Advocates Hope Harris Will Boost Momentum on Reparations to Black Americans

In 2019, in her first campaign for president, then-Sen. Kamala Harris called for “some form of reparations” for Black Americans and threw her support behind legislation to study the issue of repayment for historic wrongs.

Since then, spurred by the 2020 murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, the reparations movement has notched victories across the country, including some in the Democrat’s home state of California.

Reparations advocates say Harris’s past comments and her new position as the first Black and Asian American woman to head a presidential ticket give them renewed hope that the movement to provide recompense for Black Americans for decades of discrimination could gain new, national traction.

“We have a Black woman with a lived experience and a heart for the Black community,” said Robin Rue Simmons, a former alderman in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Ill., who pushed a program that provides qualifying Black residents with $25,000 to address the city’s history of housing discrimination. “I believe that Vice President Kamala Harris is the leader to advance this conversation at the federal level.”

But how Harris feels now, five years after expressing support in her first presidential campaign, how high the issue rests in her priorities and what impact that may have on the coalition of voters she must assemble to defeat Republican Donald Trump remains a mystery.

Since becoming the Democratic nominee, Harris’s campaign, speaking for her, has rejected her 2019 opposition to fracking, the practice of extracting natural gas that is popular in vote-heavy Pennsylvania, her past support of a single payer health care program and her more liberal proposals on immigration.

The Harris campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment on her current position on reparations.

Some Harris allies argue that support for reparations could help her attract Black voters who have been swayed somewhat by Trump’s economic message.

“There are people who support this and would be more politically engaged if this were a part of our political discourse,” Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-N.Y.) said in an interview before Harris accepted the nomination. “But it isn’t, so they’re staying home or some are even moving to the Republican Party because it feels like Democrats are taking Black voters for granted.”

Yet even some advocates worry that a forceful call for reparations could alienate more voters than it energizes.

While Democratic cities and states have pushed for reparations, the programs still face stiff political headwinds nationally. Just about a quarter of Americans support the federal government paying reparations to the descendants of enslaved Black Americans, according to a 2023 Washington Post-Ipsos poll.

The poll found large racial gaps in support for reparations. While 75 percent of Black Americans support federal reparations, only 15 percent of White Americans and 36 percent of Hispanic Americans agree. That has made some leery of Harris making the issue part of her argument for the presidency.

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Even during her first campaign, Harris carefully parsed her support for reparations, so much so that the headline of a 2019 interview with the Root, a publication aimed at Black Americans, declared that she “wants reparations (sort of).”

“I think there has to be some form of reparations, and we can discuss what that is,” she said in the interview with the Root. {snip}

She did not endorse specific proposals but instead made broad statements of support. For example, when asked in 2019 on CNN if she supported reparations in the form of cash payments, she said: “I support that we study that.”

The systemic issues facing the Black community “are present and will continue to exist, whether or not you write a check,” Harris told the Des Moines Register in 2019 in another interview.

Some advocates say Harris should clarify whether reparations programs would solely be for Black people. In a 2019 interview with TheGrio, she said, “I’m not going to sit here and say I’m going to do something that’s only going to benefit Black people.” But she did not say what other groups she would like to see eligible.

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{snip}The Democratic National Committee’s 2020 and 2024 platform endorsed a federal commission to study the issue of reparations but reparations advocates have spent years unsuccessfully pushing the Biden administration to issue an executive order that would set up a federal commission to do so.

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