Reparations for Foundational Black Americans: Racial Justice | Amir El | TEDxYouth@BrooklynLab

Reparations for Foundational Black Americans: Racial Justice | Amir El | TEDxYouth@BrooklynLab
Being Black in America can be dangerous to your health. In Baltimore and other segregated cities, the life-expectancy gap between African Americans and whites is as much as 20 years. No year has better demonstrated the deep racial divide in our communities than 2020. A year marked by the COVID-19 pandemic where Blacks are 3.2 times more likely to tie from COVID than whites and America has had to come to a racial reckoning as we end the decade with over 6000 people killed by police. The rate of fatal police shootings among Black Americans was much higher than that for any other ethnicity, standing at 32 fatal shootings per million of the population as of September 2020. The murders of countless innocent Black lives has forced Americans to confront our racist past and present. High school senior, Amir El, argues that before we are able to take collective action against America’s systemic racism, we must first create economic equality for Foundational Black Americans by providing reparations. Amir El, 12th Grader, Brooklyn Laboratory Charter Schools This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx