Why We're Doing This : A Word From FFRN! Founder David Gardinier

Black-led, White-supported Fund for Reparations NOW! launches to commemorate the 400th anniversary of African Enslavement in America

400 years ago this year, on August 20, 1619, the very first enslaved Africans on the foreign shores of Jamestown, Virginia.

What has followed is a very American story of theft, murder, and the profound mistreatment of those who became “African Americans.” If you’re like me, while you may have grown up hearing this story, perhaps the weight of it was somehow lost on you. To whatever degree of truth the story was told to you, perhaps it was also presented in such a way that made it seem long ago, or only pertaining to a certain region of the country, or somehow already resolved. But the story lives on through the income inequality, police brutality, and overall white supremacy that is still very much with us today. We’ve now had 400 years of chances to fully grasp the humanity and contributions of our African-American citizens, and African-Americans have endured 400 years of waiting for us to take them. If like me you are a White-American, take some time to sit with the weight of that story, as well as the fact that we, as a people, have never apologized for any of it. Myself and a collective of other White-Americans are working with the National African-American Reparations Commission (NAARC) to change that fact, through what we’re calling the Fund for Reparations NOW! (FFRN!).

The Fund for Reparations NOW! is a Black-led, white-supported philanthropic venture that seeks to further the racial healing of America though the implementation of NAARC’s 10-Point Reparations Plan. The Fund is designed to model what reparations could look like through the 10-Point Plan, once formal reparations are granted from the Federal government. White users of the FFRN online platform will sign a Statement of Apology, pay-in to the Fund itself, and access resources aimed at helping them continue a lifelong anti-racist practice.

After four centuries, our generation has a chance to grasp the perennial opportunity that our white ancestors never did: to acknowledge the deep wrongs that we’ve committed, and to pay reparations for those wrongs. I have no illusions that saying “I’m sorry” will account for everything we’ve done, or that any amount of money could ever compensate for the loss of rights, opportunity, and freedom that African-Americans have experienced. But I also have no illusions that our American story with race has to go on the way it’s been so far, and those of us who commit to the reparations movement are taking a clear step to say that that is not an option we are willing to live with.

The ultimate goal of this work (and in my own personal life) is to see the federal government formally apologize and pay reparations to African-Americans within our lifetimes. Until that happens, we can bring the vision of reparations to life in a small but meaningful way, through supporting NAARC and the Fund for Reparations NOW!.

-David