DR. MTANGULIZI SANYIKA, in what he called a spiritual reconciliation. https://smallscreen.uua.org/videos/ga2017-249-black-power-challenges-liberal-religion-fifty-years-later
  • Videos and Podcasts
    • The Black Church (PBS film based on the book by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.)
    • “The Language You Cry In” (this is a documentary about how a song passed down in one modern Gullah Geechee family led to its  ancestral family in Africa)
    • Daughters of the Dust, Directed by Julie Dash (on Amazon Prime for free)The first feature film with wide distribution to be directed by a Black woman, this is the story of a Gullah Geechee family at the turn of the century leaving the Sea Islands in Georgia and heading North.
    • Slavery by Another Name, PBS film based on the book by Douglas Blackmon
    • The United States of Anxiety podcast episode on the Black Church
    • GirlTrek Black History Bootcamp Prayer Edition (Podcast encouraging women to walk while listening to histories of black women available on Apple Podcast and Spotify)
    • Intersectionality Matters, The Story of US episode features historian David Blight, lawyer, EJI Executive Director and author of Just Mercy Bryan Stevenson, author of The Sympathizer, Viet Thang Nguyen as they reflect on the January 2021 insurrection and how we got there. The podcast is hosted by Kimberle Crenshaw. I believe she is the scholar who coined the phrase “intersectionality” as well as misogynoir.
    • NJ PBS – Black Churches in NJ: Bending the Arc Toward Justice
  • Places to Visit