KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Mickey Dean hears the argument often, particularly from white Kansas Citians, when he mentions Black reparations: “You weren’t a slave and my family didn’t own any slaves, so that’s in the past and why are we still talking about that?”
He gets the questions more frequently now that the Kansas City Council approved a commission to study reparations locally. So he’s on a mission to educate people on the topic, an increasingly popular one across the country.
Yes, reparations is about what’s owed in exchange for the free labor of slavery from which white people made millions in profits. But it’s about what happened after slavery too, he says. Reconstruction without repair to Black lives, Jim Crow laws that legalized racial segregation, Plessy v. Ferguson and segregation. Laws that shut out Black Americans from basic rights.
