Dems Schedule Hearing on 'Path to Restorative Justice,' Slavery Reparations
The issue of reparations for slavery will move front and center next week as a House committee holds a hearing on how, and if, the nation should compensate the descendants of slaves.
The House Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties hearing is scheduled for June 19, celebrated as Juneteenth to mark the date in 1865 when the end of slavery was announced in Texas.
The hearing will “examine, through open and constructive discourse, the legacy of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, its continuing impact on the community and the path to restorative justice,” The Associated Press reported.
Reparations supporters including writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and actor Danny Glover are scheduled to testify.
The House panel is considering legislation sponsored by Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas that would create a 13-member commission to present Congress with a report on the issue of reparations, CNN reported.
“The real issue is whether and how this nation can come to grips with the legacy of slavery that still infects current society,” Jackson Lee has said in a statement.
“While we have focused on the social effects of slavery and segregation, its continuing economic implications remain largely ignored by mainstream analysis. These economic issues are the root cause of many critical issues in the African-American community today, such as education, healthcare and criminal justice policy, including policing practices.”
Democratic presidential candidates including Sens. Cory Booker of New Jersey and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts have said they support the concept of reparations.
“So I believe it’s time to start the national full-blown conversation about reparations in this country,” Warren said in March. “And that means I support the bill in the House to appoint a congressional panel of experts, people that are studying this and talk about different ways we may be able to do it and make a report back to Congress, so that we can as a nation do what’s right and begin to heal.”
Booker introduced a companion version of the House bill in the Senate in April. It is co-sponsored by Warren and other Democratic presidential candidates including Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Kamala Harris of California, Kirsten Gillibrand of New York and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota.
“We cannot address the institutional racism and white supremacy that has economically oppressed African-Americans for generations without first fully documenting the extent of the harms of slavery and its painful legacy,” Booker said in a statement, according to The Root.
“It’s important that we right the wrongs of our nation’s most discriminatory policies, which halted the upward mobility of African-American communities. I’m encouraged to see this legislation to study the issue gain support in Congress and the shared commitment my colleagues have in doing our part to repair the harm done to African-Americans.”
In a March column in The Washington Post, columnist George Will looked askance at the current call for reparations.
Will argued that “there must be some statute of limitations to close the books on attempts to assign guilt across many generations to many categories of offenders (racial, ethnic, class).”
“If, however, you doubt that American discord can become much worse, try launching a scramble among racial and ethnic constituencies to assign varying degrees of guilt to others for varying degrees of injuries. Should reparations be means-tested, making affluent African Americans ineligible? To avoid using moral micrometers to measure guilt and injuries, should lump sums (taken from whom? by what mechanism?) be awarded to groups?” he wrote.
Will noted that the reparations conversation is not based on reality.
“But today’s flippant talk about reparations illustrates a worsening pattern of behavior among congressional Democrats, including presidential candidates,” he wrote.
“A quarter-baked idea (reparations, a Green New Deal, Medicare-for-all) is floated. There is a stampede to endorse it before thinking about the idea’s dependence on enormous revenue of unknown origin and/or unavailable technologies. Then, when details, or the lack thereof, reveal the idea’s wild impracticality, the stampeders breezily say: Nevertheless, the idea is virtuous because it is ‘aspirational.’”
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