Anthony Rogers-Wright, NYLPI’s Director of the Environmental Justice program, was invited to present at a virtual panel on Environmental Racism for the California Task Force on Reparations. Rogers-Wright was featured alongside Dr. C.N.E. Corbin of Portland State University and Helen Kang, J.D. of Golden Gate University.

Rogers-Wright emphasized the weight reparations carry as a pathway to restorative justice:

“So we have to make a decision right now, either we accept the idea that white people are genetically predisposed to success associated with social and economic elasticity – that is, we accept the theory of white ‘supremacy’ as an inexorable societal law, or we admit and act on the reality that Anglo conformity and the global white hegemony has been engineered, it’s synthetic and filled with additives and preservatives in the form of policy development and implementation specifically designed to benefit white folk at the expense of and cost to Indigenous, Black, Brown and poor Asian folk, and exercise the necessary remedies, including reparations, to set the record straight and operate from a currency of truth.”

Read the PDF of Anthony’s comments on our website or watch the panel on YouTube. Anthony’s PowerPoint can also be viewed as a PDF.