By Michele Miller
This opinion previously ran June 5, 2025 in The Afro-The Black Media Authority.
Last week, a Wall Street Journal columnist dismissed reparations as “yesterday’s fad,” praising Maryland Governor Wes Moore for vetoing a bill that would have created a state commission to study them.
Reparations are not a trend that’s passed. They are a moral and material debt — centuries old, still unpaid. To call them “yesterday’s fad” isn’t just wrong. It’s offensive. And it follows a long American tradition: declaring the fight for justice over before it has even begun.
What’s been a fad in American politics isn’t reparations — it’s invoking justice when it’s convenient, then backing away when it requires courage. With all due respect to Governor Moore, that is the real trend. That is the real exhaustion. People are tired of waiting while leaders perform empathy but veto action.
The notion that reparations have been “studied to exhaustion” is misleading — and, frankly, a convenient excuse to avoid responsibility. H.R. 40, the bill that would simply study reparations, has been introduced in Congress for more than 30 years. It has never passed. Research doesn’t settle a debt. Payment does.
For more than 250 years, American law, policy, and commerce upheld the enslavement of Black people. Leaders permitted it. Courts defended it. Churches justified it. Families profited from it. Human beings were bought and sold. Raped. Bred. Whipped. Worked to death. Children were taken from mothers. Black people were insured as property, taxed as assets, and traded like capital.
That labor generated immense and enduring wealth. It built industries. It funded institutions. It powered a nation. And the Black people whose lives and labor made that possible received nothing in return — only more exclusion.
Not at emancipation. Not during Reconstruction. Not in the New Deal. Not now.
And the damage didn’t end with slavery. It evolved. Black Americans endured convict leasing, lynching, Jim Crow, redlining, school segregation, medical experimentation, mass incarceration. Families were torn apart not just by violence, but by policy. That harm wasn’t buried in the past. It lives in maternal mortality rates, in childhood poverty, in housing discrimination, in the criminal legal system. It lives in the wealth gap that never closes.
Reparations are not symbolic. They are a material response to material theft. They address not only what was taken, but what was broken — and what still has not been repaired.
And yet, even now — even with all of this in plain view — we see leaders stepping back. Governor Wes Moore, the nation’s only Black governor, defended his veto of Maryland’s reparations commission by saying it’s time to “focus on the work itself.” But vetoing a study commission is not doing the work — it’s deferring it. Dr. David J. Johns, CEO of the National Black Justice Coalition, called the move “a painful rejection of the very communities that helped make his historic election possible.”
In a single Wall Street Journal opinion column, Jason Riley managed to dismiss reparations as “racial pandering,” reduce them to “yesterday’s fad,” and accuse advocates of trying to “redistribute wealth.” Mr. Riley was wrong on all three counts.
Reparations are not pandering. They are not some trendy appeal to Black voters. They are a serious moral and economic response to state-sanctioned theft. If anything is pandering, it’s the performance of justice at ribbon cuttings while blocking actual repair.
Reparations are not a fad. A movement that spans generations, from the Freedmen’s Bureau to H.R. 40, cannot be dismissed because today’s political leaders lack the courage to carry it forward. If support has waned, it’s not because the moral claim has weakened. It’s because too many in power are hoping it will.
And reparations are not wealth redistribution. What do they think slavery was? Slavery was wealth redistribution — by force. It transferred land, labor, capital, and generational security from Black families to white ones. Reparations don’t take what’s not owed. They return what was never paid.
Another favorite deflection: point to cities like Chicago and ask why inequality still exists under Black leadership. It’s a lazy, cruel argument — one that pretends centuries of disinvestment can be reversed by representation alone. Reparations aren’t about instant transformation. They’re about redressing harm and rebuilding what was systematically denied.
In my town of Amherst, Massachusetts, we did something rare. In 2021, we made a financial commitment — two million dollars for Black residents — before we had a final plan, a full public process, or even full consensus. We understood something most communities still avoid: reparations without money isn’t repair. It’s performance.
We knew two million dollars wouldn’t right centuries of injustice. No local effort can match the scale of a national debt. But we didn’t let that fact paralyze us. We did what was within our power. And that early commitment made everything else possible. Today, Amherst has completed a public process, delivered a set of recommendations, and kept the full $2 million intact — waiting for implementation.
Amherst and Evanston aren’t exceptions — they’re signs that the moral arc of history is bending, slowly but deliberately, toward justice.
And they are not alone. Across the country, states, cities, universities, and even churches are examining their own roles in slavery and taking concrete steps toward repair. Just last year, Loyola University in Maryland released a report on its historical ties to slavery — part of the quiet, steady work of reckoning happening across institutions.
These efforts don’t pretend to close the wealth gap on their own. The scale of national harm demands a federal response. But local and institutional action is not a distraction from that goal — it’s how justice advances in the real world. It’s the necessary groundwork for a broader reckoning. It is not a fad. It is a movement.
The political window for reparations may be narrowing. But local governments still have power. Universities still have power. States still have power. They can act. They can lead. They can pay.
This is the work.
Michele Miller is a former Town Councilor representing District 1 in Amherst, Massachusetts.
