White House senior adviser Cedric Richmond told Axios on Sunday: “We don’t want to wait on a study. We’re going to start acting now.”
“We have to start breaking down systemic racism and barriers that have held people of color back and especially African Americans,” Richmond elaborated to the outlet. “We have to do stuff now.”
“If you start talking about free college tuition to [historically black colleges and universities] and you start talking about free community college in Title I and all of those things, I think that you are well on your way,” he stated, remarking that a timeline for Congress’s commission to examine reparations was unknown.
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Reparations have been used in other circumstances to offset large moral and economic debts - paid to Japanese Americans interned during World War Two, to families of Holocaust survivors and to Blacks in post-apartheid South Africa.
But the United States has never made much headway in discussions of whether or how to compensate African Americans for more than 200 years of slavery and help make up for racial inequality.
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Legislation for reparations was first proposed by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.) in 1989. In recent years, Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) has many times proposed the measure.
White House press secretary Jen Psaki last month explained to reporters that Biden is open to forming a commission to study the proposal.
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“He certainly would support a study of reparations,” she announced. “He understands we don’t need a study to take action right now on systemic racism, so he wants to take actions within his own government in the meantime.”
The concept of reparations has been labeled as problematic for many reasons, including how recipients of reparations would be chosen, how much would be doled out, who would foot the bill, and how much it would actually cost.
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House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) announced in 2019 to the Post and Courier that “pure reparations would be impossible to implement, but we can deal with the issue [of racial inequality] if we just admit, first of all, that it exists and then come up with some straightforward ways to deal with it.”
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In the interview, Clyburn announced a discussion about reparations would lead to a debate about who would be eligible due to large family trees that have come about following the cancellation of slavery more than 150 years ago. Clyburn stated that some white people could make claims to reparations, stating they have family ties to former slaves.
“Is that a fair way to do it?” Clyburn asked. “I say not.”
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