A round of free drinks. On Whitey!
On Monday night, a bar in Portland, Oregon hosted people of color and gave them $10 as they arrived — a symbolic gift funded primarily by white people who were asked not to attend the “Reparations Happy Hour.”
A local activist group, Brown Hope, wanted the event to be a space for people of color in a mostly white city to meet, organize, discuss public policy and potentially plan various actions.
The notion of full-scale reparations — sought by some as compensation for the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow and the large wealth gap between white and black U.S. households — was supported by 58 percent of black people and 46 percent of Hispanic people in a 2016 poll.
However, 68 percent of white Americans do not support reparations; when the topic was brought up during the 2016 presidential campaign, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said it was “divisive” and unlikely to get through Congress.