Following a House subcommittee hearing on reparations for slavery, and with more and more Democratic presidential candidates going all in on the idea, President Trump was asked this week for his thoughts on the controversy. He didn’t have much to say on the divisive issue — except that he just can’t see it happening.
Trump addressed reparations in an interview with The Hill. “President Trump on Monday said he doesn’t believe the federal government will pursue reparations for descendants of slaves, an idea that has gained traction among some Democrats,” The Hill reported Monday.
“I don’t see it happening,” Trump told the outlet. “I think it’s a very unusual thing,” he added. “You have a lot of — it’s been a very interesting debate. I don’t see it happening, no.”
Trump’s comments come amid a renewed national debate over the question of the federal government repaying the descendents of slaves for the debt owed to their ancestors. Last week, the Democrat-led House Judiciary Committee debated the issue in what The Hill notes is the first hearing on reparations in a decade. The committee invited individuals to speak both on behalf and against the idea.
As The Daily Wire highlighted, among those who spoke against reparations was Quillette columnist Coleman Hughes. “In 2008, the House of Representatives formally apologized for slavery and Jim Crow,” Hughes told the committee Wednesday. “In 2009, the Senate did the same. Black people don’t need another apology. We need safer neighborhoods and better schools. We need a less punitive criminal justice system. We need affordable health care. And none of these things can be achieved through reparations for slavery. … If we were to pay reparations today, we would only divide the country further, making it harder to build the political coalitions required to solve the problems facing black people today; we would insult many black Americans by putting a price on the suffering of their ancestors; and we would turn the relationship between black Americans and white Americans from a coalition into a transaction — from a union between citizens into a lawsuit between plaintiffs and defendants.”
Hughes and the other African Americans who spoke against reparations have come under fire from those for the idea, including New York Times writer Jamelle Bouie, who suggested that Hughes and others had “no apparent qualifications other than being black.” “So will the Republican members of the subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties have anyone serious speaking against reparations or will they just invite Candace Owens again to do her thing?” he tweeted (formatting adjusted). “According to @emarvelous it looks like they’ll have this guy who wrote an op-ed and a college sophomore up against [checks notes] economists, experts, a US senator, and Ta-Nehisi Coates, who brought this all into the mainstream. It is indicative of the fundamental contempt Republicans have for this conversation that their speakers have no apparent qualifications other than being black.”
Among the political leaders against reparations is Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, who told ABC News at a press conference last week that reparations is not “a good idea.”
“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years — for whom none of us currently living are responsible — is a good idea,” said McConnell, The Daily Wire reported last week. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation, by electing an African American president,” he said. “I think we’re always a work in progress in this country but no one currently alive was responsible for that.”
How exactly we would “figure out” whom to compensate, he argued, would be tough. “We’ve had waves of immigrants, as well, who have come to this country and experienced dramatic discrimination of one kind or another,” McConnell said. “So no, I don’t think reparations are a good idea.”
The Democratic presidential candidate most strongly pushing the idea is Sen. Cory Booker, who introduced a reparations bill to the Senate in April. “This bill is a way of addressing head-on the persistence of racism, white supremacy, and implicit racial bias in our country,” Booker said. “It will bring together the best minds to study the issue and propose solutions that will finally begin to right the economic scales of past harms and make sure we are a country where all dignity and humanity is affirmed.”
“Since slavery in this country, we have had overt policies fueled by white supremacy and racism that have oppressed African-Americans economically for generations,” he argued. “Many of our bedrock domestic policies that have ushered millions of Americans into the middle class have systematically excluded blacks through practices like ‘G.I. Bill’ discrimination and redlining.”