President-elect Joe Biden has picked Susan Rice, Barack Obama’s former national security adviser, to run the White House Domestic Policy Council — an appointment that does not require Senate confirmation.
The White House Domestic Policy Council includes the president and key Cabinet members. Rice will be in charge of coordinating the policymaking process for Biden’s domestic agenda.
Known for her foreign policy prowess, Rice has shown an interest in domestic policy lately, Washington Post reported. She was a U.N. ambassador during the Obama administration, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times arguing for D.C. statehood, and considered running for Senate in Maine.
So what, if anything, has Rice said about reparations?
Dr. Sandy Darity, an expert on reparations and wealth inequality, defined “pure reparations” in a June 26 tweet.
“#purereparations is direct payment to black American descendants of US slavery of restitution sufficient to erase black-white wealth disparities,” Darity tweeted.
In a July 25, 2020 interview, David Charter with the U.K.’s The Times newspaper asked Rice if she has a view on reparations.
At the time, Rice was in the running to be Joe Biden’s vice-presidential pick.
“It’s something I’ve thought about. It’s not something I’ve chosen to comment on,” Rice told The Times interviewer. “I’m a very practical, pragmatic progressive and I think that the kinds of remedies that are desirable and potentially achievable fall into the realm of policies that relate to housing, to healthcare, to education. They address both racial disparities and socio-economic disparities and obviously the socio-economic disparities are not limited to African Americans. So those are the kind of things that I think are more viable and achievable objectives.”
In an effort to clarify her response, the interviewer for The Times asked Rice, “So a Susan Rice approach to reparations would be investment, in schools…”
“Don’t even use that word in the same sentence as me,” Rice responded. “Because I have not. That would be putting concepts and words in my mouth that I have not used.”
Mentioned as a possible replacement for retiring Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012, she withdrew from consideration after controversy related to the September 2012 terrorist attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya left four Americans dead, NBC reported. Conservatives accused Rice of lying and trying to downplay the premeditated nature of the attack.
Rice was appointed to the Netflix board of directors in March 2018. She sold some of her Netflix shares worth $305,323 in August 2020 amid speculation that she could be named Democratic Biden’s running mate. “Ambassador Rice’s sale of a fraction of her Netflix stock has nothing to do with VP speculation,” Rice spokeswoman Erin Pelton said at the time.
“Obama officials can get paid from Facebook, Netflix, Amazon, Google,etc but when it comes to REPARATIONS, they have 0 risk appetite. It’s smart for the corporate confederacy to put Rice in charge of the domestic portfolio.I never said they weren’t SMART,” The Moguldom Nation CEO Jamarlin Martin tweeted.
Rice’s net worth in 2016 was between $14.7 million and $28.5 million, according to a financial disclosure statement she made as Obama’s national security adviser, Fortune reported. Those assets did not include her two homes and her husband Ian Cameron’s inherited wealth.
Rice has been an outspoken critic of racist behavior in the past.
She slammed the Trump administration as “racist to its core” and said that supportive senators belong in the “trash heap of history,” The Hill reported. She called out Trump for his response to protests against police brutality and systemic racism after the president called demonstrators “thugs” and threatened to unleash “vicious” dogs on them.
House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-Columbia, the highest-ranking African-American member of Congress, spoke about pure reparations in a 2019 interview.
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“I think pure reparations would be impossible to implement,” Clyburn said. “But we can deal with the issue (of racial inequality) if we just admit, first of all, that it exists and then come up with some straightforward ways to deal with it.”
Clyburn said he fears reparations would lead to contested debates about who would be eligible due to the sprawling family trees that have evolved in the generations since slavery was abolished, the Post & Courier reported.
Instead, Clyburn proposes a “10-20-30” policy — a formula that calls for directing 10 percent of government funds to counties where 20 percent or more of the population has lived below the poverty line for the past 30 years.
“To me, that’s a much better way to deal with what reparations is supposed to be about,” Clyburn said.
