A House committee approved legislation late Wednesday to pave the way to pay reparations to ancestors of enslaved Black Americans though the bill has an uphill battle before it can become law.
The House judiciary committee voted along party lines 25 to 17 in favor of bill H.R. 40 that would establish a 13-member commission to study the history and effects of slavery in the United States and its colonies from 1619 to 1865 as well as the ensuing discrimination in the country with the purpose to recommend appropriate remedies, including reparations.
The bill was first introduced nearly three decades ago by the late Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., and was named after the 40-acre plots of land Gen. William T. Sherman promised in 1865 to redistribute to formerly enslaved people.
Committee Chairman Jerry Nadler, D-N.Y., described the bill to lawmakers before the vote Wednesday as “historic legislation” that does not mandate financial payments nor recommends how to properly atone for the legacy of slavery — it intends to begin a conversation about the mistreatment of Black people in the United States.
“This moment of national reckoning comes at a time when our nation must find constructive ways to confront a rising tide of racial and ethnic division,” he said. “Reparations in the context of H.R. 40 are ultimately about respect and reconciliation — and the hope that one day all Americans can walk together toward a more just future.”
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, who re-introduced the bill, told her colleagues across the aisle to not ignore the pain and history of Black people in the United States and the reasonableness of the commission.
“The goal of this historical commission and its investigation is to bring American society to the new reckoning of how our past affects the current conditions of African Americans and make America a better place to help and truly study the disadvantage,” she said. “The reparations moment does not focus only on payments but it focuses on remedies that can be created in many forms necessary to equitably address the many kinds of injuries sustained from the chattel slavery and its continuing vestiges.”
To focus on financial reparation is an “empty gesture,” she argued, stating they only want others to see the pain, violence and brutality Black Americans have experienced to create a pathway to reconciliation.
Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, rebutted he believes that the bill puts the country on the wrong track.
“We have utterly destroyed Black families. We have utterly ripped fathers and people that children should be able to look up to in their families from the homes of Black families in the name of government paternalism,” he said. “And that, I’m afraid, is where this kind of legislation takes us — it takes us away from the important dream of judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.”
The bill has not been advanced to a floor vote but it has received support from President Joe Biden whose press secretary, Jen Psaki, told reporters in February that he would be in favor of such a commission.
“He certainly would support a study of reparations,” she said though stopping short of saying he’d sign it if it landed on his desk, adding they would wait to “see what happens through the legislative process.”
The vote on the bill came less than a month after Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb, approved legislation to make available hundreds of thousands of dollars to right decades of wrongs committed by the city’s discriminatory housing practices against its Black residents as part of a reparations program.
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Yep, more taxpayer money wasted, buy the vote and destroy the hardworking American taxpayer. Since all white Conservative people are insulted, by being called “racists”, I think we Conservatives should be given “reparations”. Our reparations / reward should be sending all liberals to North Korea.
AND who’s exactly gonna be selected to PAY FOR all these reparations???
And how much will the Muslim slave traders going to pay Preparations ???
NOT a damn dime… Not a damn thing.
Before they even CONSIDER approving this, they need to incorporate ALL other Countries who contributed to slavery, INCLUDING before the United States of America was created. Blacks will NOT be the only race. Asians, Caucasians, Europeans, all races. Then they need to add prostitutes all over the world! Imagine where this is going? Wait, I have the best to add yet! They are obviously forgetting, or ignoring, the “elephant in the room”! You haven’t figured it out yet? What you truly should be realizing from our history is that Native Americans suffered more! Really? You didn’t learn that in school? They lost their land when confiscated by our Government. They said it was to protect the Natives, but instead turned out it was to sell the land for profit to anyone who wanted to purchase it. Did our Native Americans profit from that sale? Oh, they were uprooted from their native communities to another area secluded from the rest of the population, ousted like they were foreigners with no respect to their culture or way of life. But yet, that was the reason they were moved, to expand the culture & way of life of mankind who was treating American Indians not as equals! Isn’t THAT what reparations are about? This topic will be a disaster because there are way too many people around the world @fault here. How do think this will end? Anyone have suggestions?
BADLY.. Very badly! Which is imo their Goal!
“I’m afraid, is where this kind of legislation takes us —
it takes us away from the important dream of judging people by the content of their character and not by the color of their skin.”
Should all of the people who had relatives, mothers and fathers that were drafted and forced to fight in U.S. wars and were killed also receive reparations pay?
They should, bu if they are white, you can bet NONE will ever be forthcoming.
B S
What about the Irish and the Pilgrims and the Italian and the Polish, least not we forget the tormented by the blacks Chinese base in this country?
THEY ARE white.. they don’t matter.
absolute madness!
NAME One bill the dems have ever voted for, that was NOT sheer insane??
all registered Democrats, please send your bank account numbers to the DNC. If the Democrats vote for it, they can pay for it
Tedwis, I was going to suggest the same thing. Count me out, ha ha, like I’m going to be successful on that effort. One question I’d like answered is, how many more times are we taxpayers going to pay out reparations? I thought we already have paid.
We’ve been paying via welfare and other stuff, for literally 100 years… IT WILL NEVER be enough.
Anyone who votes to pay reparations needs to be voted out of office in the mid terms. If you want some generational wealth, you better get your *** to work and earn it.
In my opinion the only reparations that should even be talked about are to the indigenous peoples who were practically exterminated by the various European nations. But I don’t know any reasonable way to find the descendants of those Europeans.
This is yet another plan by government to rob one group of people then run the funds through an extremely inefficient bureaucracy and give very few limited “benefits.”
This is communism.
Taking from the poor, to give to the other poor and rich.
Reparations to all registered Republicans whose party ended slavery.
Aside from knocking down this idea in toto, no other solution will be fair or equitable. Who pays, only whites, what about the families of blacks who were slave owners themselves? Then there are the Repulicans, many abolitionists and fought for the North? There are all those immigrants who came to this contry long after the Civil War? Where do the reparations go? How is it divvied up. Businesses, social groupings, individuals? The blacks who came here long after, do they qualify? This certainly is a can of worms and, what’s more, very FISHy sounding.
Try a little actual history for a change. Reparations were granted and awarded immediately after the war of Northern Aggression, the first major assault upon our nations Constitution. Or how about blacks who fought for the South and refused to sigh papers swearing allegiance to the union who were rounded up and sold off shore as slaves. Some likely purchased by Harris’s ancestors. Or perhaps the black who at one point in history was the largest slave owner in Louisiana. Lots of good reading, if you read the real thing and not the progressive version.