(Headline USA) Vice President Kamala Harris co-sponsored a bill while she was in the Senate that would have created a national reparations commission similar to California’s.
In 2019, then-Sen. Harris reintroduced the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act.
The bill would have formed a 13-member panel to “study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery, its subsequent de jure and de facto racial and economic discrimination against African-Americans,” and then offer their recommendations for “remedies” to Congress.
Potential recommendations would need to deal with current laws that “continue to disproportionately and negatively affect African-Americans as a group, and those that perpetuate the lingering effects, materially and psycho-social,” the bill said.
Though the bill didn’t go anywhere, a nearly identical version was passed in California.
The resulting California reparations commission sent its recommendations to state legislators last year. Among the radical policies it proposed were:
- $1.2 million cash payments for every black Californian
- sweeping changes to the criminal code, including the decriminalization of public urination
- curricular changes to California’s K-12 system.
Harris has expressed support for reparations several times.
“I think there has to be some form of reparations,” she said during her failed 2020 presidential campaign. “We could discuss what that is, but look, we’re looking at more than 200 years of slavery. We’re looking at almost 100 years of Jim Crow.”
The Jim Crow era of racial segregation ended 60 years ago, with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the following year’s Voting Rights Act.
Asked about the issue again during a CNN town hall, Harris said, “I support that we study [cash reparations]. We should study it and see.”
The question over whether she, herself, would be eligible for payments underscores one of the major concerns that critics have. Although Harris claims to identify as black based on her father’s Jamaican heritage, her family never suffered under the institution of slavery in the U.S., nor any of the adversities that succeeded it.
Instead, Harris—who also traces her heritage back to Jamaican slaveholders—has reaped the benefits of black identity via diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives—including President Joe Biden’s pledge to appoint a black-woman vice president—while identifying more culturally with her mother’s Indian heritage.
Harris’s reparations bill was just one example of why she was considered one of the most radically leftist senators in Congress.
She also supported the Climate Equity Act, introduced in 2020. The bill would have created a federal “Office of Climate and Environmental Justice Accountability” tasked with measuring “the costs of environmental and climate regulations on frontline communities” and ensuring those communities “benefit from such investments.”
