Evanston, Illinois, is cutting $25,000 checks to 44 Black residents — no strings beyond skin color and a connection to a specific window of history. The city's Reparations Committee announced the payments on Thursday, the latest disbursement in a program that has now handed out over $6.35 million of public money based on race.
Tasheik Kerr, assistant to the city manager, said during a meeting last week that the 44 residents would be contacted and informed that their payments are on the way over the next few weeks. The payments are intended to cover housing expenses, according to Evanston official Cynthia Vargas.
That brings the running total to 254 individuals paid — all selected because they are Black residents, or descendants of Black residents, who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969. The city pledged $10 million over a decade when it approved the program in 2021, two years after establishing it.
The money has to come from somewhere. And that's where the story gets interesting.
Evanston funds its reparations program primarily through a cannabis sales tax and real estate transfer tax revenue, according to Fox News. A city memo showed the fund received $276,588 from the real estate transfer tax. And as of January 31 of this year, the reparations fund had received exactly zero dollars in philanthropic donations.
Not a reduced amount. Not a disappointing haul. Zero.
For a program that its architects have framed as a moral imperative — the kind of initiative that was supposed to inspire a national movement — the absence of any outside financial support is telling. When nobody voluntarily opens their wallet, the conviction runs about as deep as the rhetoric.
Alderman Krissie Harris acknowledged the funding crunch plainly enough:
"It's really important for people to understand we pay as we have the money, and it's not that we're withholding from paying everyone. It's just we have to accumulate the funds to make sure we can pay."
Translation: the city is writing checks it can only cover in installments. The committee has even discussed taxing Delta-8 THC products to keep the program afloat — though Harris conceded that the revenue stream wouldn't significantly move the needle. So the plan, such as it is, involves hoping cannabis taxes and a niche hemp derivative somehow sustain a multimillion-dollar racial redistribution program.
Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against the program last year, alleging it violates the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The argument is straightforward: the government is distributing public funds using race as the qualifying criterion. That's not a novel legal theory. It's the plain text of the Constitution applied to a program that openly sorts residents by skin color.
Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton didn't mince words when the suit was filed:
"To date, Evanston has awarded over $6,350,000 to 254 individuals based on their race. The city must be stopped before it spends even more money on this clearly discriminatory and unconstitutional reparations program."
Evanston was the first city in the nation to pass a reparations plan, and it clearly wants to be a model. But a model of what? A city taxing its residents to fund cash transfers that select recipients by ancestry and complexion — while a federal lawsuit challenges whether the whole enterprise is legal — isn't exactly a civic triumph.
Set aside the legal challenge for a moment. The policy logic collapses on its own terms.
Evanston's program targets residents — or descendants of residents — who lived in the city during a fifty-year window ending more than half a century ago. The payments are framed as addressing housing discrimination. But $25,000 cash transfers to individuals selected by racial lineage don't fix housing policy. They don't build anything. They don't reform a single zoning regulation or lending practice. They are simply government checks distributed by race.
And the funding mechanism reveals priorities that should alarm any taxpayer. Cannabis tax revenue and real estate transfer taxes are finite pools. Every dollar routed into reparations is a dollar not spent on infrastructure, policing, schools, or services that benefit all Evanston residents regardless of race. The city chose racial redistribution over universal public goods — and now can't even fund the redistribution without scrambling for new tax sources.
Meanwhile, the philanthropic class that cheers reparations in theory has contributed nothing in practice. The same progressive foundations and donors who issue statements about racial equity apparently see no reason to fund the one city actually attempting it. The gap between performative solidarity and actual financial commitment could not be wider.
Other municipalities and state legislatures have reportedly launched exploratory reparations efforts of their own. Evanston is supposed to be the proof of concept. Instead, it's proving something else entirely: that race-based government payments are constitutionally suspect, fiscally unsustainable, and unable to attract support beyond the politicians who vote for them.
The city pledged $10 million over a decade. It's distributed $6.35 million so far and is already rationing payments based on available cash. The fund has no philanthropic donors. The legal challenge hasn't been resolved. And the committee's best idea for new revenue is taxing a THC variant most people have never heard of.
Evanston didn't build a model. It built a warning.
