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~~No that's literally what they're doing~~

Ald. Stephanie Coleman (16th Ward), the chair of the Chicago City Council’s Black Caucus, said the subcommittee is likely to be part of the City Council’s Committee on Contracting Equity and Oversight, which is led by Ald. Emma Mitts (37th Ward). That panel will meet for no more than a year, and then transition to a full commission, Coleman told WTTW News.

Edit: I'm going to go back on this specific criticism, as has been pointed out by other commenters, this committee has voiced their intentions to model their program after Evanston, which began with means-testing assistance but had a 2nd phase which instituted "$25,000 in no-strings-attached direct cash payments for those eligible. Black residents who lived in Evanston during a 50-year period of discriminatory zoning laws and their direct descendants receive priority for eligibility."

There's still plenty to criticize around the inefficiencies and contradictions of reparation attempts under liberal democracy, but I don't want to direct my ire at efforts that actually accomplish some material benefit, at least if and until they demonstrate failure. In other words, we should agitate these efforts to do it correctly, and clown on them if they end up with some means-tested liberal nonsense, but not clown on them for attempting it all.

I will believe this the minute I see this process resulting in >$500k being given as reparations. Unfortunately creating a committee to study an issue is from a well-established playbook of stringing people along.

Salary and benefits for a 3 person team with a lawyer consulting will eat that up in a year easily.

That's a fair point, it's just hard to not be pessimistic when the same city is still spending $2 billion on their police budget and $29 mil to a private company for tents to house migrants (instead of just expropriating some unoccupied office buildings).

I'm not against spending large amounts of time, effort, and money on planning and executing reparations, I just have very little confidence that it can be done under liberal democracy without it turning into some market-based, means-tested program that is most certainly not reparations, all while other systems of harm are still being funded by several higher orders of magnitude. I will word my criticisms better in the future so as not to come off like I'm criticizing the very idea of planning and distributing reparations.

LMAO, yes! this is literally the first thing that came to mind.

Those are exactly the questions this subcommittee will answer? How is using a committee to go from "reparations should be paid" to the specifics of how to pay them, and to whom, a clown show? How else would you do it?

Pop open a thread about the USSR or the PRC and you'll find plenty of people praising central planning and the role it played in rapid economic development, and you might also find critiques that amount to "you should have better examined the effects of trying to eradicate sparrows."

It's OK to be skeptical of government power, waste, and corruption, but deep cynicism about government ever being able to do anything right is a core reactionary belief.

decent except for his pledge not to defund the police. up 3%