Research Proposal - Reparations for Blacks: Helping Impoverished Communities through Other Educational Reforms
Despite some modest progress in recent decades, glaring race-related inequalities still exist across the entire spectrum of the human condition in the United States today. Indeed, African Americans (hereinafter alternatively blacks) have shorter life expectancies, lower salaries and a lack of access to high quality health care services compared to whites, but these disparities are especially pronounced with respect to education. Because education is the key to addressing the myriad other problems facing the African American community today, it is vitally important to identify opportunities to directly address this issue. Therefore, the purpose of the proposed study is to explore educational reform in the United States through an anti-racism and anti-oppression lens, examining reparations as a way to address racism and oppression. In sum, educational reparations and curriculum restructuring will help America progress as a nation and address anti-racism and anti-oppression in truly meaningful ways.
1) The identification of a problem or question to be examined
The death of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis police department in May 2020 resulted in widespread national and global outrage in the past several decades. There were calls for reparations for blacks in the U.S. even prior to this deadly incident, though, but Floyds death did underscore the urgency of this type of restorative racial justice for African Americans today (Conley, 2021). Indeed, the case for reparations began immediately following the end of the U.S. Civil War in 1865 (Conley, 2021). Over the course of the past century and a half, demands for reparations have intensified and the issue remains central to Americas future as a democratic republic.
It is important to note, however, that calls for reparations have taken a back seat to the multiple other pressing challenges facing the nation. For instance, according to Coates (2019), In fact, there is a bill about reparations thats been sitting in Congress for thirty years but now reparations for slavery and legalized discrimination are a subject of major discussion (para. 3). Few people today, including even the most ardent racists, would likely argue that the four million African Americans who were enslaved prior to the Civil War suffered some degree of deprivations, and reparations...
…(2008). St. Paul, MN: West Publishing Company.Coates, T-N. (2021, June 10). Ta-Nehisi Coates revisits the case for reparations. The New Yorker. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-new-yorker-interview/ta-nehisi-coates-revisits-the-case-for-reparations.
This author wrote a seminal case for reparations in 2014, including those involving education, that is frequently cited by proponents as justification. These arguments will provide a valuable addition to the proposed studys analysis concerning the rationale in support.
Conley, J. (2021). To Teach the University is to Teach Reparations: A Class Project. Radical Teacher, 119, 4151.
The primary research conducted by this author involving modern university students provides an insightful assessment concerning opposing views about reparations. This resource will be useful in framing in the arguments against reparations in the proposed study.
Darling-Hammond, L. (1998, March 1). Unequal opportunity: Race and education. Brookings Institute. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/articles/unequal-opportunity-race-and-education/.
This author makes the point that far too many Americans believe that the Civil Rights Movement is over and everything is equal now. Therefore, any remaining disparities in academic achievement must be attributable to genetic, cultural or a lack of motivation on the part of blacks. This study provides useful background information that will be used to support the argument for…
Educational and economic data for American citizens. (2022). U.S. Census Bureau. Retrieved from https://www.census.gov/.
This resource will be used to determine current educational and economic disparities between African Americans and the general U.S. population. In addition, recent analyses of this data from the Census Bureau will also be incorporated.
Gomez, J. A., Rucinski, C. L., & Higgins-D’Alessandro, A. (2021). Promising pathways from school restorative practices to educational equity. Journal of Moral Education, 50(4), 452–470.
Citing the higher incidence of punishments and exclusionary sanctions such as expulsion on blacks, the authors maintain that educational reparations are the best place to start. The authors make the point that such restructuring is essential to achieve educational equity in the United States.
There are approximately 60 million Americans of Irish descent, and most of their ancestors arrived in America as refugees from an Ireland colonized and exploited in the harshest ways by the then-contemporary government of Britain. Should Americans of Irish descent (or Irish people still living in Ireland for that matter) demand reparations for the hardships suffered by their ancestors at the hands of colonial British "masters?" Irish immigrants to the United
Reparations Are Americans of African decent entitled to compensation for the American South's slavery past? Does the American government owe people whose ancestors were slaves reparations in the form of money, land or capitol goods? Many African-Americans and white liberals feel that black Americans are owed something and a movement in this country has been stirring for a while agitating for forced reparations by the U.S. government. (Conyers 2003) This paper
reparation being paid to descendants of African America slaves is certainly not a new argument, either for or against. The world is full of people who in black and white see the need for reparations, be they financial or otherwise. To many, the ideals or affirmative action and other civil rights reforms are a form of reparations. Yet, the question is often raised as to why the rest of
President Bush's admission in Senegal that the United States was mindful of the past wrongs it had committed in enslaving stolen people from Africa, Carrillo (2003) explores the possible gains for the reparations movement. However, Carrillo does more than simply focus on the "residual value" gained by the reparations movement from what she terms as a slip on President Bush's part. For, she also takes great pains to place in
Pattern�s ParadigmBaylor, A. (2021). Criminalized Students, Reparations, and the Limits of Prospective Reform.�Wash. UL Rev.,�99, 1229.The purpose of this study was to examine how minority students are criminalized and lose access to advanced education and justice as a result of systematic racism. Its scope included reparations literature, laws, cases, and logical conclusions, and excluded anecdotal evidence. The focus was on examples, constitutional law, and literature. The units of analysis were
Reparations for Black Communities: Education as a PlatformIntroductionThe concept that we all have an equal chance to earn the kind of riches that gives meaning to the Declaration of Independence�s bold phrase �liberty, life, and the pursuit of happiness� is the core of the American Dream. The American Dream implies that a person can be a homeowner, create a business, and build a savings account for future generations. However, the
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