Big media have shown some interest since The Atlantic‘s Ta-Nehisi Coates made a case for reparations for African-Americans after centuries of enslavement and discrimination. Just recently, a Los Angeles Times story (1/12/16) offered it as an example of how “the post-Obama left” is being driven to “policy proposals [that] are so grand as to verge on the absurd,” and Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders’ stance against the idea made fodder for CNN (1/21/16) and others tracking the opinions of black people vis a vis the presidential election.
But when, right on the heels of that, a UN human rights group released a report saying African-Americans face “systemic racial discrimination” and deserve “reparatory justice,” that was not so newsworthy. The UN’s Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent cited “the persistent gap in almost all the human development indicators, such as life expectancy, income and wealth, level of education, housing, employment and labor, and even food security, among African-Americans and the rest of the US population,” and pointed to police killings, zero tolerance policies in schools, the criminalization of poverty, environmental racism, discriminatory voter ID laws and schools’ insufficient teaching about the history of slavery as constituting a human rights crisis that must be addressed as a matter of urgency.
But corporate media didn’t agree. Jesse Holland, the AP‘s race, ethnicity and demographics reporter (and himself black), wrote it up (1/29/16); the Denver Post (1/31/16) ran a news brief, and the Christian Science Monitor (1/31/16) ran something online. Apart from that, it was mostly only African-American–focused outlets like Essence magazine (2/2/16) and independents like Democracy Now! (2/2/16) that saw any news in the news that an international organization thinks the idea of reparations for African-Americans is anything but silly. Black History Month, not off to a great start.
Janine Jackson is the host of CounterSpin and the program director of FAIR.
This piece was reprinted by RINF Alternative News with permission from FAIR.