D.C. Council approves funding to study reparations for Black residents

The funding for the reparations commission was in the city’s $21 billion budget, which lawmakers finalized Tuesday, including with a provision directing the Office of the Chief Financial Officer to handle allocating money to create a task force to study how reparations could work.

Council member Kenyan R. McDuffie (I-At Large), who introduced the legislation to create the task force, said the $1.5 million in “pre-funding” ensures that the nine-member reparations task force could hit the ground running if and when the council advances his bill. He said he is expecting to mark up his legislation, the Reparations Foundation Fund and Task Force Establishment Act, in the fall; nine council members co-sponsored the legislation, making passage likely if it gets a vote.

“It is definitely gratifying to get to this point. But it’s not over yet,” McDuffie said. “There’s still some steps that we have to get through at the council, but having the funding included in the budget to establish the creation of the commission, to do all the research that’s going to be required to develop potential proposals, is absolutely critical to moving it forward.”

Under McDuffie’s proposal, the task force would explore ways to deliver restitution to Black residents harmed by generations of racism and institutional discrimination, starting with slavery, in a city that has some of the starkest racial wealth disparities in the nation. The legislation also directs the D.C. Department of Insurance, Securities and Banking to develop a database of slaveholding records — such as insurance policies that enslavers took out on people they owned. That piece is also included in the budget, McDuffie said.

“I think you don’t get to really start chipping away at that racial wealth gap without an understanding of the history and the impact of industry, government policies that contributed to some of the outcomes that we still see today,” McDuffie said, pointing to a 2016 Urban Institute study finding that White households in D.C. have 81 times the wealth of Black households.

Patrice Sulton, executive director of the DC Justice Lab and a supporter of McDuffie’s bill, said it was huge to see the council set aside funds to get the ball rolling on the commission. She said she viewed the potential of reparations as not only a way to address staggering economic inequalities — but also as a way to promote community safety, noting that economic inequality can drive crime.

“It’s a really important time to be looking at this,” Sulton said. “It’s related to a lot of things people are looking at nationally in terms of the importance of understanding Black history and culture and the mistakes of the past, and it’s really a giant step forward that the council has said, ‘This is important.’”

Should the council move forward, the District would join numerous major cities as well as the state of California in deliberating how to account for and repair the damage — typically a tense debate that must identify the people alive today who should benefit from the reparations and also who or what should pay for them. Evanston, Ill., for example, became the first U.S. city to deliver reparations in the form of a restorative housing initiative — but is now being sued by a conservative advocacy group that opposes the race-based program, which was expanded to include an option for $25,000 cash payments.

McDuffie said he expects impassioned debate in the fall about how D.C. should proceed with its reparations commission — but stressed that the establishment of the commission is only the first step, tasked with studying feasibility and developing options. Questions about who would be eligible and how reparations would be quantified and distributed would be up for consideration by the task force. But the legislation does propose using sales tax revenue and fees and penalties collected by the Department of Motor Vehicles to pay for potential reparations — provisions likely to garner significant debate.

Groups including the DC Fiscal Policy Institute have argued that the funding mechanism could leave Black residents in part paying for their own reparations, particularly given traffic and parking fines are disproportionately issued in Black neighborhoods compared to White ones. Caitlin Schnur, deputy policy director, said that while the group supports the goals of the commission, it wants to see the council increase taxes on wealthy residents to pay for reparations. “We know that wealth is predominantly held by White residents here in the District,” she said.