Rep. Cori Bush (D-MO) has this thought in her underdeveloped brain that the American people need to be handing reparations to every Black American as a part of slavery. On May 17th, The Squad member acted on that impulse as she introduced legislation to open federal reparations for black Americans.
In the draft, Bush claims the United States “has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people.” To make up for this, Bus is requesting $14 trillion to be spread out amongst the black citizens. In her mind that figure will help close the nonexistent racial wage gap.
Fortunately, these ideas are not that new to Congress. Reps John Conyers Jr (D-MI) and Sheila Jackson (D-TX) have also tried and failed to get legislation of their own through. Conyers back in 1989, and Jackson in 2019. Shutting them down in their tracks has been largely successful, the 2020 Presidential debates found candidates vowing that the issue would need to be studied before anything could happen.
While studies as recently as 2021 by the Washington Post have shown the US has warmed up to the idea, with little over a quarter of Americans surveyed being in favor of the idea, 65% staunchly opposed the idea. Needless to say, it has a long way to go to become a popular idea. Naturally, it has been heavily split across racial lines, with nearly 2/3rd of blacks favoring the idea, and a tremendously low 18% of white supporting the idea.
Advocates for reparations like Dreisen Heath think that they lost their opportunity. He believes that the summer of 2020 would have been perfect to do this, as everyone was angry due to the death of George Floyd.
Speaking with the Post, he said “We squandered the moment during the summer of 2020 when demands were on the table including reparations. Three years later, people are still dying, circumstances, economically and politically, have not changed, and we’re in economic conditions eerily similar to where we were when historic civil rights legislation passed in the 1960s.”
While the economic realities have some parallels to the 1960s, the racial tension is nowhere near the same. The people of the country have largely become more integrated and are doing their best to get along. However, the mainstream media wants to keep the American people divided. The leftists know that their message of dividing us based on our differences instead of uniting us by our similarities wins them more attention from major media and thereby votes.
These reparations would do nothing but reopen old wounds, rub salt in them, and then try to act like everything is fine now. Instead, all it will do is open the door for more reparations down the line when these are squandered, or inflation makes them useless. As it stands the number proposed spread out over the 47,200,000 estimated population of black Americans would end up receiving $275,000 each.
A figure like this might buy a house with some land in rural Alabama or North Dakota, but it won’t even buy a broom closet in New York City or San Francisco. This money won’t build the “generational wealth” that they consistently claim whites have that blacks lack the ability to generate because of slavery. Instead, it helps push the apple cart along the path a bit faster, but it will quickly run out.
Wasting money to reignite further hatred and violence is not the answer. It won’t fix anything, and it will instead just weaken our already handicapped nation. While people like California’s leftist Gov. Gavin Newsom might support such horrific ideas, we must stand as a united front against this socialism disguised as reparations.
