WASHINGTON (AP) – President Joe Biden’s White House backs the investigation into reparations for black Americans, boosting Democratic lawmakers who are making a renewed effort to establish a committee on this issue amid the great racial inequalities created by the COVID-19 pandemic.
A home panel heard testimony on Wednesday about legislation that would set up a committee to investigate the history of slavery in the US, as well as discriminatory government policies affecting former slaves and their descendants. The commission would recommend ways to educate the American public of its findings and propose appropriate remedies, including government financial payments to compensate descendants of slaves for years of unpaid labor by their ancestors.
Biden supports the idea of studying the matter, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Wednesday, though she stopped saying he would sign the bill if it passes Congress.
“He would certainly support an investigation into reparations,” Psaki said at the White House briefing. “He understands that we don’t need a study at this point to take action 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 racism bill in a generation after the murder of George Floyd, Biden backed the idea of studying reparations for slaves’ descendants. But as he tries to win congressional support for other agenda items, including a massive coronavirus relief package, he faces a choice of how aggressively to push the idea.
Even with Democrats controlling both chambers of Congress and the White House, it can be difficult to pass a reparations bill. The proposal has been languishing in Congress for more than three decades, and only gained new attention in 2019 after the Democrats gained control of the House.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who has 173 co-sponsors on her behalf, said the descendants of slaves continue to suffer from the legacy of that brutal system and the ongoing racial inequality it spawned, pointing to COVID-19 as an example. Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that black people are nearly three times as likely to be hospitalized because of COVID-19 as whites and nearly twice as likely to die from the disease. She offered her bill as a way to bring the land together.
“The government has approved slavery,” said Jackson Lee. “And that’s what we need, a reckoning, a healing restorative righteousness.”
But polls in the US have found long-lasting resistance to reparations to slave offspring, divided along racial lines. Only 29% of Americans expressed support for making reparations payments, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in the fall of 2019. Most black Americans were in favor of reparations, 74%, compared to 15% of white Americans.
Rep. Burgess Owens, a first-term Republican from Utah, opposed a recovery commission. He noted that his great-great-grandfather arrived in America in the belly of a slave ship, but escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad and became a successful entrepreneur. He criticized “wealth redistribution” as a failed government policy.
“While it is impractical and non-starting for the US government to pay reparations, it is also unfair and heartless to give black Americans hope that this is a reality,” Owens said.
Jackson Lee’s bill calls on the commission to investigate the practice of slavery, as well as forms of discrimination that federal and state governments have imposed on former slaves and their descendants. The commission would then recommend ways to inform the American public of its findings and appropriate solutions.
Kamm Howard, the co-chair of the National Coalition of Blacks for Reparations in America, called the committee a long time ago, saying that “many years have been wasted, many lives lost” since the legislation was first enacted by Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., 1989.
“The goal here is recovery. Where would we as a people be if there were not 246 years of stolen labor and accompanying horrors, if not the many periods of multi-billion dollar plunder after slavery? Howard said. “We must be made whole.”
Larry Elder, a black conservative talk radio host, said African Americans have made tremendous progress in the economic and social spheres, noting that Barack Obama was twice elected president. He argued that racism has never been less of a problem in America than it is now and that reparations would be one of the greatest transfers of wealth in history. “Finding out who owes what is a great achievement,” Elder said.
Former NFL star Herschel Walker also spoke to the committee, saying that reparations would cause divorce and division.
“I feel like it keeps letting us know that we are still African American rather than just Americans,” Walker said.
Associated Press writers Josh Boak and Padmananda Rama contributed to this report.