Biden privately tells lawmakers not to expect much on reparations legislation

[brooklynite]

Source: Politico

Joe Biden was more blunt about racism than perhaps any president before him — and than many in the crowd expected — in his remarks commemorating 100 years since the Tulsa Race Massacre Tuesday.

“He called out how through the years there have been members in elected office who were very public about their association or membership with [the] KKK,” Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.) said in the parking lot of the Greenwood Cultural Center. “He set up the scene in his speech to take us into what was happening at that time. And that was really powerful. I was so glad to hear it.”

But some attendees noted what they considered a glaring omission: any mention of reparations for the survivors of the massacre and their descendants, some of whom have sued the city and state for compensation, and a full-throated endorsement of H.R. 40, which would create a commission to study reparations. The bill passed out of the House Judiciary Committee in April for the first time since it was first introduced in 1989.

As a candidate, Biden said he supported a commission on reparations. But the administration has yet to endorse the actual bill. After his speech Tuesday, the president met with the members of the Congressional Black Caucus, who brought up the need for H.R. 40, which is named after the “40 acres and a mule” promise that now symbolizes the lack of support formerly enslaved people received from the federal government. According to those involved in the conversations, Biden let them down gently.

Read more: https://www.politico.com/news/2021/06/02/biden-reparations-tulsa-491607

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Good. It's an impractical policy and a huge distraction from other necessary legislation.

[brush]

1. There's a way to do reparations that doesn't involve cutting a big check.

Last edited Thu Jun 3, 2021, 12:16 PM - Edit history (1)

There can be college scholarships, small business grants, paid job training, upgrading of schools an community centers and one that takes off from what's proposed in the new families provision of the infrastructure bill...a monthly stipend, or quarterly or bi-annually. That avoids the constant and usual criticism of reparations...the cutting of big checks to individuals.

It could even be an annuity like the ones Alaskans get every year from their oil fund. There shouldn't be any objection after everyone now knows what happen in Tulsa a hundred years ago. And that was just microcosm of the stolen generational wealth of the dozen of other race massacres and the hundred of years of unpaid/stolen labor of enslavement.

[cstanleytech]

2. All of those things are things that should be offered to everyone though as we need

to be helping each other.

[LenaBaby61]

3. There's a way to do reparations that doesn't involve cutting a big check.

To all you said:

[Tom Rinaldo]

4. Agreed, and they should be pursued. But I support some direct payment reparations also

History is littered with injustices that stretch well beyond any time horizon, so trying to individually make right all the wrongs of the past to every descendant of those once persecuted would open a Pandora's box that could not be closed. However there is a simple and internationally widely accepted standard that exists for asserting ancestral rights; proof of direct lineage to a grandparent from a specified group of people. Many nations (Ireland for example) allow you to qualify for dual citizenship if you can proof that one of your grandparents was born in that nation. I just miss out personally. My great grandmother moved here from Ireland as a young woman and my grandmother was born here soon after.

I think the horror of human slavery in particular is so heinous that formal explicit direct payment of reparations is required as part of a formal acknowledgement of our prior national sin. It's true that only a tiny percentage of African Americans living today would qualify under the above standard, but the number who still do is hardly insignificant. For example, a child born into slavery in 1863, who then gave birth at age 50, would have a son or daughter born in 1913. If that child also gave birth at age 50 (in 1963), that person would now be 58 and would qualify for direct reparations as the grandchild of a former slave.