Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash
Support for reparations can be divided by race and political affiliation.
Some 77 percent of African Americans think the descendants of people enslaved in the U.S. should be repaid in some way, according to an August 2022 poll by Pew Research that focused on reparations from the point of view of Black people. Whites, however, only support reparations by 18 percent, found a November 2022 poll by Pew Research. A whopping 90 percent of Republicans oppose reparations for Black Americans, found a 2021 poll by the University of Massachusetts Amherst and WCVB-TV out of Boston. That same poll found that 64 percent of Democrats support reparations.
But what about Black Republicans?
Black Democrats support reparations by 81 percent and Black Republicans by 64 percent. So it is a majority of Black Republicans who support the movement.
Some Black Republicans are trying to push the party to be more accepting of reparations. In an opinion article for Newsweek, Black Republican Pamela Denise Long urged the GOP to get onboard with the issue. The October 2022 article is entitled “Republicans: We Should Be Leading the Call for Reparations.”
Long is CEO of Youthcentrix Therapy Services, a business focused on helping organizations implement trauma-informed practices and diversity, equity, inclusion, and anti-racism at the systems level.
According to Long, repair are due to Black Americans because the “reality is that Black Americans descended from slaves have not received the equal protections that were constitutionally prescribed, nor the reparatory actions promised to our families. As a result, we face an $840,000 lineage wealth gap, per economists like Duke University professor Dr. William Sandy Darity. It’s this gap that Reparations would help close,” she wrote.
Long points out that closing the wealth gap would benefit the GOP.
“Our party, the GOP, believes in ‘human dignity,’ yet we too often engage in a practice that withholds dignity from millions of Americans by denying the ways present-day socioeconomic issues have historical roots. The case of Americans descended from slaves is a textbook example, while Reparations represents the opposite—as both an economic correction and a complete enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments with their original intent toward Americans freed from slavery,” she wrote.
Photo by Taylor Brandon on Unsplash
