What should Americans pay for the legacy of slavery and a century of Jim Crow segregation?
For decades, the question was mostly academic. Democrats and activists then seized on it during a time of racial reexamination after the 2020 killing of George Floyd, and several cities and states created commissions to study reparations for black Americans.
Now, as these commissions announce their recommendations, the political climate is very different from just three years ago. A widespread “anti-woke” movement on the right has targeted programs aimed at social and racial justice, and the hard cash figures being proposed as reparations are causing sticker shock. A California task force recently recommended more than $500 billion in reparations for black residents. San Francisco is considering $100 billion in compensation. And Representative Cori Bush of Missouri said $14 trillion was the true national cost.
Republicans have seized on the numbers to argue that the left’s pursuit of social justice has stalled. But for Democrats, the resurgence of a long-dormant issue raises a deeper set of problems on the horizon.
Democratic officials had for years endorsed the idea of reparations as a distant ideal to close the racial wealth gap, a position that appealed to many black voters, who are the party’s most loyal constituency. But headline recommendations from state and local lawmakers and task forces are forcing Democratic leaders to grapple with the financial and political implications sooner than many would have liked.
Few Democrats in positions of power are serious about spending billions of dollars to redistribute wealth to the descendants of slaves. But that reality is putting party leaders eager to retain the loyalty of black voters in the awkward position of finding ways to say no, or not yet, or change the subject entirely pending some dramatic improvement in the economy
The California task force set a price tag of up to $1.2 million each for reparations owed to older black residents as compensation for the state’s long history of housing discrimination, mass incarceration , unequal health care and other harms described in his report. But Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat who signed the bill creating the task force, dodged the issue of costs, saying the reparations are “much more than cash payments.”
San Francisco’s board of supervisors expressed support for setting aside $5 million in compensation for some residents, but Mayor London Breed, a Democrat who is black, has not committed to the payments.
Both President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, as candidates in 2020, endorsed a federal reparations study but have expended little political capital to advance the project in the White House. Mr. Biden has spoken about the legacy of systemic racism in America, but he has not issued an executive order to create a commission to study reparations, as some have urged.
“As long as people are talking about it, it’s positive for Democrats,” said David Townsend, a Sacramento-based consultant to many of the moderate Democrats in the California Legislature. “The problems don’t start until you have to start writing the checks.”
The issue presents a dilemma that is quietly dividing the Democratic voter base. At the polls, black voters generally support repairsbut other groups that Democrats can’t afford to alienate before the 2024 presidential race are largely opposed, including white, Asian and Hispanic voters.
According to survey of american adults conducted by the Pew Research Center in 2021, fewer than one in three Americans agree that the descendants of slaves should be compensated in some way, such as with land or money. Seventy-seven percent of black adults favored reparations, but only 18 percent of white adults did. Among Hispanics, support was 39 percent, and among Asians, 33 percent. About half of Democrats said descendants of slaves should be compensated, while only 8% of Republicans agreed.
A small group of black activists has led the way the impulse of repairs for years, working to a great extent in the academic field, think tanks and non-profit groups. But in the months following the murder of Mr. Floyd, a broader cross section of Americans, including politicians and religious leaders, became more vocal in their calls for direct compensation.
The Reverend Al Sharpton was among those who helped put the issue of reparations on the Democratic political agenda during the party’s 2020 primaries.
In an interview, Mr. Sharpton said that even if there was never a hard cash payout, putting a price on injustice was a worthy exercise that forced an examination of history, as Republicans widely deny that past racism has left an uneven playing field today. . If the provocative dollar amounts caused Americans to consider the extent of the country’s moral obligation to black people, he suggested, that could lead to a more productive conversation about other ways to deal with that debt.
“I think once we get mainstream America to say, whether they said grudgingly, belatedly or whatever, ‘Yes, we owe it,’ then you can have a better discussion about how we pay,” he said Mr. Sharpton. “I don’t think we’ve been successful enough that the United States has to come to the question of ‘Should we?'”
Critics of reparations argue that the United States already made up for the historical injustice by passing historic civil rights and voting rights laws in the 1960s and establishing a social safety net, including welfare and affirmative action programs in the university admissions and recruitment, to lift people out of poverty. . They say it is morally wrong to force Americans whose ancestors had no role in slavery or Jim Crow to atone for the past and have raised the possibility of legal challenges. The Supreme Court is expected to ban race-conscious college admissions in a decision this spring.
The legal argument of conservative critics of reparations is that government payments based on race violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. In California, the task force decided that eligibility should be tied not only to race but to direct lineage, determining that any descendant of enslaved African Americans or a “free black person living in the United States before of the late 19th century” should receive repairs. Some jurists have said that using direct lineage has a better chance of withstanding court challenges.
Sen. Tim Scott, who is the only black Republican in the Senate and announced a presidential bid on Monday, has rejected the idea of reparations and has been crafting a message in early GOP nominating states that America is a post-racial society.
“I am living proof that America is the land of opportunity and not the land of oppression,” said Mr. Scott while announcing his campaign in his hometown of North Charleston, SC.
The California reparations task force’s proposals will be sent to lawmakers in Sacramento, where they face major political and economic hurdles to becoming law, even in a state dominated by Democrats. For one thing, the state, whose fiscal structure leaves it open to large revenue swings from year to year, faces a projected budget shortfall of more than $31 billion. Hearings on the proposed legislation would not take place until next year.
While the task force weighed different methods of distributing reparations, such as tuition fees or housing subsidies, it opted for direct payments to offset economic inequality. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louisthe typical black family in America is worth $23,000, compared to $184,000 for white families.
“Deficits come and go,” said the Rev. Amos C. Brown, a member of the task force, who was born in Mississippi during the Jim Crow era. “As a state, we must have a moral compass that indicates that this brutal system of slavery was wrong and its legacy was accepted here in California.”
Compensation policy is complex even in liberal California. More than 40 percent of the state’s population is Latino, a group that has also faced historical discrimination. Asians are 15 percent, including descendants of downtrodden Chinese immigrant railroad workers. The state has more than 100 federally recognized Native American tribes, many of which were nearly wiped out in past centuries by white settlers. Only 6.5% of the state’s population is black.
Democrats in Congress have introduced a bill since 1989 to create a commission to study reparations, HR 40, named after the failed Civil War-era promise to freed slaves of “40 acres and a mule”. In 2021, the bill first passed the House Judiciary Committee, but did not receive a floor vote.
In recent years, the impetus for the issue has moved to the state and municipal level. Evanston, Ill.agreed to pay $25,000 to longtime black residents who suffered housing discrimination before 1970. Asheville, North Carolina, set aside $2.1 million for repairs that a commission is studying how to spend.
“The conversation of reparations for black Americans is not going away,” said Marc Morial, president of the National Urban League, noting that the federal government paid some forms of reparations to Japanese Americans after their internment in the Second World War. “This remains a pending matter. The fact that California has done something is a demonstration of the currency of this issue.”
In parallel with Democrats’ efforts at reparations, Republican-led state governments have pushed to ban the influence of critical race theory in schools, public agencies, and private businesses. Critical race theory is the concept that racism is embedded in American institutions and underpins the reparations argument.
In such a political and economic climate, black adults are very skeptical about compensation for slavery and segregation. About six in 10 black adults who support reparations in the Pew Research Center poll said repayment was not at all likely in their lifetime.
This may explain why black voters have not yet shown the same frustration with the lack of progress on reparations as they have on other issues, such as voting rights, student debt forgiveness and police reforms.
“Reparations is not a top issue of concern to African Americans in general across the country and in any of the battleground states in particular,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster and strategist.
Representative Jamaal Bowman of New York, a hard-left Democrat who supports the $14 trillion in reparations proposed by Ms. Bush, the Missouri congresswoman, said the reason black voters don’t rank the issue higher is simple.
“People have lost hope,” said Mr. Bowman.
He argued that the trillions paid would be an investment that lifts the country’s economy to all demographic groups. “We haven’t done enough to engage or explain how it would work,” he said. “This is a collective issue of justice for all people.”
