WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden’s White House backs study of reparations for black Americans, urging Democratic lawmakers to renew efforts to create commission on issue amid sharp racial disparities by the COVID-19 pandemic.
A House court on Wednesday heard testimony about legislation that would create a commission to examine the history of slavery in the United States, as well as discriminatory government policies affecting former slaves and their descendants. The commission would recommend ways to educate the American public about its findings and suggest appropriate resources, including government financial payments to compensate slave descendants for years of unpaid work by their ancestors.
Biden supports the idea of studying the issue, White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday, though she stopped saying she would sign the bill if Congress clarifies.
“I would certainly support the study of the repairs,” Psaki said at the White House briefing. “He understands that we do not need any study to act at this time against systemic racism, so he wants to take action within his own government in the meantime.”
Biden captured the Democratic presidential nomination and eventually the White House with the strong support of black voters. While campaigning against the backdrop of the greatest calculation of racism in a generation following the assassination of George Floyd, Biden supported the idea of studying the reparations of slave descendants. But now, as it tries to gain Congressional support for other agenda items, including a massive coronavirus relief package, it faces a decision on how to aggressively push the idea.
Even with Democrats controlling both houses of Congress and the White House, passing a reparations bill can be difficult. The proposal has languished in Congress for more than three decades, and gained new attention in 2019 only after Democrats gained control of the House.
Representative Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who has 173 sponsors of her bill, said slave descendants continue to suffer the legacy of this brutal system and the enduring racial inequality it generated, noting COVID- 19 as an example. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicate that black people are nearly three times more likely to be hospitalized because of COVID-19 than white people and nearly twice as likely to die from the disease. He offered his bill as a way to bring the country together.
“The government sanctioned slavery,” Jackson Lee said. “And that’s what we need, an estimate, a healing restorative justice.”
But polls have found long-term resistance in the U.S. to reparations to slave descendants, divided into racial lines. Only 29% of Americans expressed support for paying for repairs in cash, according to a survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research conducted in the fall of 2019. Most black Americans favored the repairs. , 74%, compared to 15% of white Americans.
Representative Burgess Owens, a Republican from Utah’s first term, argued against a reparations commission. He noted that his great-grandfather came to America with the belly of a slave ship, but escaped slavery by the underground railroad and became a successful businessman. He criticized the “redistribution of wealth” as a failed government policy.
“While the U.S. government pays reparations for the practice and it’s not a principle, it’s also unfair and discouraging to give black Americans hope that this is a reality,” Owens said.
Jackson Lee’s bill calls for the commission to examine the practice of slavery, as well as the forms of discrimination that federal and state governments inflicted on former slaves and their descendants. The commission would then recommend ways to educate the American public about its findings and appropriate resources.
Kamm Howard, co-chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for the Reparation of America, called the commission a long time ago and said “many years have been lost, many lives lost,” since the legislation went be introduced by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., in 1989.
“The goal here is restoration. How would we be as a people, if not for the 246 years of stolen labor and accompanying horrors, if not for the multiple periods of multimillion-dollar plunder after slavery? Howard said. “We have to be comprehensive.”
Larry Elder, a host of conservative black radio, said African Americans have made great economic and social progress, noting that Barack Obama was twice elected to the presidency. He asserted that racism has never been a more significant problem in America than it is now and that reparations would represent one of the largest transfers of wealth in history. “Finding out who owes what will be quite a success,” Elder said.
Former NFL star Herschel Walker also spoke out in opposition to the commission, saying the repairs would create separation and division.
“I think it keeps letting us know that we’re still African Americans instead of just being Americans,” Walker said.
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Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.