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Georgia county commissioner points out why costly reparations plan is bad idea: ‘We don’t have money for a hospital’

July 15, 2023 | | Print Article

Despite reportedly lacking money for a hospital, one Georgia community is now moving forward with a costly reparations study.

On Wednesday, the Fulton County Board of Commissioners reportedly voted in favor of appropriating $210,000 toward a reparations study to be conducted jointly by the county and Atlanta University Center.

“The purpose of the reparations task force is to evaluate if reparations are warranted. If they are warranted, in what form? Should it be educational? Should it be financial? What should they be?” board member Khadijah Abdur-Rahman told local station WAGA.

Abdur-Rahman was one of four who voted in favor of the proposal. Board member Bridget Thorne, on the other hand, was one of two who voted against it.

“This is just such a divisive concept, and I feel like it’s just gonna hurt Fulton County. It’s just gonna rip us apart. We heard in public comment how people are gonna be paying for it. This is coming out of taxpayer dollars. This $210,000 is coming out of taxpayers dollars,” Thorne said before Friday’s vote, according to the Washington Examiner.

“Whatever reparations, whatever they decide, whatever they find, they are going to make the taxpayers pay for it. And we don’t have money for a jail. We don’t have money for a hospital. That’s what we need to be focusing on,” she added.

Then there’s Mike Russell, a member of the county’s actual reparations ask force. He’s kind of in the middle, in that he appears to support this move, but he’s also admitted that it’s time for black Americans to move on from the past.

Speaking with Fox News last month, he said he was proud of his community for trying so hard to “correct past wrongs.”

“Of all the places I’ve been, I’ve never been anywhere where the society has taken such an effort to, in blood and treasure, correct past wrongs. And I’m very proud of that as an American. The system is not perfect. I would never tell anybody that,” he said.

“But I tell people this all the time, folks leave places where everybody looks exactly like them and are literally dying to get here. There’s a reason for that. And that is because the United States still is a land of opportunity, and we have done a tremendous job, not a perfect job, a tremendous job of correcting past wrongs,” he added.

Yet he was partial to arguments that reparations are divisive and unfair.

“I think there’s validity in those arguments, and I think we have to sort that out. I don’t know if this committee will do that. I think our job is just to find if people were treated unjustly and then let the commissioners determine what the remedy is. But I think those are all very valid questions and at some point, we’re going to have to let go of the past,” he said.

Fulton County is one of many communities that have begun (or even finished) studying reparations.

Over in California, a state-level reparations task force convened by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020 recently concluded that black people living in the state were owed reparations checks up to $1.2 million.

Here’s the catch: Despite Newsom launching the task force, he ultimately chose to side AGAINST doling out reparations.

“The Reparations Task Force’s independent findings and recommendations are a milestone in our bipartisan effort to advance justice and promote healing. This has been an important process, and we should continue to work as a nation to reconcile our original sin of slavery and understand how that history has shaped our country,” he said to Fox News in May.

“Dealing with that legacy is about much more than cash payments,” he added, thus putting a veritable nail in the coffin of reparations.

Critics were incensed.

Look:

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Vivek Saxena
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