A social innovation comes along with the establishment of a legal cannabis sector in New York. This social innovation is the fact that people who have been convicted of marijuana possession, which makes up the great majority of racial minorities.
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After doing time for drug possession and being released from jail in 2018, Jeremy Rivera is now working as a consultant in the building and construction sector. It's possible that the two lines of his resume will come in handy very soon for him: in order to obtain a salesman's license to sell marijuana in the State of New York in the coming months, one must "have been convicted of a marijuana-related offense" and "have owned and operated a profitable business for at least two years." Both of these requirements must be met.
In the state of New York, as in the rest of the country, African Americans and Hispanics have historically been overrepresented in arrests for cannabis possession, despite the fact that the use of this drug is not nearly as racially marked as arrests for possession. The State of New York has defended the practice of making a court conviction a bonus as a form of social reparation.
Rashawn Ray, a professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, notes that "The logic is that black people are excluded from the economic growth of cannabis after being incarcerated for this reason for so long." It remains to be seen what the impact of this measure will be. It is not enough, but it's a start. It is important to tackle mass incarceration and economic inequality simultaneously.
It is also the revenue from cannabis that must finance reparations for African-Americans who were victims of the housing policy in the 1960s in Evanston, which is near Chicago (Illinois). In New York, the ex-mayor Bill de Blasio created before his departure a Commission on Racial Justice, which will be the subject of a referendum during the November elections. At the national level, quotas have also reserved for years a share of the workforce for members of underrepresented groups.
"I'm skeptical about giving the label 'reparations' to any local or piecemeal program, regardless of how it's funded," said William Darity, a professor of public policy at Duke University and a proponent of reparations measures. wider. In a country that cultivates ethnic statistics and therefore accurately measures comparative situations according to origin, the question of the consequences of slavery on the socio-economic development of African-Americans is still alive.
A bill to study a system of compensation has been pending in Congress for more than thirty years under the number HR-40. Its supporters recall in particular the compensation that was granted to Japanese people who were interned in the United States after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. However, for the time being, he has never passed the decisive threshold of the Senate.