As their grande finale for Black History Month, Vanderbilt University promoted an expansive reparations plan and membership in Black Lives Matter (BLM) Nashville.
Both events took place on February 26, the last in a lineup of 30 total events. The reparations event, titled “Reparations: An Issue Whose Time Has Come,” was hosted by Institute of the Black World 21st Century (IBW) President Dr. Ron Daniels. The other event was titled, “Plugging in to Black Lives Matter,” and featured BLM Nashville encouraging students to get involved.
Daniels has promoted a reparations plan first published in 2015 by IBW’s National African American Reparations Commission (NAARC). In nine pages, the “Preliminary Reparations Program” proposed a ten-point program. It demanded a Presidential apology for slavery, with ratification from Congress; a holocaust museum for slavery; a repository overseen by social justice leaders to receive and distribute monetary and material reparations such as government or public land; a repatriation program to allow African-American descendants to return to the African nation of their choice, with supplemental income to establish their new citizenship and homes abroad; and subsidies for an comprehensive infrastructure supporting Black individuals and leaders in almost every aspect of public life: business, healthcare, education, housing, media, historical sites and monuments, and criminal justice.
Although NAARC noted that these proposals would bring about justice, the plan noted in its preamble that none of these things would ever fully absolve this country of its past evils.
“No amount of material resources or monetary compensation can ever be sufficient restitution for the spiritual, mental, cultural[,] and physical damages inflicted on Africans by centuries of the MAAFA, the holocaust of enslavement and the institution of chattel slavery,” stated the preamble.
In its plan, NAARC also emphasized that the country should be re-established on a new covenant focused on bucking the crimes of the European colonists, the Founding Fathers and their descendants, and continuous reparations for Native Americans and Africans.
The other final event for Vanderbilt’s Black History Month was a promotion of BLM Nashville. BLM has also advocated for reparations. They have criticized those who have submitted reparations plans for not going far enough.
BLM Nashville is a vocal supporter for defunding the police. Most recently, the organization issued a statement calling Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) an “anti-Black[,] racist institution.” The statement was prompted by the apparent suicide of Markquett Martin, who reportedly shot himself while running away from police.
“Defund the Metro Nashville Police Department. Fund the wellbeing of our people,” wrote BLM Nashville. “The Nashville People’s Budget Coalition is fighting for a Nashville that defends Black lives by divesting funds from MNPD and redistributing them to public goods, services, and initiatives that actually promote safety, healing, and justice for us all. Until we #defundthepolice in Nashville and #fundthepeople instead, MNPD and other public officials will keep up the lie that people must die and be caged to uphold ‘public safety.'”
— BLM Nashville (@BLM_Nashville) February 24, 2021
As a result of elected officials ordering police to not intervene last year, the nation saw homicides increase by 21 percent, and aggravated assaults increase by over 8 percent. Major Democratic-run cities endured crime spikes. In New York City, murders increased by 45 percent as arrests dropped by 55 percent. Recently, Minneapolis scrambled to supplement their police force’s requested funding after city officials’ experiments throughout 2020 to defund or abolish the police led to an unprecedented spike in homicides and shootings.
The Tennessee Star reached out to Vanderbilt’s media relations team concerning the university’s support of the various messages propagated by the reparations plan and BLM Nashville. They didn’t respond to request for comment by press time.
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Corinne Murdock is a reporter at The Tennessee Star and the Star News Network. Follow her latest on Twitter, or email tips to [email protected].
Image “Dr. Ron Davis” by Cultural Innovations in Action.
What people are missing is that a BIG problem with local Races (City County, Judges, MAYOR, etc) in Davidson Co is these “WOKE” Schools esp Vandy and its $$$ and influence. Until there is a concerted effort to curtail or overcome Voting by WOKE Students (Vandy/TSU/FISK/BELMONT, etc) Nashville will continue to be a liberal PIT
If I had a child attending Vanderbilt I would yank them out ASAP. Of course, I would not have permitted them to attend there in the first place.
Sounds like a little salve for the rich White folks who are feeling guilty over the lie of white privilege.
Hey Vandy-
Write a check. Pay for your own wokey-woke endeavors.
Marxists don’t talk about content of character. They only play the victim card since that’s where the money and power are.
I notice that Ron is a lighter-skinned black man. I wonder if his European white genes will apologize to his African black genes. Or will they always be at odds with each other?
Good questions, Wolf Woman. And how will all the ancestry be ascertained and disentangled to figure out who owes who and how much? There were black people who owned slaves and some white people like the Irish and other European groups who were basically slaves. And, no doubt, some “persons of color” are not ancestors of slaves. Reparations seems to me a quasi-religious exercise of false guilt and would be impossible to apply according to “the equal protection of the laws” of the 14th Amendment which, along with the 13th to overturn the 1857 Dred Scott decision, and rectify the effects of slavery by giving full citizenship to persons who had been in slavery.
i wonder what the ancestoral vanderbilts would say about this foolishness.
YAWN
This disgusts me.
-“Anti-racism” is just racism in blackface. If there is “systematic racism” in America, the majority of it is through the social networks of people “of color”. (And, it’s not all of them either, contrary to what the “woke brigade” would have you believe. I suspect that the majority of “black people” disagree with groups like BLM.)
-To demand “reparations” is to extract REVENGE. It is not “justice”. To demand an apology is like cuing someone to belch. You’ll hear what you demanded, but you’ll never know if it was genuine. (The flip side of such a coin is forgiveness, like letting the past stay dead, and moving forward.)
-“Defunding the Police” makes the situation worse for “black people”, not better. It removes security for the law-abiding folks of color, while allowing lawbreakers free reign.
-Maybe it’s just a piece of “African American History”, but has anyone else heard about Liberia? You know, that country founded to return freedmen to Africa? The one that “emancipation societies” offered free transportation to? Yeah, there were former slaves, and their children, that REFUSED such an offer.
-US Census Bureau estimates that, as of July 1, 2019, 13.6% of Americans are “black” and 76.4% of Americans are “white”. Sure, “America be so white”, try to keep up.
I would hope that eventually the cameras and microphones would be denied from such hatemongers. As long as we’re stuck with both outrage and identity politics, that’s a faint hope, though.
BLM is lead by admitted “trained Marxists”. Does Vanderbilt support that?
“We make war against all prevailing ideas of religion, of the state, of country, of patriotism. The idea of God is the keynote of a perverted civilization. It must be destroyed.” –Karl Marx
“We must hate. Hatred is the basis of communism. Children must be taught to hate their parents if they are not communists.” – Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Under the sort of regime advocated by BLM that crushes freedom and prosperity as proven by history IF one is educated, an institution like Vanderbilt which depends on very prosperous people paying for their schooling wouldn’t do well at all.
Vanderbilt is cited as a high place of esteem in Tennessee but it is now more anti American “Woke” School. They give degrees based on color and politics more than academics it seems, their credentials sullied by association with the likes of Harvard and the Ivy League, now, schools of Socialism and American woe is me pity em I was denied by my color Indoctrination.
We do not owe anyone “Reparations,” unless it is the victims of the Carpet Baggers including this latest rendition at Vanderbilt! While his “race: has been given preference in education, fiances and jobs,poor Southern Whites have been oppressed and denied. It is now policy of the Democrats and the Administration and Academia to oppress :”White” people and Christians and Patriots! I won’t give them a dime let them work for it. We are tired of their whining and demands for more and more and more welfare ” and to be given class privilege and advantage , that we owe them” a life of leisure on the backs of those who really slaved for a living, their taxes dedicated to the life of the leisurely on on welfare or in positions they did not earn and should not be in. Vandervilt was about education now it appears, with good reason to be a School of Socialist Anti American Indoctrination. They will take you if your politics are Leftist!
A pox on this racist Social justice Warrior!