Now is the Time for Reparations and UBI
COVID-19 has changed the world as we know it, and as such, we should finally aim to live in a more equitable world, something that we should’ve done already since we professed to be a race that’s civilized, above any other on this planet. That can only come if we deploy both Reparations and UBI today—one that is owed to slightly rectify past wrongs that are deeply felt today and another to bring a much-needed balance for us all.
The first thing that comes to people’s minds is, “how are we going to pay for them?” Well, the world just entered another depression—one some economists have been predicting before we knew about the Coronavirus and the more palatable “recession” others are naming it today—and if we don’t take steps to redistribute the wealth we all have worked and have been exploited, robbed to create, the one that’s been mostly siphoned to a criminally few (a whopping $21 trillion dollars), all hell is going to break loose.
The bank bailout of 2008 was to the tune of $700 billion dollars. (Mother Jones reports that the Federal Wall St bailout is closer to $14 trillion dollars). The estimated military budget for 2020-2021 is $934 billion dollars (although The Nation says it is more than $1 trillion dollars).
Many major corporations pay zero taxes and according to CNBC, “the federal government brought in about $74 billion less in corporate taxes than if all [91] the companies had paid the statutory rate...” Those numbers are staggering.
What’s more, according to Forbes, “CEO pay skyrocketed to 361 times that of the average worker” during 2018, while wages for workers have stagnated for decades, the Pew Research Center reports:
After adjusting for inflation, however, today’s average hourly wage has just about the same purchasing power it did in 1978, following a long slide in the 1980s and early 1990s and bumpy, inconsistent growth since then. In fact, in real terms average hourly earnings peaked more than 45 years ago: The $4.03-an-hour rate recorded in January 1973 had the same purchasing power that $23.68 would today.
When you add race and ethnicity to the equation, things are obviously maddeningly bleak. There’s been a steady decrease in wealth, on top of the pittance we already had, for both African Americans and Latinx people. According to the Nation, it’ll take “the average Black family 228 years to build the wealth of the white family today.” A wealth white Americans achieved first through the robbery of Native American land, through slavery (which jump-started the economy), the little-spoken about White Affirmative Action, and American imperialism—all events that continue to hurt us tremendously today while most white Americans (and a lot of Black and Brown people) remain willfully ignorant and in denial of.
When you break things down further by race, ethnicity, status, and lineage, Black Americans fare worse than Black immigrants (at least non-Caribbean) and Black and Brown Latinx immigrants and their descendants fare worse than their white Hispanic counterparts. Here’s a breakdown of Latin Americans by national origin in the US by Prosperity Now:
On top of being poor, we are kept out (and/or are criminally underpaid) of most major industries: corporate America, Hollywood, the media (both mainstream and indie), tech, philanthropy, politics… The wage gap can’t be leveled by just raising the pay for women and workers and lowering that of CEOs—we also need a major shift in hiring practices along racial and ethnic lines.
We are also targeted by the surveillance state, ICE, the police, the war on drugs, by predatory lending companies, predatory multi-level marketing companies, and our very own unscrupulous people who have found selling our name and struggles very profitable—especially to those who have discriminated against us before.
There has been extensive research on reparations and advocates have written undeniable cases for it. And no matter their methods or what you think of Ta-Nehisi Coates, Dr. William A. "Sandy" Darity Jr., Yvette Carnell and Antonio Moore—those most known for leading the movement for reparations for Black Americans today—a debt that must and can be paid is owed. There’s absolutely no excuse to be against Reparations.
Both Reparations and UBI are a must. This virus has changed the way we understand labor, concepts of fairness, of equal pay, of who matters, of how it matters, of why it matters, and when it matters. All of us do and we must act on that pronto. For the sake of our planet, for the animal kingdom, for humanity.
How are we going to pay for them? How are we paying for the things I mentioned before?
Many politicians are proposing one or multiple payments, most very low (and please, Andrew Yang’s UBI is at the expense of other social safety nets), but I believe Senator Bernie Sanders has the right idea by advocating for $2,000 per household—till the Coronavirus is under control. We need a more humane, anti-classist, anti-racist UBI.
We should all also be for a federal job guarantee, Medicare for all, housing for all, a Green New Deal… along a permanent UBI, since many, many people have and are struggling, including our most vulnerable: women, Black and Brown women, children, the old, the infirm, immigrants, the LGBTQ community, Native Americans, Black and Brown trans women and men, those who are nonbinary, the disabled, and many more. If a lot of abled, cishet people are having a hard time surviving today, imagine those who don’t have the privileges we enjoy?
Giving money directly to people simply works, no matter what the naysayers say. People are also driven by purpose—not just the pursuit of happiness (unless their purpose is the pursuit of happiness). Saying folks will just sit on their butts and collect checks is racist, ableist—simply ignorant. We will take care of each other. We will find things to do, like those who have been freed of financial insecurities have. We will create art. We won’t just survive—we will thrive.
Many people feel and see the paradigm shift that is now happening before us. There’s really no going back to life as we knew it.
Now is the time for Reparations and UBI.
A mainstream or indie magazine would usually pay me between $250-$450 for one of my pieces. Since I decided to go solo for the sake of keeping my voice unedited and uncensored, I created this website. Keeping it afloat and these pieces coming is not just time-consuming, but it’s also costly because it angers a lot of those same mainstream papers and magazines (along with their donors) for calling them out—so their favorite retaliation tactic is deplatforming. Especially of unapologetic and unhypocritical Black and Brown voices. Ideally, I’d like to raise between $250-$450 per piece and many of you have actually stepped up to the plate and helped me accomplish that. For that, I thank you from the bottom of my heart. If you would like to see more of these and support one of the few unbought indie voices, please contribute:
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César Vargas is an award-winning writer, advocate, strategist, speaker, and social critic with a loyal following and a robust social capital that spans from coast to coast: Journalists, celebrities, activists, artists, executives, politicians, and more. He was named one of 40 Under 40: Latinos in American Politics by the Huffington Post. He’s written about internal and external community affairs to several news outlets and quoted in others: The Huffington Post, NBC, Fox News, Voxxi, Okayafrica, Okayplayer, Sky News, Salon, The Guardian, Latino Magazine, Vibe, The Hill, BET, and his own online magazine—which has a fan base of over 25,000 people and has reached over a million—UPLIFTT. He’s familiar with having a voice that informs, invigorates, and inspires people—creating content that usually goes viral. He recently won two awards from Fusion and the National Hispanic Foundation for the Arts for his films Some Kind of Spanish and Black Latina Unapologetically. He attained a degree in Films Studies from Queens College, CUNY.
