Is there anything more blatantly illegal than sending black Americans taxpayers’ money while explicitly excluding people who are not black?
How did the city of Evanston, Illinois, get away with it for years? City taxpayers fund “reparations” for black residents in the form of cash and other financial assistance.
Non-black residents filed a lawsuit in 2024 to stop the illegal discrimination. The plaintiffs alleged that the reparations policy violated the Equal Protection Clause.
The U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) last week announced that it seeks to intervene in the lawsuit. The city of Evanston tried and failed to have the lawsuit dismissed. An excerpt:
The city has not identified any specific acts of discrimination that violated the constitution or a statute that these payments are intended to remedy. Nor does the city require any evidence that recipients or their ancestors experienced discrimination when they lived in the city.
So-called reparations for slavery are a hard-sell in the U.S. All slave owners and former slaves are dead. How do you justify confiscating the income of hardworking residents (none of whom owned slaves) and giving it only to black residents (who are not and never were slaves)? Are biracial residents receiving money? Can someone identify as black and get the cash?
In addition to intervening in the lawsuit, DOJ opened an investigation into the reparations program, citing the Equal Protection Clause and the Fair Housing Act.
“The Supreme Court has repeatedly affirmed that government actions classifying citizens by race are presumptively unconstitutional,” said Andrew S. Boutros, U.S. attorney for the Northern District of Illinois. “The Constitution demands that the government treat citizens as individuals, not as members of a racial class. Distributing public funds based on an individual’s ancestry or race divides the citizenry and establishes the very hierarchy the Equal Protection Clause was designed to dismantle.”
Photo credit: By Madcoverboy (talk) – en:wiki, CC BY-SA 3.0, link
