These are comments from the local and global community answering the question:
Why is reparations (for slavery in the U.S.) important to you?

August 2019

Ongoing, voluntary, individual and institutional reparations is an opportunity:

• to accept responsibility for past and present crimes of systemic racial violence, terror, & economic exploitation;

• to inspire peaceful, contagious structural change;
• to liberate us from complicity; and
• to heal the heart and soul of the nation &  our precious planet.
  
  T. Iannuzzi
  European Descent/ benefits materially but harmed spiritually by white privilege
  Shutesbury, Massachusetts, USA, Planet Earth
  

October 2019

Reparations to Black People Is Essential To Save White People.

 

George Esworthy
European Descent
Buckland, Massachusetts, USA

— —

It is time to make amends in ways that matter. There is the need for reparations to the descendants of the Native American First Nation people who were eliminated in large numbers via genocide, who were enslaved and whose land was stolen from them-land that they lived on in harmony with nature . . .

 

Dorothy McIver
White
Greenfield, Massachusetts, USA

 

January 2020

 

This country was founded on land theft, genocide and slavery. It is a shameful legacy, all the more so because we have not apologized nor sought to repair the damage done to generations of native and black people. We will never be whole and never stop our global and local oppressive behaviors if we do not acknowledge the wrongs we have done and negotiated as full a reparation as human decency requires.

 

Sherrill Hogen

European Descent

Shelburne Falls, MA, USA

 

— —

February 2020

 

Peace and freedom require breaking free from cycles of violence and trauma.  Reparations — in all its relational, monetary, memorial, and other creative avenues — is a vital step in this direction.

 

Cara Michelle Silverberg

white(ned) Ashkenazi Jew

Wendell, MA