President-elect Joe Biden has tapped a prominent advocate of reparations for his Treasury transition team.
Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor at the University of California, Irvine School of Law and author of the book The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap, has joined Biden’s transition.
In tweets unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon, Baradaran watched then-Democratic candidates sidestep the issue.
“Dear Kamala, Reparations or go home,” Baradaran tweeted in 2019.
“Biden just dodged that reparations question like a much nimbler and younger man,” she wrote on Twitter later that year.
As a member of the Treasury Department’s agency review team, Baradaran “will help lay the foundation” for the incoming administration. Agency transition teams are tasked with addressing such challenges as the economy, racial disparities, and more, the transition said.
In her 2017 book, Baradaran argues for racial redress by providing compensation for damages, an issue neither Biden nor Vice President-elect Kamala Harris took a position on during the campaign cycle.
“A reparations program could take many forms from simple cash payments or baby bonds to more complex schemes such as subsidized college tuition, basic income, housing vouchers, or subsidized mortgage credit,” she writes.
Earlier this year, Baradaran called reparations “the only answer” in an interview with HuffPost.
Pointing to purchases of corporate bonds by the Federal Reserve this summer, Baradaran told Mother Jones that current monetary policy “is not neutral … and you have that recognition from the Biden campaign.”
Biden has said he would look at the issue. His campaign plan to “Build Back Better by Advancing Racial Equity Across the American Economy” includes policies for affordable housing and homeownership, small business investment, and tuition assistance for historically black schools.
However, it does not include calls for direct monetary compensation for the black community.
“Agency review team members were chosen because they are well-respected in their fields and understand the work required to restore good governance across federal agencies,” a Biden-Harris transition spokesperson said in a statement to the Washington Examiner. “They will work to ensure the incoming Biden-Harris administration can achieve the policy goals of President-elect Biden and Vice President-elect Harris.”
The spokesperson pointed to a statement made by Biden during the Democratic primaries to the Washington Post: “While my administration takes major actions to address systemic racism, it will also study how reparations may be part of those efforts and ensure the voices of descendants are central when gathering data and information.”
Harris, too, has failed to establish a position on reparations. “When you are talking about the years and years and years of trauma that were experienced because of slavery, because of Jim Crow and because of all that we have seen in terms of institutional and legal discrimination and racism, this is very real, and it needs to be studied,” she said during a 2019 CNN town hall amid the Democratic primary.
Before advising Biden’s transition, Baradaran helped Sens. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts, as well as former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, on racial wealth gap proposals.
Neither Baradaran nor the Biden-Harris transition responded to a request for comment.
Biden and Harris are emphasizing diversity, writing in a statement that they are “proud to have one of the most diverse agency review teams in presidential transition history.”
The transition team said more than 50% of agency review members are women and that about 40% of advisers are from groups historically underrepresented in the federal government, such as racial minorities, people with disabilities, and those in the gay and transgender community.
Such personnel decisions suggest a strong interest in addressing racial disparities.
Other members of Biden’s economic transition team confirmed by the Washington Examiner include longtime Biden advisers Jared Bernstein and Don Graves, Obama White House senior policy adviser Cecilia Muñoz, and Joelle Gamble, an advocate for financial sector reform who interned at the Treasury in 2018.
