New Jersey Reparations Council, U. community panelists discuss reparations for systemic racism

On Monday, the Segregation in New Jersey Committee of the New Jersey Reparations Council hosted a public forum, the second of nine virtual committee meetings to be held over a two-year period.

During the session, the council discussed their work and heard three-minute comments from the public.

After reading off the names of the 10 panelists, panelist Ryan Haygood, the president and chief executive officer of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, provided opening remarks.

"The New Jersey Reparations Council is finally confronting and working to repair the enduring harm from New Jersey's deep and often overlooked institution of slavery and its enduring impact on the contemporary life of Black people in our state," Haygood said.

Another panelist, Maisha Simmons, a Rutgers alum and assistant vice president of Equity and Culture at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, said that New Jersey faces health disparities in certain neighborhoods, citing the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's declaration of racism as a public health threat in 2021.

Additionally, panelist Dennis Parker, the executive director of the National Center for Law and Economic Justice, said that institutional racism connecting home values and education systems has been harmful to Black and Brown New Jersey residents.

Because the state allocates less educational funding to areas with lower property values, Black and Brown citizens who tend to reside in these neighborhoods receive lower quality or fewer educational resources, he said.

"The relationship between segregation and suburbanization is where segregation does some of its greatest damage with respect to the racial wealth gap that we experience now," David Troutt, the director of Rutgers Law School Center on Law in Metropolitan Equity, said. 

During public comments, Nichole Nelson, a senior policy advisor at the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, talked about racial barriers in homeownership in South Orange and Maplewood in Essex County. She also referenced her previous research on the county's history of integration policy and the Fair Housing movement. She linked them to the effects of chattel slavery and anti-immigration laws targeting African and Caribbean nations.

Jane Gardner, a West Orange resident, said that she observed the effects of racial segregation in Essex and Morris counties and that affordable housing could help integrate these communities.

"It's not just the dollars in housing," panelist James Williams IV, the director of Racial Justice Policy at the Fair Share Housing Center, said. "What we're owed is far more complex than that, and we just have to really work towards completing and advocating for fully actualized legislation policy within this country and not things that are impartial."

Khalil Gibran Muhammad, the discussion's moderator and a Ford Foundation professor of History, Race and Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, said that there was no consensus on eligibility for reparations and that more inclusive eligibility measures would be helpful at this point in the advocacy process.

The council's next public session will be hosted on Jan. 11, 2024, according to panelist Jean-Pierre Brutus, the senior counsel of the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.

The findings of the Segregation in New Jersey Committee will be combined with the eight other committees to become the council's final report, expected to be released in June 2025, Brutus said.

Editor's note: A previous version of this article misspelled Nichole Nelson's first name. A link verifying her remarks have also been added.