Congresswoman leading reparations movement says wealthy Black Americans deserve payments, too

A House Democrat who introduced a resolution calling for the U.S. to spend trillions of dollars on reparations for Black Americans says there won’t be an income cap for receiving the payout.

All Black Americans would qualify for reparations because, regardless of their current economic status, their ancestors suffered the indignity of slavery, said the resolution’s author, Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania.

“Whether or not a Black American, a Black descendant of American chattel slavery, were able to break into the middle class, they are still and they were able to do that despite the harms, despite the past injustices done to them,” she said.

Ms. Lee continued, “They are not excluded from the reparation and the remedies therein. When we think about who traces their lineage back, that is, again, a debate that is used to try to silence the rest of this movement. It’s a distraction tactic.”

Ms. Lee said that too often, the reparations movement gets “bogged down” over questions of who qualifies.

“Should they make $25 an hour, or should they be paid below a living wage? Should they have been educated? Or if they’re educated, does that disqualify? No! They are Black. If they are Black and they are descendants of slaves, then they were directly in the lineage of harm,” she said.

“If they are descendants of Jim Crow, Jim Crow policies in this country, they are the direct descendants and current living recipients of that harm.”

Ms. Lee’s resolution references U.S. slavery, Jim Crow laws, and other racially biased laws and policies to justify spending trillions of taxpayer dollars to Black Americans.

The resolution specifically makes a 135-point argument for reparations, describing the enduring detriments of slavery, racism, discrimination and violence against the descendants of slaves.

Her resolution has a nearly impossible uphill climb in the GOP-controlled House, but Ms. Lee said her strategy right now is “to educate.”

“We’re going to continue to organize. We’re going to continue, whether it be locality by locality, district by district,” she said. “We’ll continue to build up the army of folks who we need to speak truth to power and demand  that which we are owed and what is due to us.”

She’s not alone.

Rep. Ayanna Pressley, Massachusetts Democrat, introduced a bill in February that would establish a federal commission to study U.S. slavery and reparation proposals.

The commission would be charged with investigating the enduring impacts of slavery and its aftermath, along with creating proposals for reparations to Black Americans who are descendants of slaves.

Ms. Pressley urged her Democratic colleagues to step up and support their efforts, even though the popularity of “racial reckoning” has waned in recent years.

“People that said they were a part of a so-called racial reckoning are nowhere to be found in this moment now that the headlines have faded, and so too has their commitment to do this work,” Ms. Pressley said.

“To Democrats, I want to say it is not enough for us to simply say, ’We ain’t them.’ This is an opportunity and a moment to affirm exactly who we are as people of conscience,” she said. “And there’s a lot of conflicting analysis and punditry about why we find ourselves in the moment we are in now, and why Donald Trump has a second occupancy in the White House.”

In recent years, legislatures in blue states, including New York, California and Maryland, have launched commissions to study reparations in recent years.