02/26/2023
SB 776 VOTE:NO
In CommitteePublic Hearing 02/28/2023 8:00am HR C
Status (overview) of bill:https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Measures/Analysis/SB776
Committee assigned to bill:https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2023R1/Committees/SVEMFW/Overview
This bill establishes Task Force on Reparations and directs task force to study and develop proposals for financial and nonfinancial reparations for Oregonians of African-American descent, develop appropriate methods for educating public about task force findings and recommend appropriate remedies based on task force findings. Sunsets December 31, 2024.
Reparations is based on the idea that Black slaves were strangers and the colonies had established a homeland in America. That very idea perpetuates the concept of ‘them and us’ that has done more to divide than unite this country. Nearly 100 years before Jamestown, Africans helped the colonies to survive with their knowledge of cultivation, contrary to being first slaves arriving in 1619 now taught in schools.
From the early 1500s forward, the Portuguese, Spanish, English, French, Dutch, and others fought to control the resources of the emerging transatlantic world and worked together to facilitate the dislocation of the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas. Historian John Thornton has shown that the African men and women who appeared almost as if by chance in Virginia in 1619 were there because of a chain of events.
The task force isn’t directed to be objective in comparison of history of nationalities, instead it starts from a clear bias that it is directing others to overcome. The bill states the task force will develop, a predetermined outcome, proposals for financial and nonfinancial reparations based on:
(A) Enslavement;
(B) Racial terror;
(C) Political disenfranchisement;
(D) Housing segregation;
(E) Separate and unequal education;
(F) Racism related to the environment and infrastructure;
(G) Pathologizing the Black family;
(H) Control over creative cultural and intellectual life;
(I) Stolen labor and hindered opportunity;
(J) An unjust legal system;
(K) Mental and physical harm and neglect; and
(L) The wealth gap.
This is not reparations, it is redistribution of wealth in a communist/Marxist fashion. America is a melting pot of nationalities that each have some history of hardships that has allowed them to prosper.
Black people should be indignant that they are being used to advance a racist agenda and a worse slavery then they escaped from. This bill pushes the Black people backwards into a class of socialist entitlement that is disrespected. You can’t legislate out emotional bias and by trying to do so, it draws attention and makes it worse. That is why the US Constitution is written with equal opportunity, and not forced equity. In the end, whatever amount of money they will receive won’t compare to how much worse they feel about themselves.
Every category of legislation has given Blacks, underrepresented, underprivileged a hands out opportunity over everyone else. It seems that reparation has already been legislated.