There are moments in American politics where you read the headline three times because your brain refuses to accept that this is real. This is one of those moments.
Evanston, Illinois — a white-majority suburb north of Chicago with 78,000 residents and apparently zero common sense — is cutting $25,000 checks to 44 black residents as part of a $10 million reparations program. Not because these individuals were personally wronged by the city government. Not because they suffered a specific, documented harm that can be remedied. Because of their race.
That’s it. That’s the criteria.
How It Works
Black residents and descendants of black residents who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969 are eligible. The city’s Reparations Committee — yes, that’s a real government body that real taxpayers fund — approved a decade-long, $10 million payout plan. The first wave is 44 people at $25,000 each, ostensibly for “housing expenses.”
The money comes from the city’s real estate transfer tax. Also from a 3% tax on cannabis retailers. And because that apparently isn’t enough, the Committee is now proposing a new tax on Delta-8 THC products — the cheap vape-shop cannabis knockoffs sold in gummies and cartridges.
So let me get this straight. A city government is taxing weed sales and real estate transactions to fund cash payments distributed exclusively by race, to address housing discrimination that ended over half a century ago, administered by a committee that exists solely to redistribute money based on skin color.
And people wonder why trust in government is at historic lows.
The Legal Problem
Judicial Watch filed a lawsuit against Evanston last year, and their argument is about as straightforward as constitutional law gets. The 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause says the government can’t treat people differently based on race. Evanston’s program treats people differently based on race. Case closed — or at least it should be.
“They are just entirely giving money, usually to black residents solely on the basis of race,” Judicial Watch attorney Michael Bekesha told Fox News. “And I mean, that’s just problematic.”
Problematic is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. What it actually is, is unconstitutional. The Supreme Court has spent decades establishing that government racial classifications require strict scrutiny — the highest legal bar. Evanston’s program doesn’t clear that bar. It doesn’t even attempt to. It’s a race-based cash transfer dressed up in the language of historical justice, and the city’s legal team knows it, which is why their official response to the lawsuit is “we can’t comment on ongoing litigation.”
Translation: we don’t have a defense, so we’re going to stall.
The Math That Doesn’t Add Up
Evanston has about 12,500 black residents out of a population of 78,000. Over 46,000 residents are white. The white majority is taxing itself to pay a black minority cash based on where their ancestors lived between 1919 and 1969.
But here’s the part nobody in Evanston’s city council seems interested in discussing. The people paying the real estate transfer tax aren’t the people who enforced housing discrimination in 1950. The 28-year-old couple buying their first condo in Evanston in 2026 had nothing to do with redlining. The cannabis shop owner handing over 3% of his revenue didn’t draw any segregation maps. The people footing the bill have no connection to the harm being “repaired” — and the people receiving the checks weren’t personally harmed by Evanston’s government.
Reparations, as Bekesha correctly noted, are meant to make a specific person whole after a specific government wrong. Japanese Americans interned during World War II received reparations because the government imprisoned them. That’s a direct wrong and a direct remedy. Evanston’s program has no direct wrong, no direct victim, and no direct remedy. It’s a wealth transfer based on ancestry, funded by people who weren’t involved, and distributed to people who weren’t harmed.
The Weed-Funded Future
The Delta-8 tax proposal is the cherry on top. Evanston’s Reparations Committee — again, a real thing that exists — wants to tax cheap THC products to fund more payouts. The city’s own corporation counsel admitted the revenue “likely won’t be a huge revenue stream,” but they’re doing it anyway because symbolism matters more than math.
So the plan is to fund racial reparations with a tax on budget vape products purchased primarily by young people who had nothing to do with housing discrimination in the Eisenhower era. You couldn’t write satire this good.
What This Is Really About
Evanston’s program isn’t about justice. It’s about politics. It’s about a city council that wants to be first — the first government reparations program in America — and is willing to torch constitutional principles to get the headline.
The 44 people receiving $25,000 checks will spend the money. The lawsuit will wind through the courts. The program will almost certainly be struck down. And Evanston will have spent years and millions of dollars on a program that accomplished nothing except proving that good intentions and bad law make terrible policy.
Meanwhile, the actual problems facing black residents in Evanston — education, employment, housing costs — will remain exactly where they were. Because a $25,000 check doesn’t fix systemic issues. It just makes the city council feel like it did something.
Feeling good isn’t governing. And governing by skin color isn’t legal. Evanston is about to learn both lessons the hard way.