So much for caring about states’ rights.
Evanston, Illinois – just blocks down the street where I worked in the early 1970’s ~ Editor
The Trump administration is trying to get rid of the first reparations program in the U.S. for Black Americans.
On Tuesday, the Department of Justice asked a judge to end the program in Evanston, Illinois, offering $25,000 to the descendants of the city’s Black residents who experienced housing discrimination between 1919 and 1969 due to city policies and ordinances. All residents who experienced housing discrimination in the city after 1969, regardless of race, also qualified for the program, which began in 2021.
The DOJ said in its court filing that the program was “racially discriminatory, calling it unconstitutional because it doles out different benefits based on race.
“There are sound ways for a city to remedy past discrimination or direct resources to its most vulnerable citizens and neighborhoods. Simply handing out money based on race, however, is not the answer,” said Harmeet Dhillon, assistant attorney general of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, in a statement.
In total, Evanston has allotted $20 million to the program, raised from a tax on legal marijuana, and $7 million has been distributed for use on down payments, home repairs, and paying interest or late penalties on property in the city.
But to the Trump administration, any acknowledgment of racial discrimination toward people of color, historical or present, is to be rejected as “wokeness” or “DEI.” If the government’s lawsuit succeeds in ending the program, it could prevent similar reparations programs from starting all over the country – regardless of whether they’re effective or not.
Written by Hafiz Rashid for The New Republic ~ June 17, 2026
Respectfully, this isn’t a matter of states rights. It’s about equality under the law and not handing out questionable monies to black people without actually knowing if they are actually descendants of slaves. And even if they were, as far gone removed they are from the days of oppression in America, they themselves have not been harmed by slavery any more than I have, from the days my Irish ancestors were enslaved by the Brits.
Reparations actually violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
The Fourteenth Amendment, ratified in 1868, states in Section 1:
“No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.”
This clause prohibits states from denying equal protection to individuals under the law. In the context of reparations, providing benefits — especially financial ones — to descendants of enslaved people based on race creates a race-based classification that is not equally applied to all citizens, thus violating the principle of equal protection
In short, the Equal Protection Clause is the constitutional provision that is central to the constitutional challenge to reparations, because it governs how laws and policies must be applied equally to all people, regardless of race.
The black folks of today are simply doing everything in their power to undermine and overwhelm every government program and system on all levels, as part of the Democrat Party’s concentrated efforts to usher in communism and end the republic. And more than reaping financial benefits, they never have sought “equality” but rather privilege above and beyond the regular Constitutional rights and the Inalienable God0Given Rights afforded every man and woman, regardless of color.
As some profound person once told me. “Phouac ’em”.