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Kamala Harris and Reparations
Will a Harris presidency deliver some real justice for black people?
I know what the world has done to my brother, and how narrowly he has survived it. And I know, which is much worse, and this is the crime of which I accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither I nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it.
— James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
Vice President Kamala Harris has indicated that she supports providing reparations to the descendants of black slaves and for the hundreds of years of continuing racial discrimination against their progeny — us.
Harris addressed the issue of slavery reparations several times while running for president in 2020. However, she offered few specifics as to what such a thing would actually look like. She did say, though, as a general matter, that the federal government should provide living black people race-specific benefits because of the legacies of black slavery and racial discrimination. She has said that beginning even before the “official” founding of this nation-state and throughout its 250-year history, the “government” has purposely, deliberately, and effectively made it impossible for the masses of black Americans to thrive socio-economically.
“We have to be honest that people in this country do not start from the same place or have access to the same opportunities,” Harris said in a statement shared with The New York Times in February 2019. “I’m serious about taking an approach that would change policies and structures and make real investments in black communities.”
Those words followed a 2019 appearance on Charlemagne The God’s “The Breakfast Club,” radio show. There, the then-Senator Harris affirmed that she favored “some type” of reparations. She provided no specifics as to what form reparations should take or how government policies would or could be manipulated or introduced to administer a reparations initiative. She did address the idea of cash payments to black people:
“If we’re talking about writing a check, I don’t think it is that simple,” she said. “And frankly, I don’t support an idea…
