Oppression Update: New Jersey Also Dancing the Slavery Reparations Tango

Brother Bingley sent me this yesterday, and I could not believe it.

And then I totally could, even more so the more I dug into this.

So, first off, let’s establish just how well off New Jersey is under the careful fiscal management of the Democrats who have been in charge for, oh, like, forever, and almost to the end, term-limited, tender ministrations of rodential governor Phil Murphy – it’s teetering.

Budget panels in both chambers of the Legislature in late-night votes Friday approved an annual spending bill that Senate Democrats have said will cost $58.8 billion.

Legislators’ proposal spends more than the plan Gov. Phil Murphy unveiled in late February, leaves the state with a surplus too small to meet a statutory requirement for a new tax relief program, and expands New Jersey’s structural deficit to $1.5 billion (Murphy proposed $1.2 billion).

If the budget stands at $58.8 billion, it would amount to the highest level in state history. The full Legislature is expected to give the plan a final vote on Monday. The next fiscal year begins Tuesday.

The only way any of this is done or nearly paid for is because NJ taxes the dog crap out of anything that moves – or doesn’t – in the state.

…The Garden State ranks sixth nationally in total tax burden for 2025, according to WalletHub. The tax load, equivalent to 10.3% of personal income, comprises the nation’s third-highest property tax burden, a high income tax burden, and moderate sales taxes.

...New Jersey’s property taxes are consistently ranked as the highest in the country, with the average bill climbing to nearly $10,100 in 2024, according to the state Department of Community Affairs.

…The state’s progressive income tax ranges from 1.4% for income under $20,000 to 10.75% for income over $5 million, according to Division of Taxation records.

New Jersey’s top rate is one of the highest in the country, according to the Tax Foundation. Moreover, according to Bankrate’s 2024 state tax comparison, New Jersey does not adjust its tax brackets for inflation, which means residents may face higher effective tax rates over time even if their real income does not increase.

This doesn’t include what Murphy’s climate cult experiments have done to utility rates in the state or any of the additional costs laid out in the above article.

To live in the state is an exercise in footing the bill for an enormous nanny state welfare machine that never gets any smarter or smaller.

Now that we’ve established that, here’s the next blow NJ residents probably aren’t aware they’ll need to fend off, but will likely be aghast when they see it. Because a ‘wealth gap’ is widening, leaving them behind as well. 

But they won’t get to blame being black. Just poor slobs, unfortunate enough to be trying to earn an honest living in a state that literally takes almost every other dollar you earn.

Fight For Slavery Reparations Endures In NJ As Wealth Gap Widens

A long-running push for slavery reparations continues in the Garden State.

The New Jersey Reparations Council recently gathered for a Juneteenth forum at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center in Newark, releasing an update about its two-year effort to study the state’s “deep but often overlooked history of slavery.”

New Jersey authorized the enslavement of more than 12,000 Black people between 1630 and 1866, the council reported. This “brutal system” leveraged more than two centuries of unpaid labor to build New Jersey into one of the wealthiest states in America – and it’s a history of inequality that persists today.

According to a recent study from the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice (NJISJ), the median household wealth of white families in New Jersey is $662,500, compared to less than $20,000 for Black and Latina/o families. A massive inequality in homeownership was cited as one of the major reasons behind the “staggering” gap.

…“In the turbulence of today lies an opportunity to build something new – a new New Jersey where Black people are truly free and empowered to flourish and where all residents benefit from our state’s wealth and opportunity,” said Ryan Haygood, president and CEO of the NJISJ.

…According to the council, all Black people in New Jersey should be able to qualify for slavery reparations.

“Because slavery harmed both enslaved and free Black people, and because segregation and institutional racism have harmed descendants of enslaved people as well as Black people who arrived in New Jersey well after slavery, all Black people in New Jersey are eligible for reparations,” the council argued.

Well, hey, yo – who gets to pay for all of this?

Why the flush-with-cash State of New Jersey, of course.

Why would taxpayers be complaining if the state is paying for this?

…According to the council, reparations should include direct payments from the state of New Jersey to Black people.

Sounds like a plan, right?

And who is this ‘council’ that developed this payback scheme? Are they state-sanctioned, chartered by the legislature, what?

Nope.

It almost sounds as if it’s just some academics who got together to bang around a reparations plan and decided, after two years of working on all the angles, that their findings would be ‘the blueprint’ for ‘moving forward.

…Convened by the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice and co-chaired by Taja-Nia Henderson (Rutgers Law School) and Khalil Gibran Muhammad (Princeton University), the New Jersey Reparations Council is the first-of-its-kind commission to finally confront and repair New Jersey’s deep and often overlooked involvement in slavery and its lasting impact on the contemporary life of Black people in our state.  

The New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, which convened this, is another social justice private enterprise founded in 1999 through resources made available thanks to a foundation started by US Steel scions. 

So, in effect, uber liberal, super wealthy largesse is proposing to bone the already overburdened residents of the Garden State completely.

But this proposal from a privately commissioned council has legs with a Democratic legislature all too willing to virtue-signal, so there is now a potential piece of legislation which will give this reparations push the cover of official legitimacy, much like California’s recent debacle.

Did you know there is a bill (A602/S3164) in our Legislature that establishes a “New Jersey Reparations Task Force”?

CA’s task force, established in 2020 under AB 3121, operated for 2 years and cost nearly $1M covering public hearings, research, & administrative expenses

Bill… pic.twitter.com/GOjEMIfLbg

— Wake Up NJ 🇺🇸 New Jersey (@wakeupnj) June 19, 2025

And in the proposed NJ version of ‘Oh, we just want to look at this’ is some pretty incendiary and questionable verbiage stated as fact.

I’ve got a couple of hummers in different sections I’ve picked out. It seems more of a manifesto than an academic argument for the state to move on this.

     ….i.     New Jersey’s deep roots in American slavery and its vestiges have endured to the present day.  A direct line can be traced from New Jersey’s role in American slavery to its system today of voter suppression, racial wealth disparities, mass incarceration, racial segregation, and crumbling infrastructure in Black communities in New Jersey, such as the current elevated lead levels in water and homes.

     j.     The full effects of the institution and legacy of slavery on Black people and communities in New Jersey have not been sufficiently examined, nor have there been remedies for past injustice and present harm, or sufficient efforts at transformation.  As a result of historic and continued systemic racial discrimination, Black people in New Jersey confront some of the worst racial disparities in America, including but not limited to these areas:

     (1)   Access to Democracy: New Jersey suffers from racialized voter disenfranchisement, denying the vote to over 100,000 people in prison, on parole, or on probation, according to State date.  Almost half are Black, though Black people comprise just 15 percent of the State’s population.  The racism of the criminal justice system is directly imported into the franchise.

And what the bill requires:

…This bill, among other things, requires the task force to:

     (1)   examine the institution of slavery within the State of New Jersey;

     (2)   examine the extent to which the State of New Jersey and the federal government prevented, opposed, or restricted efforts of former enslaved persons and their descendants who are considered United States’ citizens to economically thrive upon the ending of slavery;

     (3)   examine the lingering negative effects of slavery on living African-Americans and on society in New Jersey and the United States;

     (4)   research methods and materials for facilitating education, community dialogue, symbolic acknowledgement, and other formal actions leading toward transformation, reparations remedies, a sense of justice, and economic justice among the descendants of enslaved African people in this State;

     (5)   make recommendations for what remedies should be awarded, through what instrumentalities, and to whom those remedies should be awarded; and

     (6)   address how said recommendations comport with national and international standards of remedy for wrongs and injuries caused by the State.

It’s only two pages, and reading it is illuminating.

There is also going to be significant pushback from residents if they find out this is going forward. There already has been from the few who have heard of this effort.

I want reparations for repugnant lawmaking and abusive taxation from every Governor and Legislator who held NJ office in the last 50 years @njassemblydems @NJAssemblyGOP pic.twitter.com/HvmVOtwHZq

— Paula,🌹Serf of FMinus Dunton (@PaulaCo51119295) June 19, 2025

It’s also another reason to be very wary of a mayor like Ras Baraka – yes, the one who got arrested at the ICE center – who is running for governor., Does he have a chance? Schmaybe. Schmaybe not.

But Mayor Baraka was also a proponent of a recently ended ‘guaranteed income’ experiment in his city, which gave 400 folks thousands of dollars, and has been judged a ‘great success.’

The bottom line? People who are struggling to make ends meet know exactly what they need to do for their families – and we should trust them to do it. That was the message from city officials as they released an update about Newark’s recent experiment with “guaranteed income.”

On Tuesday, Mayor Ras Baraka and other stakeholders gathered for a press conference to announce a new report about the city’s unique pilot program, which rolled out in October 2021 and ended in September 2023.

Through the program, a group of 400 Newark residents were given “unconditional” payments for two years – with no work requirement and no strings attached. Half of the participants received $250 on a bi-weekly basis, and the others got $3,000 twice yearly.

The money came from a mix of private and corporate donations, as well as public funds from the federal American Rescue Plan. To qualify, recipients had to be residents of Newark, have an income below 200 percent of the federal poverty line, and have been negatively impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Again, forewarned is forearmed.

You can’t fight it if you don’t know about it.