In 2023 America, the truth is often stranger than fiction. And perhaps no greater example of this can be found than in Boston, where the city’s newly convened reparations task force includes a college student…and two 11th graders.
Because when it comes to deciding how to reallocate forcibly taken taxpayer cash, that’s who you want sitting on the panel: a couple of high school juniors barely old enough to drive a car.
The city of Boston named high school juniors Damani Williams and Denilson Fanfan, along with 22-year-old University of Massachusetts student and Black Lives Matter organizer Carrie Mays, among the 10 people appointed to their new reparations task force Tuesday. The group’s duties will include “to assess what actions we as a city have taken and consider what actions we can take moving forward to acknowledge truth, foster reconciliation, repair harm, and restore and strengthen our communities,” per Boston Mayor Michelle Wu.
Why them? Well, because the two teens go to school in "one of Boston’s most historically marginalized areas areas," while Mays has spent the better part of her short adult life grandstanding for social justice and protesting the police (she's also on the city's Civilian Review Board of Police Accountability, so there's that, and in her spare time posts grammatically incoherent rants about white people in between Instagram photos of herself in underwear).
Related: California's Mulling Over $220k 'Reparations' Payments For Black Residents
That’s enough to land these still-parentally-dependent youngsters on an official city task force, which will consider if - and how much - the city should pay current black residents to make up for the historical sins of slavery committed by dead people against other dead people, as well as what official policies the city should adopt to promote “equity” for its black residents. The group has also been tasked with thinking up ways the city can offer a “formal apology” to its black residents for slavery more than 150 years ago.
“We are looking forward to determining recommendations for how we reckon with Boston’s past while charting a path forward for Black people whose ancestors labored without compensation and who were promised the 40 acres and a mule they never received,” said Joseph D. Feaster Jr., an attorney and former NAACP Boston branch president, who will now serve as task force chairman.
Considering a full 20% of the task force is made up of kids who aren’t even old enough to vote, it seems unlikely that they’ll come up with anything less ridiculous than San Francisco’s own reparations committee, which recently suggested the city pay every eligible black resident - including some drug criminals - $5 million for centuries-old injustices against, again, dead people.
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