Charlottesville City Councilor, Wes Bellamy, is leading a group of “Black Politicos” in a demand that embattled Governor Ralph Northam and Attorney General Mark Herring support the group’s extreme social, economic, racial, and environmental reparations list.
The February 11 manifesto reiterates calls for Northam and Herring to resign, but in recognition of the fact that neither appears willing, it proposes specific penance in exchange for peaceful coexistence.
Among the demands made by Bellamy and the Black Politicos:
- A taxpayer supported “Business Equity Fund” primarily to support “African-American owned businesses in the Commonwealth.”
- An emphatic call by both Northam and Herring that “all confederate statues and memorials should be removed from public spaces throughout the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
- “Creation of an Office or Division of Equity and Inclusion”
- That Attorney General Herring publicly call for “decriminalization of marijuana in the Commonwealth”
- That Attorney General Herring commit to a racial hiring quota, “ensuring that at least 25% of his staff are people of color.”
- That Northam commit to increased funding of Virginia’s five “Historically Black Colleges and Universities,” and specifically, “to lead a capital campaign in which each institution receives five million dollars.”
In addition, the Black Politicos have aligned with “a coalition of organized Virginians working united against white supremacy through unraveling the Capital of the Confederacy,” in their call to:
- “Establish a new renewable energy agency, fully funded by the commonwealth.”
- “Ratify the Equal Rights Amendment.”
- “Exercise executive power to grant mass clemency to as many pending cases as possible with an emphasis on freeing incarcerated Black people.”
- Eliminate funding for “budget measures that increase harm to youth of color, such as funding for school resources officers.”
- Undermine federal immigration enforcement through “dedicated implementation of a universal representation program in the state budget to grant immigrant and refugee communities access to immigration litigation.”
The letter concludes with a call for “reallocation and redistribution” of resources, and threatens “no reconciliation” without such measures.
In his own “no justice, no peace” moment, Councilor Bellamy has promised to make the remainder of Northam’s term “hell,” unless Northam capitulates to Black Politicos’ demands.
Read the entire Black Politicos’ extortion letter here: https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/5735291/VBP-Press-Release.pdf
This is a laundry list of progressive wishes, a couple of of which have nothing to do with racial justice per se, but you can’t blame this group for using leverage when they have it. That’s not a shake down, that’s Politics 101.
LoL, like you wouldn’t blame a conservative group for such a blatant racist list of demands or more appropriately extortions? Shakedowns are shakedowns whether in the political arena or elsewhere. Bellamy is a radical racist extremist who should have been booted off the council when his hateful tweets that go against what progressives supposedly stand for went public. The city council showed it’s true colors when it caved like a certain red line in the sand. If you want a return to peace and harmony in Charlottesville, send Wes Bellamy packing and return control to sensible legislators.
You have a bunch of stuff mixed up there, Al. There is racism on both the liberal and conservative side, and I agree that Bellamy should have been forced off the Council when his tweets came to light. But that doesn’t make it racist for victims of racism to call for redress from power structures that have sanctioned and enforced or sometimes just looked the other way at injustice. Conservative insistence on “colorblind” policies ignores the long history of oppression and second-class citizenship blacks had to endure, and which whites benefited and still benefit from.
If you catch someone cheating at cards, do you let him keep all his winnings and give them to his family? Whites built up wealth for generations from the labor of African-Americans. Tell me why we, their descendants, should get to keep all that inherited wealth. There are obvious problems with straight payments, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t make reparations in other ways. Whites tore apart the black family, raped black women and demeaned black men. Tell me why we shouldn’t help them get a leg up.
You’re delusional if you think whites built up wealth for generations on the labor of blacks. They build wealth thru innovation the availability of a labor pool. Was it fair to those labors? Of course not, it never is. Southern plantation owners were the #1 users of slave labor. To say the wealth in this country was from cotton picked by slaves is a joke.
The way you fix past injustices and discrimination is to eliminate them. Asking me to atone for past transgressions that neither I nor my ancestors had anything to do with is asking me resist in whatever manner necessary when it based on my skin color.
So, whites didn’t build wealth by exploiting black labor, but they built it through exploiting available labor (much of which was black and enslaved, and could have innovated on its own but was denied the opportunity), and although that’s not fair the inheritors of that wealth don’t owe anything monetary or otherwise to the descendants of the enslaved, especially since not all the wealth was created by slave labor. Wow.
“The way you fix past injustices and discrimination is to eliminate them.” So I guess if someone robbed your father of his life savings and your father died you shouldn’t and wouldn’t take the thief to court.
You aren’t being asked to atone, you’re being asked to love your neighbor. Or if you can’t have a heart, you’re being asked to just be fair.
I, and at least 4 generations of Butlers, did not own slaves or benefit in any way from anyone’s labor other than their own (don’t know about other generations). Why Bellamy wasn’t removed from Silly Clown Council for his racist comments still blows my mind. I’ll continue to pray that he doesn’t run for reelection. He’s continues to be a blight on the Council and the City.
You and your family benefited from not being consigned to a ghetto, Frances. You benefited from not having the breadwinner of your family lynched. You benefited from being allowed to vote and go to the best schools and be prepared for and hired for the best jobs. You benefited from not developing an addiction to drink or drugs, or a predilection for violence, as ways to cope from the indignity of being denied these things, from the daily reminder that you were a second class citizen, from the daily put-downs by whites, and the fear of what whites might do to you, especially if you in any way protested your treatment. You benefited because you were free in ways Bellamy’s people were not and could scarcely think of becoming.
Bellamy’s comments were wrong and I think he should have resigned, but can you really not imagine feeling the same way if you’d been in his place? That’s what blows my mind.
Ken, there is no logic in your last post. Do you think that one benefits by not being murdered daily, not dying in a car accident, not being struck by lightning or dying from some other natural disaster, etc.? I guess you can make that claim but statistically, it’s a real stretch. Do you know anything about Frances Butler Morris other than what she’s posted? Maybe her family has been the victim of a hate crime or suffered an addiction to drugs. Maybe her family is 100% white, maybe they are not. Did they benefit from white privilege regardless, as you seem to assume? Btw, Bellamy was born after the civil rights movement and after the voting rights act. Please don’t assume that you have any idea how he’s feeling either because you haven’t been in his place. It’s one thing to be empathetic to what you think he has suffered but to suggest that someone should feel the same way if they’d been in his place, when you don’t even know that he’s been through, is disingenuous.
Not a Lib, thanks for the reply. What I’m saying is that white people enjoyed freedom from the harms and restrictions that black people had to endure, and that’s how they got ahead. The laws and customs that kept blacks from competing with whites on equal footing are what allowed whites to prosper in ways that blacks simply could not.
So what I know about Ms. Morris is that her family did not suffer socially, economically and politically like blacks did, and that in fact her family had the opportunity to attend schools blacks couldn’t attend, take jobs blacks couldn’t take, buy homes in neighborhoods blacks could live in, etc. Today when the members of her family compete economically, socially and politically, they do so standing on the shoulders of people who were allowed and enabled to rise higher than Bellamy’s family was. That’s part of what progressives mean by “white privilege.”
So you say I shouldn’t presume I know what Bellamy feels about all this (never mind that he’s more or less told us). Fine – if you were in his place, how would you feel?