Credit: News & Observer file photo. The author frequently passed this billboard outside Raleigh, NC circa 1970.
As public fallout from the Black Lives Matter movement continues, this MLK, Jr. Day is a fine time to revisit the ‘R’ word: Reparations. It is especially timely considering the recent attempt at insurrection and political coup, that—if you believe some of the slogans uttered—were in some measure a reaction to broad public sympathy for protests against George Floyd’s murder.
Reparations for 400 years of black bondage, peonage, Jim Crow terror, and (post-1964 Civil Rights Act) institutional racism hardly need defending. The real debate ought to be about what form reparations should take. There can be no “blanket” reparations—the idea of tracing family trees back to enslaved ancestry then cutting all the disparate progeny a “stimulus” check is a non-starter. Reparations have to be institutionalized as permanent correctives and tailored to rectify glaring “disparities” that are readily identifiable and targetable. Long term care and elder support services provide a specific example.
Health care in this country is already overwhelmingly a government-funded business; that is, it is already ‘socialized’ but for profit, not for maximization of access and service. Black folk are totally capable of taking care of their old people in their own communities—communities to which they are by and large confined as a result of persistent racial bias and residential segregation. As a large percentage of “essential” workers, they already supply the labor that supports the elderly and disabled of other communities, so an adequate and qualified workforce obviously exists. But due to historic and ongoing discrimination in the overall economy and the healthcare industry specifically, they simply lack access to opportunities and capital resources that would make large-scale Black ownership of healthcare businesses and especially long-term care enterprises possible.
Policies that specifically direct public funds (Medicare, Medicaid and research investments, as well as contracts issued by corporations drawing billions from such public health funding) to support the development of Black owned care enterprises can help create appropriately scaled, culturally sensitive, community embedded care facilities, even in so-called “bad” neighborhoods. Regardless of the popular ‘feel good’ embrace of Black aspirations following George Floyd’s murder, the 57 years since the signing of the Civil Rights Act and the recent insurrectionary actions in DC prove White resistance to Black advancement will continue to be formidable. The superficial, shortsighted welfare programs of the civil rights era failed completely. Once bitten, twice shy. For genuine efforts to correct past injustices send capital, not social workers.
Population aging will accelerate and peak during this decade. The Black segment of this aging generation—Black boomers—were born into state enabled Jim Crow segregation and suffered some of the worst depredations of American racism. Large public investments in entrepreneurial care enterprises, care facilities, and eldercare infrastructure in communities where those victims live would be a helpful and measurable step toward health-related reparations. Such investments would be huge job generators as every respectable economic forecast predicts that providing for America’s rapidly aging population will be a major source of job growth going forward. Jobs are just the flip side of business formation.
Eldercare investments in Black communities would support local entrepreneurs resulting in authentic, indigenous, targeted business growth, a double benefit. Plus it would lift the level of health services access, reducing persistent disparities. Reparations in every area of racial disparity must mean targeted, sustained capital investment in Black controlled institutions and business organizations. The elder care segment of the health care industry is just one example.
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