Earlier this year, the Ithaca Common Council classified taking steps towards delivering reparations to Black Ithacans as a "high priority." This comes after years of local activists and legislators calling for action and after centuries of enslavement, segregation, and systemic marginalization. During the fight for Civil Rights, Malcolm X said the following in regards to progress:

"If you stick a knife in my back 9 inches and pull it out 6 inches, there's no progress. If you pull it all the way out, that's not progress. The progress is healing the wound that the blow made."

While the Common Council has taken many steps towards acknowledging our city and country's racist history, and that work must be done to end the systemic elements of racism that exist throughout our government and society, we must now take the crucial step of healing over 200 years of injury: We must make a concerted effort to provide reparations to Black Ithacans. This can take many forms on the local level: creating intentional pathways to allow Black Ithacans to return to our city after being displaced due to gentrification; as we transition our economy to being green and renewable, we can create intentional mandates and quotas that ensure Black Ithacans and their communities are the main beneficiaries of Ithaca Green New Deal investment; Through the opportunities provided by Justice 50 and Participatory Budgeting, we can support Black Ithacans in exercising their own agency when deciding how to rebuild and strengthen their communities; With the creation of a Reparations Commission in New York, Ithaca can play a crucial role in collecting its own research and providing it to this state commission as they develop a proposal for reparations statewide.

There are many shapes and forms reparations in Ithaca can take. We urge the Ithaca Common Council to continue exploring viable pathways through which reparations to Black Ithacans can be achieved and to take decisive action in delivering them.