The White House offered a qualified endorsement of reparations for black Americans and a study into whether they should be compensated for over 200 years of slavery on United States soil.
President Joe Biden backs “a number of components” of Democratic-written H.R. 40, including the House bill’s funding of a proposed reparations commission, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Thursday.
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Biden believes the study is “the next important step forward and something that he feels would be absolutely correct in addressing this moment in history,” Psaki told reporters. “I don’t have more of an assessment of the legislation.”
Biden inadvertently reinvigorated the reparations debate this week with his trip to Tulsa, Oklahoma, where he marked the centennial anniversary of the city’s “Black Wall Street” race massacre. The president announced a package of measures designed to close the racial wealth gap but did not publicly comment on the issue of reparations, which an Oklahoma commission recommended in 2001.
“He also supports a study, as we’ve said before, into reparations but believes that, first and foremost, the task in front of us is to root out systemic racism where it exists right now,” White House spokeswoman Karine Jean-Pierre told reporters Tuesday on Air Force One en route to Tulsa.
Biden advised members of the Congressional Black Caucus to temper their expectations regarding reparations as he competes for legislative priorities.
“He didn’t disagree with what we’re doing,” Rep. Brenda Lawrence, the CBC’s second vice-chairwoman and a Michigan Democrat, told Politico. “He did talk about his plate [being] full with trying to get the infrastructure bill passed and that he really wanted to make sure that he could get that through before he took on anything else.”
H.R. 40 was first introduced to Congress in 1989 by the late Rep. John Conyers, another Michigan Democrat, but lawmakers never seriously considered it until George Floyd’s death in police custody last year. Biden has backed the proposal, though conditioned his support on whether final language also included provisions for Native Americans.
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As many as 300 black Tulsa residents were killed with another 10,000 left homeless in 1921 after their white neighbors looted and destroyed businesses and houses in the city’s once-thriving Greenwood District, then known as “Black Wall Street.”
The two days of violence were triggered after 19-year-old Dick Rowland, a black man, was accused of assaulting 17-year-old Sarah Page, a white girl. Many insurance companies declined claims made by the black residents, contributing to inter-generational financial losses.
