Schools Are Confronting Centuries of Racial Injustice. Will They Offer Reparations?

学校面临着几个世纪以来的种族不公。他们会提供赔偿吗？

Cainan Townsend’s father started 1st grade at 11 years old, and graduated from high school at 22.

彩南汤森德（Cainan Townsend）的父亲11岁开始上一年级，22岁高中才毕业。

This wasn’t by choice. The schools that served Black students in Farmville, Va., where Townsend’s family has lived for generations, shut down between 1959 and 1964. They were engaging in what’s now known as Massive Resistance, protesting the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka Supreme Court decision that mandated the end of racially segregated public schools nationwide.

这不是他们自己的选择。为弗吉尼亚州法姆维尔的黑人学生服务的学校在1959年至1964年期间关闭了，汤森德的家庭世代居住在那里。他们正在进行现在一场名为“大规模抵抗”的活动，抗议1954年布朗诉托皮卡教育委员会的最高法院裁决，该裁决规定在全国范围内关闭实行种族隔离的公立学校。

Four decades later, in the early 2000s, the state of Virginia opened a $2 million scholarship fund for Townsend and his fellow Prince Edward County classmates to pay for new academic pursuits. Last month, the state extended the program’s eligibility to anyone in the state who lost access to school during Massive Resistance, and to include descendants of those affected.

四十年后，在21世纪早期，弗吉尼亚州为汤森德和他的爱德华王子县同学开设了一个200万美元的奖学金基金，用于支付新的学术活动。上个月，该州将该计划的资格扩大到该州在大规模抵抗运动中失去上学机会的所有人，包括受影响者的后代。

Townsend’s father, who’s still alive and turned 70 last month, was always tough on his son when it came to maintaining good grades and dealing with bullies. Townsend later realized that was because his father was acutely aware of how easy it would be to lose the opportunity to attend school at all.

汤森德的父亲仍健在，上个月年满70岁，他总是严厉要求儿子保持良好的成绩，以及如何面对欺凌。汤森德后来意识到，这是因为他的父亲敏锐意识到他们很容易就会彻底失去上学的机会。

“We have people who equate education with turmoil, education with pain, education with strife, and they prefer to stay away from it,” said Townsend, 29. “This program is going to try to rectify some of that.”

29岁的汤森说: “我们有些人认为教育等同于动荡，教育等同于痛苦，教育等同于冲突，他们更愿意远离教育。这个项目会纠正其中的一些误区。”

He intends to apply for scholarship funds to pay for a Doctor of Education (Ed.D.) degree.

他打算申请奖学金，来支持自己的教育博士学位。

Virginia’s new education-focused effort to make up for what Black Americans lost over generations of disenfranchisement and discrimination is one of several reparations efforts taking shape across the country.

弗吉尼亚州以教育为重点再次做出努力，弥补美国黑人在若干代的权利受剥夺、受歧视中所失去的东西，这是全国各地正在形成的弥补措施之一。

California’s Berkeley Unified school district in last month became one of the first school districts in the country to commit to studying its role in providing reparations for descendants of Black people who were enslaved.

上个月，加利福尼亚州的伯克利统一学区成为该国最早致力于研究其在为被奴役的黑人后裔提供赔偿方面的作用的学区之一。

Back in Virginia, the local government in Loudoun County is pondering how to make amends with Black residents who suffered when the district refused to desegregate its schools following the Brown v. Board decision.

而弗吉尼亚州，劳登县的地方政府正在考虑如何对黑人居民进行补偿，因为在布朗诉董事会的裁决之后，该地区拒绝取消学校的种族隔离。

Several broader efforts at the state and local levels are taking K-12 education into account as well.

在州和地方层面也考虑到了为基础教育做出努力

California’s reparations commission last June released a report that includes a slew of recommendations for addressing the historical roots of racial disparities, from dedicated education funding for Black students to free undergraduate education for Black high school graduates. A similar report out of Providence, R.I., highlighted the low academic achievement of the city’s majority-Black school district and urged hiring more mental health counselors in schools.

加州赔偿委员会去年6月发布了一份报告，包括一系列解决种族差异历史根源的建议，针对黑人学生的专门教育设立资金，针对黑人高中毕业生提供免费本科教育。罗德岛州普罗维登斯市的一份类似的报告强调了该市多数黑人学区的学业成绩低下，敦促在学校雇用更多的心理健康咨询师。

And in Boston, two public high school students are among a group of 10 people tasked with studying the need for reparations for its Black residents. St. Louis is currently looking for a teenager to join a reparations committee as well.

在波士顿，由10人组成的小组中有两名公立高中学生，负责研究黑人居民的赔偿需求。圣路易斯目前也在寻找青少年加入赔偿委员会。

“They are many, many generations removed from legalized slavery, but they are still living in our communities and experiencing the impact,” said Tanisha Sullivan, president of the NAACP’s Boston branch. Including teenagers on the committee “to shape what the research might be was really important.”

全国有色人种协进会波士顿分会主席塔尼莎·沙利文 (Tanisha Sullivan) 表示：“他们有许多代人脱离了合法化的奴隶制，但他们仍然生活在我们的群体中，且正在经历奴隶制的影响。让青少年加入委员会，来确定研究内容，这至关重要。”

These efforts are far from settled. Many of the plans to study reparations could fizzle before they yield tangible results. Core questions around how much is owed, and by whom, remain unanswered. A federal bill that would establish a nationwide reparations commission has stalled in Congress for decades, even after the U.S. House hosted its first public hearing on the subject in 2021. And some proponents of reparations remain wary of using that term for fear of alienating critics.

这些努力还远不能解决问题。许多研究赔偿的计划可能在产生实际结果之前就已经泡汤了。欠多少钱，谁付钱等核心问题仍未得到解决。建立全国性赔偿委员会的联邦法案在国会停滞了几十年，甚至在2021年美国众议院就这一问题举行了第一次公开听证会之后，一些支持赔偿的人仍然对使用该条款保持警惕，担心受到批判。

Still, efforts to consider reparations have multiplied in the last few years, spurred by a variety of factors including the groundswell of protests in 2020 that followed the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Popular television shows like “Watchmen” and “Atlanta” have devoted episodes to exploring the future of America if Black Americans receive reparations. And in two recent reports, the United Nations has urged the United States to move forward with studying reparations.

尽管如此，在过去几年中，在各种因素的刺激下，社会不断涌现出为赔偿做出的努力，在明尼阿波利斯警方杀害乔治·弗洛伊德之后2020年的抗议活动如雨后春笋。“守望者” 和 “亚特兰大” 等受欢迎的电视节目专门探讨了美国黑人获得赔偿的未来。在最近的两份报告中，联合国敦促美国推进赔偿研究。

Preston Green, a professor of educational leadership and law at the University of Connecticut, sees the fight for reparations as a long-term effort to shine a light on persistent racial disparities.

康涅狄格大学教育领导力和法学教授普雷斯顿·格林 (Preston Green) 认为，争取赔偿是一项需要长期坚持的努力，揭示一直都存在的种族差异。

In 2021, he and two fellow education scholars, Bruce Baker and Joseph Oluwole, published a playbook for how reparations around K-12 schooling could work. The first step, they argue, would be to undo current school funding policies that exacerbate racial disparities, including state aid that doesn’t sufficiently compensate for low property tax revenue in historically under-resourced Black communities, and funding formulas that fail to target additional aid to students who would most benefit from it.

2021年，他和两位教育学者布鲁斯·贝克 (Bruce Baker) 和约瑟夫·奥卢沃勒 (Joseph Oluwole) 出版了一部剧本，内容是如何围绕基础教育对黑人进行赔偿。他们认为，第一步是取消目前加剧种族差异的学校资助政策，包括国家援助没有充分补偿历史上资源不足的黑人社区的低财产税收入，以及未能将额外补助用于最能受益的学生的资助方式。

Only then, the authors argue, could policies like property tax rebates for Black homeowners begin to blossom.

作者认为，只有到那时，黑人房主的房地产退税等政策才能蓬勃发展。

“When we deal with issues of race, this country has a very difficult time with it,” Green said. “I think that’s why it’s taking its time to really percolate.”

格林说: “当我们处理种族问题时，这个国家举步维艰。我想这就是为什么它需要时间来慢慢处理。”

Why schools matter in the fight for reparations

为什么学校在争取赔偿的斗争中很重要

Some reparations efforts have zeroed in on the generational effects of unequal access to education—stretching from centuries of enslavement to the burning of Black schools erected during the post-Civil War period known as Reconstruction, from states’ steadfast refusal of desegregation orders to the present-day funding challenges for schools disproportionately attended by students of color.

争取赔偿所作出的努力集中在受教育不平等的世代影响上——从几个世纪的奴役到内战后称之为重建时期的黑人学校遭到烧毁，从各州坚定拒绝取消种族隔离的命令到如今有色人种学生比例过高的学校所面临的资金挑战。

The push to address injustices Black Americans have faced in Loudoun County schools began in 2020. That year, Juli Briskman, who represents the Algonkian district on the Loudoun County Board of Supervisors, was tasked with contributing to a county apology on behalf of the school system for failing its Black residents.

2020年开始为解决黑人在劳登县学校面临的不公正现象做出努力。那一年，在劳登县监事会中代表阿尔贡克区的朱莉-布里斯克曼，受命代表学校系统为其黑人居民做的不妥当之处而向县里道歉。

“I said from the dais that night, words are good, intention is important, thoughts are important, but what are we actually doing to repair the harm?” Briskman said.

“那天晚上我在讲台上说，话说得很好，意图和想法很重要，但是我们实际上在做什么来修复对黑人的伤害？” 布里斯克曼说。

Among the infractions cited in the apology: The county forced Black residents who had raised $4,000 to purchase land for a high school to sell the parcel to the county for just $1, robbing them of ownership of the Douglass School, which grew out of Black parents’ concerns that their children weren’t receiving an adequate high school education. The district also refused to desegregate until nearly a decade after the Supreme Court ruling ordering the move.

在他的道歉中提到的违规行为有: 县里强迫筹集了4000美元购买高中土地的黑人居民以1美元的价格将地块卖给县里，剥夺了他们对道格拉斯学校的所有权，而这所学校建立起来，是由于黑人父母担心自己的孩子无法接受足够的高中教育。该区还拒绝取消种族隔离，一直到最高法院作出裁决后近十年才下令搬迁。

Briskman couldn’t get these tragedies out of her head. They reminded her of when she, an Ohio native, moved to Virginia and was shocked to find that residents celebrated “Lee-Jackson-King Day,” honoring two Confederate generals alongside a modern civil rights icon, and learned in school that the U.S. Civil War was primarily an act of northern aggression.

布里斯克曼无法忘记这些悲剧。他们让她想起了当她这个俄亥俄州人搬到弗吉尼亚州时，震惊地发现居民们会庆祝“李-杰克逊-金纪念日”，纪念两位邦联将军和一位现代民权偶像，并在学校得知美国内战主要是北方攻击的行为。

She’s since helped develop a proposal to extensively study the long-term effects of discrimination in the county’s schools, and to solicit a broad swath of community feedback on how to meaningfully compensate for those harms. The district has invested $250,000 in a partnership with University of Virginia researchers to pull together and analyze primary sources that illuminate racial disparities in the county’s schools.

此后，她帮助制定了一项提案，广泛研究歧视对该县学校的长期影响，并就如何有意义地弥补这些危害征求广泛的社区反馈。该地区已与弗吉尼亚大学的研究人员合作投资了250,000美元，汇集并分析揭示该县学校种族差异的主要来源。

Some residents have asked Briskman why the county wouldn’t just invest $250,000 in scholarships for Black residents. But Briskman wants the community to steer the effort.

一些居民问布里斯克曼，为什么县里不直接投资25万美元为黑人提供奖学金。但是她希望社区能够起引导作用。

“I think it would be really hard to just do a flat-out cash outlay, although I’m not opposed to it,” Briskman said. “We’re really looking at, what does the community say they want? They might want a school to be refurbished, they might want scholarships, they might want a trail dedication where kids had to walk to school because they didn’t have transportation.”

她说: “我认为真的很难只是做一个现金支出，尽管我并不反对，"我们真的在关注社区说他们想要什么？他们可能想要翻新一所学校，可能想要奖学金，他们可能想要一条小路，孩子们因为没有交通工具而不得不步行上学。”

Advocates are confronting and challenging false assumptions

倡导者们正在对抗和挑战错误的假设

The notion that cash is the only acceptable currency for reparations is one of several misconceptions that have dogged the movement for decades.

现金是唯一可接受的赔偿货币，这是几十年来困扰该运动的若干错误观念之一。

In Boston, for instance, many reparations critics have argued they’re not necessary because the city is in the North and thus didn’t have slaves, Sullivan said.

沙利文说，比如在波士顿，许多赔偿的评判家认为没有必要，因为波士顿在北部，这儿没有奴隶。

But that’s not true. Phyllis Wheatley, who became among the first widely known African American poets, was enslaved by a Boston businessman. Recent research at Harvard University illuminated the extent to which Boston’s economic fortunes were shaped by slavery in the early 1700s.

但并非如此。菲利斯·惠特利是第一批广为人知的非洲裔美国诗人之一，受到波士顿商人的奴役。哈佛大学最近的研究阐明了17世纪初波士顿的经济财富如何受到奴隶制的影响。

“The system itself was not just about those who were enslaved on plantations in Louisiana,” Sullivan said.

沙利文说: “这个系统本身并不仅针对那些在路易斯安那州种植园受奴役的人。”

Reparations also aren’t a new concept, contrary to what some naysayers might argue.

赔偿并不是一个新概念，这与一些反对者可能会提出的观点相反。

Allen Davis, a New Hampshire-based scholar and activist, worked with local librarians and University of Massachusetts Amherst researchers to assemble a timeline of dozens of reparations efforts in the United States. The first notch on the timeline is from 1783, the year the Revolutionary War ended, when Belinda Royall secured a pension from Massachusetts after being enslaved for half a century.

位于新罕布什尔州的学者和活动家艾伦·戴维斯 (Allen Davis) 与当地图书馆员和马萨诸塞州阿默斯特大学的研究人员合作，制定了美国数十项赔偿工作的时间表。时间轴上的第一级是从1783年革命战争结束开始，当时贝琳达·罗伊尔 (Belinda Royall) 被奴役了半个世纪后在马萨诸塞州获得了养老金。

The largest reparations effort in American history came in 1988, when President Ronald Reagan approved $1.2 billion in cash payments—$20,000 per person—for 60,000 Japanese Americans who were sequestered in internment camps during World War II.

美国历史上最大的赔偿举措发生在1988年，当时罗纳德·里根总统批准了为第二次世界大战期间隔离在拘留营中的60,000名日裔美国人支付12亿美元的现金，每人20,000美元。

Adena Ishii, a University of California Berkeley graduate who is among the advocates pushing the Berkeley school district to pursue reparations, said she came to learn as she grew up that her parents were among the recipients of those funds, and that her aunt played a key role in exposing to the public that the U.S. government knew all along that Japanese Americans posed no threat.

加州大学伯克利分校毕业生艾迪娜·石井 (Adena Ishii) 是推动伯克利学区赔偿的倡导者之一，她说她长大后就开始了解自己的父母收到了这笔资助，她的姨妈在向公众揭露美国政府一直知道日裔美国人不构成威胁方面发挥了关键作用。

As a result, Ishii feels a powerful urge to support other groups in their fight to address harms that have gone unrepaired.

石井有一种强烈的冲动，想要支持其他团体为解决尚未修复的伤害而奋斗。

“It’s so important that folks follow the lead of African Americans in this effort, but that everyone feels like they can get involved and support this,” Ishii said. “I’m Asian American and I think it’s really important to stand in solidarity with groups as they’re working on these efforts.”

石井说: “在这项进程中，人们跟随非裔美国人的步伐，但每个人都觉得他们可以参与并支持这项工作，这一点非常重要。我是亚裔美国人，我认为在各团体做出努力时，与他们团结一致真的很有必要。

Perhaps the biggest myth reparations proponents have to challenge is the notion that the harms they’re addressing are in the distant past.

也许赔偿支持者必须挑战的最大困难是，他们所要解决的伤害是在遥远的过去。

Many who personally witnessed forced segregation in schools and elsewhere are still alive. The wealth gap between Black and white Americans has widened in the last 15 years, and majority-white school districts receive significantly more funding per student than districts where most students are not white. Republican-championed state laws passed across the country have placed implicit and explicit limits on how teachers and textbook publishers can address racism and Black history. Mississippi still celebrates Confederate Heritage Month.

许多亲眼目睹学校和其他地方被迫隔离的人仍然在世。在过去的15年中，美国黑人和白人之间的贫富差距不断扩大，白人占多数的学区比不是白人占多数的学区每位学生获得的资助要多得多。在全国范围内通过的共和党倡导的州法律，对教师和教科书出版商如何解决种族主义和黑人历史进行了隐含但又明确的限制。密西西比州仍在庆祝同盟遗产月。

In Farmville, Va., Townsend confronts the painful history of his family’s plight every day. As curator of the Robert Russa Moton Museum, he walks visitors through 1950s-era protests over dismal conditions in school buildings for Black students, and the subsequent fallout from the half-decade period of school closure.

在弗吉尼亚州的法姆维尔，汤森德汤森每天都要面对他的家庭遭受到的痛苦历史。作为罗伯特-拉萨-莫顿博物馆的馆长，他带领参观者们了解了20世纪50年代他们对黑人学生校舍的恶劣条件的抗议，随后学校关停了半个月。

“It’s easy to think by looking at these pictures that you’re talking 100, 200 years,” Townsend said. “Anybody who meets me is only one degree removed from the school closings.”

汤森德说：“看着这些照片，你很容易认为这是100年、200年前的事情。任何我遇到的人，都只能让学校停课一段时间。”

Many challenges lie ahead

面临许多挑战

Deciding to pursue reparations is a big step. But even trickier ones lie ahead.

决定寻求赔偿是一大步。但是，更棘手的问题还在前方。

School districts in Berkeley and Loudoun County have virtually no precedents to follow as they explore what reparations could look like.

伯克利和劳登县的学区在探索赔偿的形式时几乎没有先例可循。

Laura Babbit, president of the Berkeley school board, believes the majority-white district is uniquely poised to lead by example. It was among the first large school districts to voluntarily implement a busing program that brought Black students to predominantly white schools and vice versa. The district boasts one of the nation’s only K-12 departments devoted to African American history.

伯克利学校董事会主席劳拉·巴比特 (Laura Babbit) 认为，白人占多数的地区将以身作则。该地区是最早自愿实施公共汽车计划的大型学区之一，该计划将黑人学生带到白人为主体的学校，反之亦然。该地区是美国仅有的致力于非裔美国人历史的基础教育部门之一。

Still, it will have to maintain momentum to avoid following the fate of a comparable movement in neighborhing Oakland Unified. A controversial plan to close several majority-Black schools in the district derailed advocates’ hopes for a broader focus on reparations for Black students—though the closure plan was later reversed.

尽管如此，必须保持势头，避免重蹈邻近的奥克兰联合大学类似运动的覆辙。一项有争议的计划是关闭该区几所黑人占多数的学校，打破了倡导者对更广泛地关注黑人学生赔偿问题的希望，尽管该计划后来遭到推翻。

The Virginia scholarship program has served nearly 90 recipients, but it’s lain dormant without new funding since it was established in 2004. State Del. Kaye Kory, a Democrat, stumbled across the fund a couple of years ago and decided to renew a push for broadening eligibility to the entire state, and to descendants of Black people affected by the massive resistance phenomenon.

弗吉尼亚奖学金计划已经为近90名获奖者提供了服务，但自2004年成立以来，一直处于休眠状态，没有新的资金。州德尔。民主党人凯伊·科里 (Kaye Kory) 几年前偶然发现了该基金，决定再次推动将资格扩大到整个州以及受大规模抵抗现象影响的黑人后裔。

“We actually made it a law to deny education to Black people,” Kory said. “The least we can do is begin to offer some assistance in boosting up their academic achievement now.”

科里说: “我们实际上把拒绝黑人接受教育定为法律，至少我们现在能做的是开始为提高他们的学业成绩提供一些帮助。”

The program currently has roughly $1 million left. But with tuition costs at an all-time high, that’s only enough to cover degree programs for a handful of people. The state will either have to devote a new source of state funds or solicit private donations, Kory said.

该计划目前还剩下约100万美元。但由于学费达到历史新高，只够支付少数人的学位课程。科里说，该州要么必须投入新的州资金来源，要么征集私人捐款。

Ken Woodley, the journalist and Prince Edward County native who conceived the program in the early 2000s, recently applied through U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine’s office for $10 million in grants from Congress to replenish the scholarship fund.

肯·伍德利 (Ken Woodley) 是21世纪初初构思该计划的记者和爱德华王子县人，最近通过美国参议员蒂姆·凯恩 (Tim Kaine) 的办公室申请了国会提供的1000万美元赠款，来补充奖学金基金。

“If Mom and Dad through no fault of their own can’t read or write, you are at a distinct disadvantage from your classmates whose parents were able to fulfill their educational destiny, and therefore take an active part in their child’s life, in their homework, read to them from day one, be engaged with the school system,” Woodley said.

伍德利说：“如果爸爸妈妈因为自己的原因而无法读写，你与你的同学相比就会处于明显的劣势，他们的父母能够完成自己的教育，能够积极参与他们孩子的学习和生活，从第一天开始就参与进家校合作，读书给孩子听。”

It remains to be seen how widespread the reparations movement will become in K-12 schools specifically. Most people interviewed for this article said they hadn’t been contacted by people elsewhere in the country who want to replicate their efforts.

赔偿运动在基础教育学校中的普及程度还有待观察。接受本文采访的大多数人说，本国其他地方的人没有与他们进行联系，他们想要复制自己的努力成果。

But the abundance of ongoing efforts suggests the project won’t disappear anytime soon. In Berkeley, Babitt believes the crucial question of reparations is not if, or even when, but how.

但是大量工作正在进行，说明该项目不会很快消失。在伯克利，巴比特认为，赔款的关键问题不在于是否赔款，甚至不在于何时赔款，而在于如何赔款。

“If people would just believe we can, and work with that lens, I guarantee that we make this happen,” Babitt said.

巴比特说: “如果人们相信我们能做到，并从这个角度出发，我保证我们能做到。”