Despite the outpouring of support for the Black Lives Matter movement and protests, this has not translated into support for reparations for Native Black Americans. In fact, when multiple polls, conducted both before and after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, are factored in it turns out that about 70 percent of white Democrats oppose reparations.
A majority of Republicans have traditionally opposed reparations. But with the Democrats reliant on the Black vote, it would be assumed Democrats — white and Black — would be pro reparations.
Floyd’s murder “heightened discussion around racism that followed have not led to substantial support for reparations among white Democrats,” Five Thirty-Eight reported. In late April and early May this year, just a quarter of white Democrats supported reparations, according to polling from Democracy Fund + UCLA Nationscape. And while in more recent polls, that support has grown to 33 percent of white Democrats, that’s nowhere near the support this policy has among Black Democrats. According to most recent polls, about two-thirds of Black Americans supported reparations both before and after Floyd’s death.
Another national survey, conducted by the Associated Press/NORC last fall, found that 74 percent of Black people agreed that the U.S. federal government should “pay reparations for slavery and racial discrimination in this country by making cash payments to the descendants of enslaved people.” Compare this to, only 15 percent of whites (of all political parties) agreed, Gallup News reported.
A more recent poll by ABC News/Ipsos poll released last month, found that nearly three-fourths of Americans believe that the federal government should not provide payments to Black Americans whose ancestors were slaves to compensate for the toll of slavery. Only 26 percent of Americans are in favor of reparations, ABC News reported.
And, 72 percent of Black Americans are also more than five times as likely to back reparations than whites (14 percent) and over twice as likely than Hispanics (34 percent).
“Although we have seen large changes in opinion on a wide variety of issues revolving around race in America, there has been only a slight change in attitudes about reparations over the last 20 years. An ABC News/Washington Post poll from June 1997 found that only 19 percent of Americans backed providing Black Americans whose ancestors were slaves with payments, while 77 percent opposed it,” ABC News reported.
Compare this to polling done in 1997, when 65 percent of Black Americans and a mere 10 percent of whites supported reparations.
Listen to GHOGH with Jamarlin Martin | Episode 73: Jamarlin Martin Jamarlin makes the case for why this is a multi-factor rebellion vs. just protests about George Floyd. He discusses the Democratic Party’s sneaky relationship with the police in cities and states under Dem control, and why Joe Biden is a cop and the Steve Jobs of mass incarceration.
In yet another poll, this one by Vice/Ipsos from 2019, three in ten Americans support reparations for the descendants of slaves. But just two in ten white Americans (19 percent) feel this way. A majority of Black Americans (62 percent) support reparations.
Bottom line, for white Democrats, reparations is not a priority.
