A bill has been introduced in Salem that seeks to create a task force to study whether or not the state is complicit in denying civil rights and opportunities to African Americans. No other race or minority group is listed.
According to House Bill 2995 “Sets up a task force to look at ways in which the state can give reparations for past acts of racism to African-American people who live in the state.
Establishes the Task Force on Reparations and directs the task force to study and develop
proposals for financial and nonfinancial reparations for Oregonians of African-American descent, develop appropriate methods for educating the public about the task force’s findings and recommend appropriate remedies based on the task force’s findings.
The task force would look for the following:
” …The task force shall identify governmental actions that have resulted in harm to
Oregonians of African-American descent in the following categories of systemic discrimination:
(A) Enslavement;
(B) Racial terror;
(C) Political disenfranchisement;
(D) Housing segregation;
(E) Separate and unequal education;
(F) Racism related to the environment and infrastructure;
(G) Pathologizing the Black family;
(H) Control over creative cultural and intellectual life;
(I) Stolen labor and hindered opportunity;
(J) An unjust legal system;
(K) Mental and physical harm and neglect; and
(L) The wealth gap.
The bill continues: (4) The task force may:
(a) Identify methods for eliminating racial bias in employment and advancement, especially for Oregonians of African-American descent who seek public employment or promotion
to higher paying positions in government;
(b) Identify methods for eliminating anti-Black discrimination policies in artistic, cultural, creative, athletic and intellectual life; and
(c) Identify individuals who should be compensated financially and with services, at no
charge to the individual, that seek to remedy damage to the individual’s mental or physical
health from anti-Black healthcare systems and treatments, such as forced sterilization,
medical experimentation, racist sentencing disparities, police violence, environmental racism and race-related stress that causes psychological harm.
At this point this is only a bill-not a law and should it pass it will only establish a “Task Force” to study the issue.
You can read the bill in its entirety here: https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2025R1/Downloads/MeasureDocument/HB2995/Introduced
What are your thoughts on reparations in Oregon? You can share your thoughts with your representatives in Salem.
Senator Dick Anderson: https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/anderson
Representative David Gomberg: https://www.oregonlegislature.gov/gomberg
Even if descendants of the Civil War united and said “we deserve reparations for my descendants ruthlessly being killed in the fight for civil rights, I would vote no”.
You MUST work to feed your family to get life necessities. No one will ever thoughtfully vote to “give” money for reparations whether you’re black, brown or white.
BS
Just another example of the waste of time and manpower that continually occurs in Salem. Just to get this bill to this point has most likely cost tens if not hundreds of thousands of dollars and to what end? I do not believe in being racist, however, this bill is an outstanding example of racism. Why is it only about black people. I’m sure that you would find examples of other racism for other groups of people such as our indigenous citizens as well as the slave labor of the Chinese and Irish immigrants.
You are wasting our taxpayers money digging up problems and exploiting the poor me attitude. Look what happened to my relatives generations ago.
We live in a state that bends over backwards to make sure that no one is treated unfairly so why even think that you can pay the generations now for a perceived wrong a hundred years ago and why only pursue only one ethnic group.
You are wrong thinking that spending our money and the time that we pay you for digging up something that no one can change in the past.
Let’s see if we will watch you spendng your time trying to reduce the budget that you are blindly voting up each year.
It seems that you are only wasting your time and our taxes on endeavors such as this.
MLK tried to unify us….but this is just one more attempt to divide us!!
Who is sponsoring this “bill” ??