“Elected Revolutionary” Charles Barron is a member of the original Black Panther Party, a longtime reparationist, and a former NYC City Councilman and New York State Assembly Member. On this #FreedmenFridays segment, Barron explains the multiple stall-outs, challenges, and forward progress of New York’s state and municipal reparations efforts.
The first thing he wants people to understand before any conversation about reparations begins:
“Reparations is a debt owed. We have to make a distinction between what we are supposed to get as taxpaying citizens out of the budget. We can’t allow our enemy to define the compensation and call it reparations.”
Here is what Barron says is actually happening, and what it means for the movement nationally.
1. Reparations is a debt owed. Programs Black Americans were already entitled to as taxpayers are not reparations.
When governors offer scholarships, healthcare, or housing as reparations, they are rebranding inclusion as remedy. Black Americans pay taxes into budgets that discriminated them out of those same services. Getting back what was withheld is not reparations. The debt is separate, specific, and cannot be offset by services the government was already obligated to provide.2. The reparations movement is being blocked from the inside, not from the outside.
In New York, it is not Fox News or disruptive protestors holding up the process. It is the governor, the Black head of the state assembly, and the Black head of the state senate protecting Wall Street and the real estate industry from a bill that would require accountability. The New York state reparations timeline is now 2029. California is at the study phase again. The pattern is not partisan. It is structural.3. Black faces in high places does not mean Black power.
A Black president, a Democratic House, a Democratic Senate, and a Black committee chair could not move HR40 out of committee. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who campaigned on socialism and reparations, is now gutting the Commission on Racial Equity, blocking deed theft enforcement, and building budgets that look like those of the mayors who came before him. The test is not who is in the seat. The test is what they do with the budget.4. You cannot let your enemy define the compensation.
The form of reparations, whether cash, land, healthcare, tax relief, or a combination, must be determined by the people owed the debt, not by the political apparatus that owes it. The moment you allow the debtor to set the terms, you no longer have reparations. You have managed disappointment.5. Reparations without liberation recycles the money back into the system that created the wound.
The structural conditions that produce Black poverty, unemployment, mental health crises, and community disinvestment will not change because a check is cut. Reparations are necessary and non-negotiable. But they must be accompanied by independent political power, community-controlled institutions, and a direct challenge to the colonial capitalist system itself. Otherwise the money moves, but the architecture stays the same.
“Reparations without liberation will keep us on the American plantation. We must understand that if we do not change the system that is creating the poverty, the unemployment, the crime, and the misery, all of the reparations we get will go right back to the very system we need to radically change.”
— Charles Barron, Black Panther Party, former NYC Council Member and NYS Assembly Member, founder of Operation Power
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