Wes Bellamy: Charlottesville Backs “Reparations Fund”

Editor’s Note: This is amazing transcript which shows what Wes Bellamy, the Vice-Mayor who openly says he hates White people, has been up to in Charlotteville, VA. It’s not just getting the parks renamed and Confederate statues torn down. It’s also creating a race based spoils system of taxpayer dollars. He says he doesn’t believe in equality. He believes in “equity” which is redistribution of wealth from Whites to blacks. This is hardly a surprise from someone so fond of the Black Panthers.

AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about your original push to have the Robert E. Lee statue taken down and what you ultimately got, that isn’t talked about as much, which is some kind of—

WES BELLAMY: Equity package, yeah.

AMY GOODMAN: —some kind of funds for reparations?

WES BELLAMY: Yeah, so, this all started nearly a year and a half ago, in March of last year. I received several different phone calls, emails. There was a petition from a local student here in the area about an effort and a push to remove the statue of Robert E. Lee. People in Charlottesville have been talking about this for some years, but just last year there was a nuance in a bill that was vetoed at the state House by our governor that essentially said that if you want to move these kind of statues and things of that nature, it’s a local issue, so you have the right to be able to do so. My colleague and I, Ms. Kristin Szakos, we both decided to push really hard. We held a press conference in which there were probably about 150 people who came out. About 80—or, excuse me, I would say about 110, 120 people or so who were pro-moving the statue, and about 30 to 40 Sons and Daughters of the Confederacy, who came with their large flags, and very, very upset that we were pushing to do so.

Subsequently, since then, there’s been a lot of things that have transpired. I mean, I’ve received all kinds of death threats, been probably called every kind of N-word that you can think of. And it’s been a very interesting topic. But I think that we have awakened, to say the least. We’ve seen a group of people here in our community who have been marginalized, who haven’t necessarily had a voice. We’re waking up, and we’re saying that we are going to stand tall.

And in the midst of all of this, we also got an equity package passed, which I presented in January, before we had our first vote—and it was unanimously passed—which gave us $950,000 to our African American Heritage Center, $250,000 to build onto one of the parks in the local African-American community. We got $2.5 million to public housing redevelopment, $50,000 annually for anyone who lives in public housing to get free GED training, another $50,000 to anyone who lives 80 percent below the AMI, which is the annual median income, as well as public housing, to have scholarships of sorts to go to our local community college. We got a position for black male achievement, which we’re calling a youth opportunity coordinator. So, I mean, in all, in all, it was about $4 million, basically, from funding, put specifically into marginalized communities to help bridge the gap and create equity.

All of this is about equity. We need equity, and not equality. Those are two different things. Equity is giving everyone what they need in order to have the same playing field. Equality is just giving everyone the same thing. I don’t want equality. I want us to have equity. And we’re going to push for equity in every space, whether that’s public parks, whether that’s in our city budget, no matter where it is, as long as I’m on council. And I’m going to push for it until the day I die.