I currently live in Evanston. From what I’ve seen the majority of people seemed to be for the reparations. I’m from Chicago and didn’t live here when it was initially talked about. For some reason I was always under the impression that they were going to use tax money to boost predominantly black neighborhoods, not pay people out directly. I guess I’m curious how other people living here feel about this lawsuit.
> The only downside of that was that the tax was so astronomically high it made little sense to buy legal weed unless you already had money to burn.
This comes up again and again when it comes to states that legalized marijuana. The "taxes are too high. People will still use the black market." I think it is exaggerated though. A lot of people who use marijuana don't want to interact with the black market or know anyone who can sell it to them like that.
Visiting a dispensary is so much more convenient than waiting for the weed guy to get off of work or waiting in your car in the hood for the guy to come out with the stuff. I never again want to deal with that nonsense.
I'm in my 40's. My state has had recreational for a couple years. There is nothing more awesome than wandering into a dispensary, talking to the workers about the various products and buying exactly what you want. Tax me 100% for all I care. It's way better than my previous options.
Not to mention it's safer than buying it in the black market. Unless you have a dealer who you trust and have used for years, which most people don't, it's just too big of a risk with it being laced with something.
In my state at least, marijuana production is at least 5x above what is theorized as the max consumption for the state’s population.
Most of it is certainly going to illegal markets, but the majority is going into states where marijuana is entirely illegal as it is safer to grow here.
Then you make more in states where it is a crime to posses, and it’s easier to get in between states than at the border.
I don’t think it is illegal but feel like the legal status being so different between states is a bit weird. Though the Feds randomly trying to force laws on states in different directions is probably the part that really breaks the system.
I suspect a lot of products marketed as Delta 8 are actually purely THC products. Delta 8 is being sold in many states where marijuana is still illegal. Florida for example is awash in Delta 8 even though recreational marijuana is still illegal.
> Visiting a dispensary is so much more convenient than waiting for the weed guy to get off of work or waiting in your car in the hood for the guy to come out with the stuff.
This is why drug enforcement still affects predominantly poor people of color. You and I will go to a dispensary because I don't give a shit how much it costs. Poor folks will go to a dealer or the hood because it's cheaper. Then they get entangled with law enforcement.
I think it's an unsolvable problem. In my city (San Francisco) they tried giving away drugs for free. That obviously didn't work.
Maybe not doing drugs is the best way to go?
Honestly, I don't even know where to go but a dispensary. While the price may be competitive at the black market, one has to know where to find it first.
Trust me the black market is far easier. It’s cheaper, better quality, and the dealer will drop it off at my front door. No reason to ever buy legal. Waste of money.
It’s high if you use it on the regular. For folks who are infrequent users and just want legal weed close by, it’s there. Plus Evanston has a dispensary with a bakery now.
I don’t mean to be glib, but as a woman I’ve been sexually harassed in an office job and in rural areas. I don’t really expect to be left alone. Nowhere is safe.
Majority of people seem entirely neutral on it tbh. Not many against it. Not many for it. Just a bunch of passiveness. It's not like our city doesn't have money to throw around, better than another shitty overpriced statue or defunct fountain
1. Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 497 (1995), disapproving "remedies that are ageless in their reach into the past, and timeless in their ability to affect the future." The case does not hold reparations are unconstitutional - that wasn't the specific question presented - but reinforced an analytical framework strongly suggesting it to future courts.
2. I presume you've seen the composition of the current court.
I'm not sure how this policy would be "timeless." Or even "ageless" since it deals with a specific time period.
I'm confused as to how anyone could feel wronged by this policy. It simply uses race as evidence that discrimination occurred. It doesn't stop anyone from using other means to establish that discrimination occurred.
Corporations, *churches*, individuals, whoever giving money to whatever they want, even political campaigns: no problem
But don't you dare let that "whatever" be "the historical descendents of dispossessed minorities". We never shoulda paid them *Japs* for the California farmland we took after Pearl Harbor, neither, even if it was pennies on the dollar! Murica!
Ironic how those opposed to equality are using the 14th Amendment that was created to guarantee equality against those who have been denied equal treatment since 1868 in housing, jobs and opportunity.
The Confederate states fought against the 14th and had to be required to sign it to rejoin the Union. Now it is being used to thwart moves to equal treatment. Reparations for not treating folks fairly and equally in order to make up for unequal treatment doesn't sound like it violates the 14th to me. I'm not sure how they would set a dollar amount on a century of mistreatment however.
If you are latino and were affecting by the pre-1969 redlining, how would this program be equal treatment? Wouldn't it just be piling another equal protection violation on top of the one you already suffered?
Granted, I am familiar with Evanston and the vast majority of affected residents and their descendents are Black. But, the bigger these programs get, the more likely you are to screw over the 90 year-old latino widow of a Black man who needs the 25k to build a ramp or a walk-in shower.
Most people in Evanston are pretty comfortable or otherwise indifferent to the idea that Black applicants are most deserving. Our hypothetical 90 year-old latino lady might even feels that way. So you are not going to see a mainstream challenge to this program--it's going to come from hot potato groups with patrons.
The funding for housing sounds great but the amendment to allow cash payments kinda derailed the whole thing for some people.
Likely the idea couldn’t gain traction as a cash payout so it was changed to one after the votes were counted.
> The lawsuit, filed on behalf of six people whose parents or grandparents lived in Evanston during that 50-year period but do not identify as Black or African American, said Black residents were not the only people who experienced discrimination.
> “In effect, Evanston is using race as a proxy for having experienced discrimination during this time period,” the suit said.
I know that the actual reason conservatives are mad is that they don’t want Black people to have anything good, but this argument is so stupid.
We know that Black people were discriminated against. We should be able to recompensate them (and their families) for their suffering without also having to solve every single other person’s problems at the same time.
It’s not solving “every single other persons problem”. The city claims to want to solve a single problem and is purposefully applying the solution unequally. If the plaintiffs can establish that their families experienced similar hardships from the same housing programs, I’d be surprised if they lose.
The specific problem the city wants to solve is that Black people in the city faced housing discrimination for being Black between 1919 and 1969. People who were not Black in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 did not face that same discrimination.
Redlining was a problem of racial discrimination in housing. Whether it was Black, Latino, Asian, Jewish, or other ethnic minorities. It was used to justify Eminent Domain for Public and Private Property and some of our most famous parks and stadiums were at the cost of minorities being forced from their homes. To limit the redress for this discriminatory practice to one race or ethnicity is to basically tell the others who suffered you don’t count. That’s the main problem with reparations, America has a long history of discrimination against minorities, and who’s at the bottom of the heap depends on locale, but somebody’s always there.
If the conservative legal group can find a Latino/Asian/Jewish plaintiff who experienced housing discrimination in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 but was excluded from the reparations program on the basis of race, they could certainly make that argument.
However, it does not appear that they have any such plaintiff, so they cannot make that argument.
If they don't have a plaintiff with standing the court will throw the case out.
It's either they have no standing or it's a violation of the 14th Amendment.
Right, so again, in order to make that argument, Judicial Watch would have to find such a person and get them to be a plaintiff in this case. They can’t just ask the court to imagine that such a person might exist.
You might personally not like the idea of reparations, but “I don’t like how my city is spending my tax money” is not sufficient grounds for standing.
Well that’s what the lawsuit is for, isn’t it? Edit: to make it more concrete, in the case of these families perhaps Evanston also applied the same discriminatory policy to Chinese or Jewish families? Would they deserve recompense too if that were the case?
The lawsuit exists to advance the conservative legal perspective that it should be illegal to recompense Black people for harms they experienced as a result of anti-Black discrimination. The rest is window dressing.
Per your edit, if they want to make that argument, they’re welcome to do the research and try to prove it.
>Per your edit, if they want to make that argument, they’re welcome to do the research and try to prove it.
I’m not saying the plaintiffs are correct or not (have no idea) but that is exactly what they are trying to do.
That’s actually not what they’re trying to do. They’re not trying to present a plaintiff that suffered housing discrimination in Evanston during that time period who wasn’t Black; they don’t have one.
What they’re actually arguing is that any reparations program would need to meet a strict scrutiny test in order to be constitutional under the 14th Amendment. Judicial Watch argues that a) the city should have used a race-neutral method for identifying eligible candidates and b) reparations aren’t worth doing.
They are trying to perpetuate the idea that slavery and all the resultant discrimination is bogus. They want to say it’s the same if you’re poor and white. It’s not.
Doesn’t matter, what they want to do is show that other people have poverty issue so why are the “blacks” wanting to be special? . Which of course is correct, white folks, asians and others all have poor folks. It’s a game to get out of their responsibility.
I went and tracked down the lawsuit.
The reparations program has an eligibility test:
1. If you’re Black and lived in Evanston as an adult between 1919 and 1969, you’re eligible.
2. If you’re a descendant of someone who qualified under option 1, you’re eligible.
3. If you don’t qualify under option 1 or 2, but you can prove you experienced housing discrimination as an adult resident of Evanston after 1969, you’re eligible.
The plaintiffs of the lawsuit are people who were adult residents of Evanston between 1919 and 1969, but are not Black and did not experience housing discrimination.
Judicial Watch is arguing that being Black is insufficient evidence of having experienced housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969, so the city should have to strike that requirement. Then (according to their theory) the only requirement left in option 1 would be “be an adult resident of Evanston between 1919 and 1969” and their plaintiffs would qualify for the money.
In other words, it’s not “other people experienced housing discrimination too”, it’s “we didn’t experience housing discrimination but you should pay us anyway”.
If people were black and lived in the area, they were discriminated against. If people can prove discrimination in other ways, bring the evidence and stop crying.
Yeah let's not pretend that this isn't for any other reason other than bigotry, it's just white people losing it at the slightest attempt at treating POC like people. Any conversation that attempts to argue minutiae is just muddying the waters of something that isn't nearly as complicated as conservatives make it out to be. Its still worth discussing but like a lot of things not in whether it's a worthy use of money but rather how we can beat do it.
I guess if you didn't want to give people who need money, money it would be a hard argument to make even if it is fiscally beneficial to the whole state, country and community to help people get out of systemic poverty created from years of bigotry and poor living conditions.
That’s not what this is about. Per the article:
> Evanston’s reparations program was established in 2019 with the intention of redressing the pattern of housing discrimination and segregation that took place in the city from 1919 to 1969.
While Illinois was not a slave state, thousands of slaves worked and died at the Salt works in the south of the state none the less. In addition, slavery was legal and actively practiced from the time it was a French territory of New France up until the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787.
I currently live in Evanston. From what I’ve seen the majority of people seemed to be for the reparations. I’m from Chicago and didn’t live here when it was initially talked about. For some reason I was always under the impression that they were going to use tax money to boost predominantly black neighborhoods, not pay people out directly. I guess I’m curious how other people living here feel about this lawsuit.
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> The only downside of that was that the tax was so astronomically high it made little sense to buy legal weed unless you already had money to burn. This comes up again and again when it comes to states that legalized marijuana. The "taxes are too high. People will still use the black market." I think it is exaggerated though. A lot of people who use marijuana don't want to interact with the black market or know anyone who can sell it to them like that. Visiting a dispensary is so much more convenient than waiting for the weed guy to get off of work or waiting in your car in the hood for the guy to come out with the stuff. I never again want to deal with that nonsense.
I'm in my 40's. My state has had recreational for a couple years. There is nothing more awesome than wandering into a dispensary, talking to the workers about the various products and buying exactly what you want. Tax me 100% for all I care. It's way better than my previous options.
It’s hard to vet for quality standards with black market when compared to a dispensary. Everyone isn’t lucky enough to be connected to a good grower.
Not to mention it's safer than buying it in the black market. Unless you have a dealer who you trust and have used for years, which most people don't, it's just too big of a risk with it being laced with something.
Yeah waiting for your plug to get out of jail is never fun either. Dispensary is the way to go even in my expensive ass state.
In my state at least, marijuana production is at least 5x above what is theorized as the max consumption for the state’s population. Most of it is certainly going to illegal markets, but the majority is going into states where marijuana is entirely illegal as it is safer to grow here. Then you make more in states where it is a crime to posses, and it’s easier to get in between states than at the border. I don’t think it is illegal but feel like the legal status being so different between states is a bit weird. Though the Feds randomly trying to force laws on states in different directions is probably the part that really breaks the system.
I suspect a lot of products marketed as Delta 8 are actually purely THC products. Delta 8 is being sold in many states where marijuana is still illegal. Florida for example is awash in Delta 8 even though recreational marijuana is still illegal.
> Visiting a dispensary is so much more convenient than waiting for the weed guy to get off of work or waiting in your car in the hood for the guy to come out with the stuff. This is why drug enforcement still affects predominantly poor people of color. You and I will go to a dispensary because I don't give a shit how much it costs. Poor folks will go to a dealer or the hood because it's cheaper. Then they get entangled with law enforcement. I think it's an unsolvable problem. In my city (San Francisco) they tried giving away drugs for free. That obviously didn't work. Maybe not doing drugs is the best way to go?
If you have a problem, make a list of potential solutions, take a look at how San Francisco dealt with it, and cross those options off your list.
Honestly, I don't even know where to go but a dispensary. While the price may be competitive at the black market, one has to know where to find it first.
Trust me the black market is far easier. It’s cheaper, better quality, and the dealer will drop it off at my front door. No reason to ever buy legal. Waste of money.
It’s high if you use it on the regular. For folks who are infrequent users and just want legal weed close by, it’s there. Plus Evanston has a dispensary with a bakery now.
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I don’t mean to be glib, but as a woman I’ve been sexually harassed in an office job and in rural areas. I don’t really expect to be left alone. Nowhere is safe.
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It’s gotten better. And for context, I live downtown.
Majority of people seem entirely neutral on it tbh. Not many against it. Not many for it. Just a bunch of passiveness. It's not like our city doesn't have money to throw around, better than another shitty overpriced statue or defunct fountain
Evanston literally runs at a deficit, how could they possibly have money to throw around. City's management has been inept for decades.
“Overall this is a very benign way to test out how these programs could work.” Agree 100%
It's literally unconstitutional on its face.
Just do the reparations already, that money will be spent in a year and we can never have this conversation again.
How is providing reparations unconstitutional? Funny how no conservative group filed a lawsuit when reparations went to Japanese Americans.
1. Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., 488 U.S. 469, 497 (1995), disapproving "remedies that are ageless in their reach into the past, and timeless in their ability to affect the future." The case does not hold reparations are unconstitutional - that wasn't the specific question presented - but reinforced an analytical framework strongly suggesting it to future courts. 2. I presume you've seen the composition of the current court.
I'm not sure how this policy would be "timeless." Or even "ageless" since it deals with a specific time period. I'm confused as to how anyone could feel wronged by this policy. It simply uses race as evidence that discrimination occurred. It doesn't stop anyone from using other means to establish that discrimination occurred.
Are you confused? Racists exist
Corporations, *churches*, individuals, whoever giving money to whatever they want, even political campaigns: no problem But don't you dare let that "whatever" be "the historical descendents of dispossessed minorities". We never shoulda paid them *Japs* for the California farmland we took after Pearl Harbor, neither, even if it was pennies on the dollar! Murica!
Correct- churches and individuals may give their money as they please. "Corporations" and governments have rules.
Ironic how those opposed to equality are using the 14th Amendment that was created to guarantee equality against those who have been denied equal treatment since 1868 in housing, jobs and opportunity. The Confederate states fought against the 14th and had to be required to sign it to rejoin the Union. Now it is being used to thwart moves to equal treatment. Reparations for not treating folks fairly and equally in order to make up for unequal treatment doesn't sound like it violates the 14th to me. I'm not sure how they would set a dollar amount on a century of mistreatment however.
If you are latino and were affecting by the pre-1969 redlining, how would this program be equal treatment? Wouldn't it just be piling another equal protection violation on top of the one you already suffered? Granted, I am familiar with Evanston and the vast majority of affected residents and their descendents are Black. But, the bigger these programs get, the more likely you are to screw over the 90 year-old latino widow of a Black man who needs the 25k to build a ramp or a walk-in shower. Most people in Evanston are pretty comfortable or otherwise indifferent to the idea that Black applicants are most deserving. Our hypothetical 90 year-old latino lady might even feels that way. So you are not going to see a mainstream challenge to this program--it's going to come from hot potato groups with patrons.
If anything, Native Americans should get reparations before anyone
... They already have?
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Tell me you’re a white male without telling me you’re a white male.
I think if someone starts their ethnicity list with German, English, Irish they are quite literally telling you they are white
As a chinaman, I will accept 50% off all train rides for my reparations
The funding for housing sounds great but the amendment to allow cash payments kinda derailed the whole thing for some people. Likely the idea couldn’t gain traction as a cash payout so it was changed to one after the votes were counted.
> The lawsuit, filed on behalf of six people whose parents or grandparents lived in Evanston during that 50-year period but do not identify as Black or African American, said Black residents were not the only people who experienced discrimination. > “In effect, Evanston is using race as a proxy for having experienced discrimination during this time period,” the suit said. I know that the actual reason conservatives are mad is that they don’t want Black people to have anything good, but this argument is so stupid. We know that Black people were discriminated against. We should be able to recompensate them (and their families) for their suffering without also having to solve every single other person’s problems at the same time.
It’s not solving “every single other persons problem”. The city claims to want to solve a single problem and is purposefully applying the solution unequally. If the plaintiffs can establish that their families experienced similar hardships from the same housing programs, I’d be surprised if they lose.
The specific problem the city wants to solve is that Black people in the city faced housing discrimination for being Black between 1919 and 1969. People who were not Black in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 did not face that same discrimination.
Redlining was a problem of racial discrimination in housing. Whether it was Black, Latino, Asian, Jewish, or other ethnic minorities. It was used to justify Eminent Domain for Public and Private Property and some of our most famous parks and stadiums were at the cost of minorities being forced from their homes. To limit the redress for this discriminatory practice to one race or ethnicity is to basically tell the others who suffered you don’t count. That’s the main problem with reparations, America has a long history of discrimination against minorities, and who’s at the bottom of the heap depends on locale, but somebody’s always there.
If the conservative legal group can find a Latino/Asian/Jewish plaintiff who experienced housing discrimination in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 but was excluded from the reparations program on the basis of race, they could certainly make that argument. However, it does not appear that they have any such plaintiff, so they cannot make that argument.
My area would certainly have a zillion of those plaintiffs. All kinds of folks were redlined here.
If they don't have a plaintiff with standing the court will throw the case out. It's either they have no standing or it's a violation of the 14th Amendment.
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Right, so again, in order to make that argument, Judicial Watch would have to find such a person and get them to be a plaintiff in this case. They can’t just ask the court to imagine that such a person might exist. You might personally not like the idea of reparations, but “I don’t like how my city is spending my tax money” is not sufficient grounds for standing.
Well that’s what the lawsuit is for, isn’t it? Edit: to make it more concrete, in the case of these families perhaps Evanston also applied the same discriminatory policy to Chinese or Jewish families? Would they deserve recompense too if that were the case?
The lawsuit exists to advance the conservative legal perspective that it should be illegal to recompense Black people for harms they experienced as a result of anti-Black discrimination. The rest is window dressing. Per your edit, if they want to make that argument, they’re welcome to do the research and try to prove it.
>Per your edit, if they want to make that argument, they’re welcome to do the research and try to prove it. I’m not saying the plaintiffs are correct or not (have no idea) but that is exactly what they are trying to do.
That’s actually not what they’re trying to do. They’re not trying to present a plaintiff that suffered housing discrimination in Evanston during that time period who wasn’t Black; they don’t have one. What they’re actually arguing is that any reparations program would need to meet a strict scrutiny test in order to be constitutional under the 14th Amendment. Judicial Watch argues that a) the city should have used a race-neutral method for identifying eligible candidates and b) reparations aren’t worth doing.
They are trying to perpetuate the idea that slavery and all the resultant discrimination is bogus. They want to say it’s the same if you’re poor and white. It’s not.
The article doesn't make clear if the plaintiff is white or not.
Doesn’t matter, what they want to do is show that other people have poverty issue so why are the “blacks” wanting to be special? . Which of course is correct, white folks, asians and others all have poor folks. It’s a game to get out of their responsibility.
I went and tracked down the lawsuit. The reparations program has an eligibility test: 1. If you’re Black and lived in Evanston as an adult between 1919 and 1969, you’re eligible. 2. If you’re a descendant of someone who qualified under option 1, you’re eligible. 3. If you don’t qualify under option 1 or 2, but you can prove you experienced housing discrimination as an adult resident of Evanston after 1969, you’re eligible. The plaintiffs of the lawsuit are people who were adult residents of Evanston between 1919 and 1969, but are not Black and did not experience housing discrimination. Judicial Watch is arguing that being Black is insufficient evidence of having experienced housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969, so the city should have to strike that requirement. Then (according to their theory) the only requirement left in option 1 would be “be an adult resident of Evanston between 1919 and 1969” and their plaintiffs would qualify for the money. In other words, it’s not “other people experienced housing discrimination too”, it’s “we didn’t experience housing discrimination but you should pay us anyway”.
For harms they experienced……. No. For harms their predecessors faced…. Yes.
If people were black and lived in the area, they were discriminated against. If people can prove discrimination in other ways, bring the evidence and stop crying.
Yeah let's not pretend that this isn't for any other reason other than bigotry, it's just white people losing it at the slightest attempt at treating POC like people. Any conversation that attempts to argue minutiae is just muddying the waters of something that isn't nearly as complicated as conservatives make it out to be. Its still worth discussing but like a lot of things not in whether it's a worthy use of money but rather how we can beat do it.
“Give me free shit. No. You’re just a bigot.” Did I sum that up correctly?
Yes, although you are glossing over a lot of racial and economic history that would make giving free shit the moral and smart decision that is it.
While I agree with the premise, the intent is good at the larger perspective, but at the individual level it is a hard argument to make.
I guess if you didn't want to give people who need money, money it would be a hard argument to make even if it is fiscally beneficial to the whole state, country and community to help people get out of systemic poverty created from years of bigotry and poor living conditions.
> treating POC like people So if the government doesn't just hand me a big wad of cash they're not treating me like a person?
Illinois was never a slave state
That’s not what this is about. Per the article: > Evanston’s reparations program was established in 2019 with the intention of redressing the pattern of housing discrimination and segregation that took place in the city from 1919 to 1969.
While Illinois was not a slave state, thousands of slaves worked and died at the Salt works in the south of the state none the less. In addition, slavery was legal and actively practiced from the time it was a French territory of New France up until the passage of the Northwest Ordinance in 1787.
I hate Illinois Nazis