In 2022, an eighteen-year-old entered one of the only grocery stores serving the Black community of Buffalo, New York, and unloaded his AR-15-style rifle. From the parking lot to the aisles full of food, the gunman—barely a man—stalked his prey like a trained hunter and livestreamed the pursuit on Twitch. Screams and pleas blended with the sounds of bullets. In the heat of the moment, the gunman aimed his rifle at a white store employee before quickly apologizing and redirecting his attention toward the mostly Black workers and customers. Ten people were killed that day. All of them were Black.
There is perhaps no greater evidence of our disunity than mass shootings by white supremacists. From the acts of violence to the manifestos and racist imagery often revealed in the aftermath, these incidents are reminders of how far some Americans will go to maintain a racial hierarchy. Following the massacre in Buffalo, a racist manifesto that the gunman had posted online was discovered. Additionally, the assault rifle he used to murder ten innocent people was covered in racial slurs, the names of other known white supremacists, and a few other phrases. One especially stands out: “Here’s your reparations.”
The debate around reparations is as old as the Emancipation Proclamation. The moment the chains of chattel slavery began to fall, Black people immediately began asking for—and demanding—redress. These were people who had been enslaved their entire lives. The plantation economy they maintained against their will was used to fund industries and empires, and formerly enslaved Black people wanted their rightful share as free citizens. But it takes time to unravel the tightly wound yarn of white supremacy, especially when it is woven into the fabric of our nation.
Chattel slavery went on for almost 250 years in many parts of this nation, and the Reconstruction era lasted less than twelve. With the Compromise of 1877, which effectively ended Reconstruction, the work to secure rights and protections for Black people was all but abandoned to satiate the Southern thirst for Black submission. In 2026, we are still suffering from that choice. It’s illustrated in the Department of Justice’s recent creation of a $1.776 billion slush fund—the dollar amount chosen to commemorate U.S. independence—for, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, “claimants who say they were negatively affected by alleged government overreach.”
Called an “anti-weaponization fund” by the Trump Administration, this giveaway to the President’s allies and, in particular, January 6 insurrectionists is essentially “reparations” by another name, to a group that has no claim to them. Created without Congressional oversight, this fund has been labeled fraudulent by thirty-five former judges appointed by Presidents from both parties. In June, a federal court halted the fund’s implementation while litigation against it proceeds, despite promises from the administration that it would scrap the program.
Yet even the mere proposal of this fund proves that the federal government has the capacity to disseminate cash payments to citizens whom it has decided were wronged. So why have Black Americans never been prioritized in this way? While 52 percent of Americans believe that the legacy of slavery still influences U.S. society today, less than one-quarter believe Black Americans should receive cash payments. Organizers and researchers at the advocacy organization Liberation Ventures named this phenomenon the “Accountability Gap,” where people acknowledge past harms but don’t believe the government is responsible for making things right. The group also coined another term: the “Hope Gap,” where people believe something should be done but that it will never happen and, thus, there’s no use even pursuing reparations. And it isn’t just white Americans or non-Black people of color thinking this way. Though more than 70 percent of Black Americans support reparations, only 7 percent of them believe it will happen in their lifetime.
This pessimism is not entirely unfounded. Historically, the U.S. government has never committed to a process of acknowledging the violence enacted against Black Americans. This nation has never held people, leaders, or companies accountable for their role in perpetuating those harms—and in instances where federal employees and elected officials have attempted to do so, they’ve been pushed out. Even when Black people have advanced without external support, the federal government has stepped in to thwart our political organizing, undermine our economic achievements, and turn a blind eye to acts of racial terror.
In fact, more than half of all Americans believe reparations to Black Americans would increase racial divisions. But the fact that white supremacists murder Black people in churches and grocery stores whenever we experience racial progress only cements the case for reparations and why we so desperately need it. The racist urge that compels a young white man to mass murder innocent Black people in Buffalo is the same one that convinces white people to ambush the Capitol and gerrymander districts when their candidate doesn’t win. It descends from the pull white Americans felt to burn wealthy Black districts to the ground, lynch Black business owners, and enslave Black people as perpetual laborers. But because we dismissed those urges as differences of opinion and allowed them to fester, we are still dealing with them generations later.
Reparations include more than money, though that aspect is important. Making reparations involves a truth and reconciliation process, one that this country desperately needs. We are broken, angry, and speaking over one another because we have never had a true outlet for contending with our sordid past and healing wounds. But we can’t afford not to.
Our nation’s leaders incessantly tout how wealthy and powerful the United States is without interrogating who made that power possible. Internationally recognized reparations researcher Dreisen Heath recently made the case that we cannot expect to ever move forward without first looking back. “This country still builds its wealth on exploited Black labor and has spent 150 years making sure Black communities could not turn gains into lasting political power,” she wrote. “Reparations are the only response that matches the scale of this injustice.”
The “forty-acres-and-a-mule” promise that has since become a symbol of reparations derives from an 1865 meeting between Union generals and freed Black people in Savannah, Georgia. Union General William T. Sherman asked the Black leaders gathered there a series of questions about what they wanted out of emancipation. Twenty Black people were present, but they all elected the Reverend Garrison Frazier to speak for them. Frazier was born enslaved in North Carolina and had only been free for eight years after having purchased himself and his wife with pieces of gold and silver. The question of liberation had never been theoretical for him.
Sherman told the Reverend: “State in what manner you think you can take care of yourselves, and how can you best assist the Government in maintaining your freedom.” Frazier replied, “The way we can best take care of ourselves is to have land, and turn it and till it by our own labor . . . . We want to be placed on land until we are able to buy it and make it our own.”
Though Sherman took these words to heart, issuing Special Field Order No. 15 to establish a land redistribution project with confiscated Confederate lands, the plan never came to be. Now, the legacy of slavery lives on not just in antiquated harms adjusted for inflation but in continued attacks on the safety, fulfillment, and happiness of Black people. It lives on in the coordinated land seizures, mass incarceration, redlining, disproportionate use of eminent domain, exclusion from institutions of higher education, discrimination in corporate America, unequal access to medical care, and so much more.
It’s time to get serious about building an America that works for everyone, beginning with those upon whose backs the nation’s prosperity was built. A reparations omnibus is one of the more creative and holistic ways to go about this. It is a political mechanism for tackling the biggest items on our national agenda and a gift to those of us brave enough to imagine a United States without white supremacy.
An omnibus bill is a legislative package linking together multiple items and priorities into one connected agenda. The most common examples of omnibus bills are federal spending bills, but other omnibus proposals tackle complicated issues from multiple angles. Rather than chipping away at a problem incrementally, an omnibus bill can streamline tactics, securing funding and support in one fell swoop. These legislative packages are often designed to make big dents in critical issues plaguing the nation, like the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1968. While those bills were focused on the issue of segregation and access to political participation and civic engagement, I propose that this omnibus be dedicated to the legacy of slavery in the United States of America at large.
The beauty of an omnibus approach is that you don’t need to cherry-pick which policy is best suited for the moment at hand. We can begin with studies in every state to illuminate the true scale of the problem we are solving and disseminate those findings through culturally relevant and age-appropriate public education campaigns. Through this effort, we can transform curricula, monuments, museums, and public spaces. As we embark on the journey of unlearning hate, we can also lean into proposals like cash payments, baby bonds, land grants, tax exemptions, and racially specific guaranteed income programs as key to alleviating the immediate economic pressure facing Black Americans. The legislation could dictate the measurement and tracking of success over time with regular opportunities to course-correct.
Such an omnibus could also make institutional investments into health care, education, environmental justice, and jobs in predominantly Black areas like the South and in city centers throughout the North. Partnerships with federal agencies and executive departments would ensure compliance across the board and allow for even more resources to be leveraged through the Department of Housing and Urban Development, the Department of Agriculture, the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Education, and the Department of Justice. Simultaneously, we can implement eminent domain reversals, sunset racist legislation, and fast-track claims for restitution in cases of redlining, lynching, land theft, wrongful incarceration, police brutality, and employment discrimination.
Right now, the reparations debates tend to start and end with questions around eligibility and feasibility. We have been backed into a corner where the only way out is to surrender our political imagination. With a proposed omnibus in writing, we can take a less defensive stance in this conversation and force the United States to engage with our vision, to rebut from a place of substance. A reparations omnibus could be co-created by economists, lawyers, organizers, health care practitioners, behavioral analysts, historians, elected officials, and more to ensure breadth and depth in the suggested legislative fixes.
Every myth about reparations has been continually busted, proving this is a problem of will rather than capacity. We are told there isn’t enough money as we watch the Pentagon lose track of billions of dollars annually and lawmakers approve trillion-dollar defense budgets without batting an eye. We are cautioned that the logistics would be nightmarish, even as we witness the national distribution of economic stimulus checks and the Trump Administration set aside billions for its supporters.
But it is precisely when the odds seem bleakest that Black people in the United States have swung hardest. For more than a century, activists, faith leaders, and advocacy organizations pushed for pensions for formerly enslaved Black people and their children to no avail. In 1915, formerly enslaved woman and mother of five Callie Guy House led the National Ex-Slave Mutual Relief, Bounty, and Pension Association in filing a class-action lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury for $68 million, the amount of tax revenue it had collected on cotton produced by enslaved people. The lawsuit was dismissed, but the case, Johnson v. McAdoo, signaled the first federal attempt at litigating reparations through the courts.
Throughout the twentieth century, as the harms committed against Black Americans climbed, calls for reparations swelled. In her 1963 publication Why Reparations?, civil rights leader Audley “Queen Mother” Moore decried the 244-year head start white Americans have on Black Americans. For years, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. used the metaphor of a “check” to illuminate the moral debt owed to Black America. By 1967, King was getting more literal. In one interview, he explained that American society is plagued by structural issues that “cannot be solved without costing the nation billions of dollars.”
The following year, just weeks before his assassination, King lamented the wealth built through land and farming while Black Americans were blocked from that prosperity. “And they are the very people telling the Black man that he should lift himself up by his own bootstraps,” he said. “Now, when we come to Washington, in this campaign, we are coming to get our check.”
Nearly sixty years later, Black Americans are still begging to be taken seriously. You can look at that timeline and think, “What’s the point?” Or you can become a student of history and realize that we are on the precipice of true change.