The Boston Reparations Task Force is aiming to examine the history and impact of slavery in the U.S., potentially leading to monetary compensation.
The task force will involve historians researching the city’s role in the slave trade and its impact, with a budget of $500,000.
The focus is on developing recommendations for reparative justice solutions for Black residents, addressing issues such as education, health, and wealth gaps.
“There’s always been this question: what is owed us?” L’Merchie Frazier said. “I always think about if we had compensation for every second of enslavement just on the legal books. And we assigned a dollar value to that, how much would that be? How much would that have been rendered as far as cost?”
“Reparations to me means I remember. I reclaim. I restore, I reimagine. Those are my four tenets and looking at over 500 years of Black and Indigenous history, the hidden stories–the property… relationships in land and bodies,” Frazier said.
“From the possessive logic that has been rendered in the Western Hemisphere and in that the toll that has been an impact of slavery as a contract–-as implemented in all the facets of life,” she said.
“We should be meeting this with a case of examination. That is to weigh the balance [of] justice [and] equity. What belongs to whom, and if, at some point, real dollars.”
“There’s the moral issue, as James Baldwin talks about: America’s moral credit. Martin Luther King pointed to the moral compass. The check marked insufficient funds–All of that has a part and parcel to do with a 21st-century view looking back over the centuries of what reparations will mean to us. How do we reconcile and repair in areas of education, the health and wealth gap, all of those issues that confront us today?” Frazier said.
“And to whom and what time we could start calculating from, you know, it’s a very complex issue. It’s not something that’s going to be arrived at tomorrow,” she said.
“How will we then meet this very complex question? In its layers, in its examination of land rights and documents and archives.”
The efforts in Boston are part of a larger trend across various cities and states in the U.S. to explore reparations for the legacy of slavery.
