Acknowledging how past economic injustices—colonialism, slavery, discrimination—created current housing inequality, demanding reparative justice in housing policy.
Zera Yacob lived during Ethiopian resistance to colonialism and understood how economic systems encode historical injustices. Housing unaffordability today reflects centuries of structured inequality: slavery's wealth extraction, colonialism's land theft, redlining's racial discrimination, indigenous dispossession. These aren't individual failures but inherited systemic debts. Yacob's commitment to reason and justice requires acknowledging this history and its ongoing effects. Descendants of enslaved and colonized peoples face compounded barriers to wealth-building through homeownership; communities subject to redlining remain disinvested; indigenous peoples lack land access their ancestors owned. Justice demands more than equal treatment going forward—it requires repairing historical damage. This means reparative housing policies: land restitution, targeted down-payment assistance, community reparations funds for displaced neighborhoods, acknowledgment of theft. Yacob's philosophy, grounded in Ethiopian resistance to imperialism, recognizes that universal justice principles require addressing particular historical wrongs. Housing affordability cannot be solved without confronting inherited injustice.
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