23-05-2025
Demanding slavery reparations now is proof Democrats have lost the plot
Even for a party as troubled as the Democrats, the decision by a group of lawmakers to introduce a congressional resolution demanding reparations for the descendants of enslaved Africans is particularly hairbrained. It's not that African Americans, like myself, do not deserve formal recognition for the centuries of labour our ancestors were forced to contribute to building this nation. But reparations? It's the wrong solution from the wrong party at the wrong time.
The specific legislation on the table is not new. Officially known as the Reparations Now resolution, the bill was first introduced back in 2023 by former Representative Cori Bush – then a leading member of the Democrats' ultra-progressive 'Squad', whose best-known figure is New York Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Last August, Bush was defeated in an unusually-costly Democrat primary race dominated by her aggressive criticism of Israel and its war with Hamas in Gaza.
This time, the reparations push is being led by Pennsylvania Democrat Summer Lee, another vocal Israel-critic and 'Squad' member. 'Black folks are owed more than thoughts and prayers. We're owed repair, we're owed restitution and we're owed justice,' said Lee at a press conference announcing the bill. Bush, who also attended the event, added: 'For over 400 years … America has been cashing checks written in black blood.'
Reparations Now calls upon the federal government to allocate trillions of dollars – $14 trillion in Bush's original version – for reparations atoning for slavery, as well as for the legacies of Jim Crow, housing discrimination and the effects of America's decades-long war on drugs. With African American household wealth still roughly one-sixth that of their white counterparts, according to data from the National Community Reinvestment Coalition, few could deny that there is a problem.
But Reparations Now is not the plan to address it. Beyond the logistics of such a scheme – funding, eligibility, disbursements – is the timing behind the idea's resuscitation. Lee has made clear that she is picking up where Bush left off as a direct response to the Trump White House's assaults on race-based preference programmes such as DEI.
Such thinking was also behind the reintroduction of a similar bill – HR 40 – by Representative Ayanna Pressley (D-Mass) and New Jersey Senator Cory Booker in February. HR 40 would establish a federal commission to examine the long-term effects of slavery and explore possible reparations programmes. Pressley was even more biting in her critique of the president and the necessity of reparations now than her fellow Squad-members, branding Trump's second term 'a moment of anti-Blackness on steroids'.
While it might make for easy headlines, tying reparations directly to the return of Trump makes no sense. For one thing, the relative poverty of African Americans is nothing to do with the current president: black Americans have been poor under both Republican and Democratic administrations. In fact, many African American leaders, such as Republican South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, believe that Democratic efforts to eradicate poverty among black communities through handouts – most notably President Lyndon B Johnson's 1960s'-era 'Great Society' campaign – have done more harm than good.
'What was hard to survive,' said Scott during his short-lived run for the presidency back in 2023, 'was Johnson's Great Society, where they decided to put money – where they decided to take the black father out of the household to get a check in the mail. And you can now measure that in unemployment and crime and devastation.'
Although Scott was skewered by progressives such as 1619 Project author Nikole Hannah-Jones, data from Pew reveals that Scott is likely to be speaking for a not-insignificant proportion of African Americans. Roughly 20 per cent do not support a reparations push, with higher-educated and higher-earning black Americans leading such opposition. Overall, 70 per cent of Americans believe reparations schemes are a bad idea.
It isn't particularly difficult to see why. In California, reparations commissions at both the state level and in the city of San Francisco spent years – and millions on research and task forces – but have yet to take any concrete actions. And this in a state that never had slavery. A San Francisco plan was particularly ambitious, floating a $5 million payment to every eligible black resident — a process that the Hoover Institution said would cost every local non-black family $600,000. Unsurprisingly, the scheme has been stalled by budgetary constraints.
Although such figures have yet to be considered on a national level, the price tag for bills like Lee's Reparations Now would be difficult to stomach even for most Democrats – and face almost certain legal opposition from Republicans. A modest reparations scheme in Evanston, Illinois, for instance, was sued last year by the conservative group Judicial Watch, which claims that it is unconstitutional because applicants must qualify by race. The programme – which launched in 2022 – provides $25,000 in housing grants to direct descendants of black residents harmed by historic housing discrimination.
Rather than focus on reparations schemes that spend decades in development but inevitably go nowhere, Democrats would be better served — and better serve their constituents — fixing their party and focusing on efforts that are actually likely to improve the plight of black Americans. But that would involve confronting some hard facts and making some difficult decisions. Like with their support for preferred pronouns or Pride flags, it's far easier to embrace virtue-signalling and anti-Trump bluster. The Democrats thrive on distraction – and reparations fit this mold perfectly.
David Christopher Kaufman is a New York Post columnist
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