Friend,

Today is Juneteenth, a holiday marking the day in 1865—two and a half years after the Emancipation Proclamation—when 250,000 enslaved Black people in Texas learned that slavery was officially over.

But it did not mean full Black freedom. Unfortunately, white people throughout the country codified anti-Black racism in other ways, and our country continues to deny Black people equal rights. In fact, the wealth gap between Black and white families has continued to expand.¹ The fight for Black liberation is ongoing.

Just a few days ago, Congress passed a law to make Juneteenth a federal holiday.

This action comes at a critical time. Across our country, we are seeing efforts to suppress the teaching of our history. This now federal holiday will serve as a powerful reminder that we cannot run from our past and must educate future generations on Black/African American history.

But this legislation is just a first step in addressing our country’s horrific anti-Black racism, which is built into our structures and institutions. To truly reckon with our history, we need to go beyond commemoration and take action that will truly address the continuous, systemic impacts of slavery.

There’s much more to be done right now in Congress to transform the lives of Black Americans in a bold and meaningful way—including passing voting rights protections and passing H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act.

Thanks to ongoing Black-led activism for racial justice, the concept of reparations for Black Americans has shifted into the mainstream. Our district’s former Congressmember, the late Rep. John Conyers, first introduced H.R. 40 in 1989 and kept advocating for it alongside grassroots movements for reparations.

Now under Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee’s leadership, H.R. 40 reached a new milestone this year: it passed out of the House Judiciary Committee for the first time in its history, which means it can now go to the House floor for a vote.

Please add your name now to become a grassroots co-signer of H.R. 40, which would establish a federal commission to study our country’s ongoing legacy and harms of slavery and develop proposals for reparations.

Although Juneteenth marks the official end to chattel slavery in the South, it does not mark the end to systemic racism throughout the country. From the 1910s to the 1960s, millions of Black people moved North for job opportunities and to escape segregation and racial terror in the South—only to find oppression and discrimination in cities like Detroit, too.²

Our majority-Black district has launched many movements for justice, but it’s one of the poorest and most polluted in the country. Like other marginalized communities across the country, we’ve gone unheard for far too long, while facing government disinvestment and discrimination in housing, infrastructure, education, banking, policing, water access, air quality, and more.

We must reverse centuries of disinvestment in Black communities, and root out racism in our institutions.

In many ways, racial inequities have continued to worsen in our country, including:

• The wealth gap between Black and white families has expanded over the past 60 years.³ And during the pandemic, Black Detroiters were twice as likely to lose their jobs than white Detroiters.⁴

• Health inequities abound. Black Americans were 3x more likely to get and twice as likely to die from COVID-19 than white Americans.⁵ Before the pandemic, Black women have been more than three times as likely to die during pregnancy or birth as white women,⁶ and Black infants have been more than twice as likely to die as white infants.⁷

• Discriminatory housing policies have continued. The gap between white and Black home ownership rates is the widest it has been in 50 years, back when explicit race-based housing discrimination was legal.⁸ Here in Michigan, we used to have one of the highest rates of Black homeownership in the country, but now we’re seeing the greatest decline in Black homeownership of any state.⁹ Redlining still exists, with Black Americans disproportionately denied fair lending rates and mortgages, regardless of income.¹⁰ And Black homeowners still face higher property taxes than white homeowners.¹¹ Because of these issues, Detroit has the highest number of property tax foreclosures in any city since the Great Depression—one in three Detroit homes.¹²

• Discriminatory lending policies have continued, with new forms of redlining—the discriminatory denial of services and increase in rates based on geography and race. Despite being one of the most impoverished areas in the country, metro Detroit’s car insurance rates are the most expensive in the country. People with flawless driving records but mediocre credit scores are charged almost double the rate for car insurance as people with worse driving records but better credit scores.¹³ This discriminates against Black people, who’ve had less access to wealth- and credit-building opportunities.

• Black Americans are over-policed and over-incarcerated. The U.S. has a higher rate of Black incarceration than South Africa did during apartheid.¹⁴ The past 40 years have seen a 408 percent increase in incarceration, along with dramatic increases in spending on policing.¹⁵

• Education inequities persist. As of 2019, school districts that serve higher populations of Black and brown students received $23 billion less in funding than predominantly white districts.¹⁶ Here in Detroit, our taxpayer dollars go to corporate tax subsidies, rather than to schools—and our public schools have had to turn off their water because it’s unsafe for students to drink.

It’s past time to dismantle structural racism. Our country’s wealth was built on the backs of enslaved Black people, and our government must repair and take responsibility for these ongoing harms.

Can you add your name now to become a grassroots co-signer of H.R. 40, the first step toward reparations to address our country’s ongoing legacy and harms of slavery?

Thank you for helping to confront the deepest systemic wounds of our country. I want to leave you with this powerful quote from the Movement For Black Lives: “We’re not interested in nibbling around the edges or accepting symbolic concessions. Black people have struggled for centuries for true freedom—our time is now.”

In solidarity,

Rashida