House panel holds hearing on reparations for slavery

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A House Judiciary subcommittee is gathering to debate H.R. 40, a bill that would study how the U.S. would implement reparations to black Americans, amid a national conversation about what the federal government owes descendants of slaves. Sen. Cory Booker, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and actor Danny Glover are among the witnesses set to testify before the panel.

According to his prepared remarks, Booker is expected to tell the panel that the nation has “yet to truly acknowledge and grapple with the racism and white supremacy that tainted this country’s founding and continues to cause persistent and deep racial disparities and inequality. These disparities don’t just harm black communities, they harm all communities.”

Few Republican members of the subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties attending the hearing. The ranking member of the subcommittee, GOP Rep. Mike Johnson, said in his opening statement that it would be difficult to provide financial compensation to black Americans for the actions undertaken by a “small” subset of slave-owning Americans. A few members of the audience scoffed, asking, “Small?”

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Johnson said that reparations would be “unconstitutional on its face,” eliciting boos and hisses from the audience. Johnson argued that it would not be constitutional to recompense people for hardships experienced by their ancestors.

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Sen. Cory Booker is testifying at the House Judiciary subcommittee hearing on HR 40, which would study reparations. Grace Segers

H.R. 40, which was named for the post-Civil War promise of “40 acres and a mule” as compensation for former slaves, has languished in the House since former Rep. John Conyers first introduced it in 1989. But Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee reintroduced the bill in January. Reparations used to be a fringe idea — at least among white politicians — but it’s been receiving more attention from mainstream Democrats in the 2020 presidential campaign. Many of the declared Democratic presidential candidates have staked a position on reparations, or at least support having a national conversation about the issue.

Coates wrote the seminal 2014 essay in The Atlantic, “The Case for Reparations,” which stirred interest in reparations among reporters and politicians. The piece argued that black Americans deserve compensation not only for slavery, but for the legacy of domestic terrorism against black people post-Civil War, segregation, as well as for redlining, a practice used by mortgage providers that kept black people from obtaining mortgages. 

Booker’s proposed American Opportunity Accounts Act, commonly known as “baby bonds,” would provide every child born in the United States with a $1,000 savings bond, regardless of race. The child would receive an additional deposit from the government every year, with those in the poorest families receiving up to $2,000. The child would be able to access the account at age 18, and only for allowable uses, like education and home ownership. The idea of the proposal is to help reduce the racial income inequality gap.

However, many Republicans remain opposed to reparations, arguing that no one responsible for slavery is alive today. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said Tuesday that he believed rights for black Americans had advanced enough to render reparations unnecessary.

“I don’t think that reparations for something that happened 150 years ago, for whom none of us currently living are responsible, is a good idea. We tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a Civil War, by passing land mark civil rights legislation. We elected an African American president,” McConnell said. McConnell once made it his mission to make President Obama a one-term president, and worked to block legislation supported by Obama throughout the tenure of the first African American president.

Sen. Lindsey Graham said that he did not know “where it stops” if one implements reparations.

“I just think we are so far removed from the event, it was the original sin of the country. I think let’s just make it a more perfect union rather than look backward because I don’t know where it stops when you do that,” Graham said. “We’re not a perfect country but we’re trying to form a more perfect union and I don’t think this helps.”

A few hundred people lined up outside the doors of the hearing room before it began, including a line of people raising their fists in the black power symbol. Dozens of people were ushered into the overflow room to view the hearing on video.

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