A House Democrat who introduced a resolution calling for the U.S. to spend trillions of dollars on reparations for Black Americans says there won’t be an income cap for receiving the payout.
All Black Americans would qualify for reparations because, regardless of their current economic status, their ancestors suffered the indignity of slavery, said the resolution’s author, Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania.
“Whether or not a Black American, a Black descendant of American chattel slavery, were able to break into the middle class, they are still and they were able to do that despite the harms, despite the past injustices done to them,” she said.
Ms. Lee continued, “They are not excluded from the reparation and the remedies therein. When we think about who traces their lineage back, that is, again, a debate that is used to try to silence the rest of this movement. It’s a distraction tactic.”
Ms. Lee said that too often, the reparations movement gets “bogged down” over questions of who qualifies.
Should they make $25 an hour, or should they be paid below a living wage? Should they have been educated? Or if they’re educated, does that disqualify? No! They are Black. If they are Black and they are descendants of slaves, then they were directly in the lineage of harm,” she said.
“If they are descendants of Jim Crow, Jim Crow policies in this country, they are the direct descendants and current living recipients of that harm.”
“We’re going to continue to organize. We’re going to continue, whether it be locality by locality, district by district,” she said. “We’ll continue to build up the army of folks who we need to speak truth to power and demand that which we are owed and what is due to us.”
She’s not alone.
Ms. Pressley urged her Democratic colleagues to step up and support their efforts, even though the popularity of “racial reckoning” has waned in recent years.
“People that said they were a part of a so-called racial reckoning are nowhere to be found in this moment now that the headlines have faded, and so too has their commitment to do this work,” Ms. Pressley said.
