Vice President Kamala Harris remained silent on Monday about whether she supports a package of reparations bills in California.
Sixty-eight percent of Americans oppose reparations, a Pew Research poll found in 2022.
“I think there needs to be some form of reparations and we can discuss what that is,” Harris told The Root in 2019 when asked if “black people should get reparations.”
The Press Democrat reported on the effort among Democrats in California to deliver “direct cash payments to the African American descendants of people enslaved in the United States.”
The outlet reported Sunday:
Years of effort went into making California the first state in the nation to get reparations laws to the governor’s desk to be signed into law. Yet tonight, in the final hours of this year’s legislative session, two key bills to repair harm for African American descendants of enslaved people met their bitter demise.
Although other bills in a 14-bill reparations package introduced by the Legislature’s Black Caucus passed this session, Democratic Sen. Steven Bradford of Inglewood couldn’t convince the caucus or Assembly leaders to bring to the floor the two ambitious bills he carried independently.
Bradford’s Senate Bills 1403 and 1331 would have created a new agency and also a fund to help implement policies recommended last year by a first-in-the-nation state task force, including eventual direct cash payments to the African American descendants of people enslaved in the United States. The envisioned California American Freedmen Affairs Agency would have helped Black Californians research their genealogy, confirm their eligibility for reparations payments, and expedite their claims.
The Harris campaign did not reply to Breitbart News’s request for comment about whether Harris remains supportive of reparations and if she backs California’s Senate bills to facilitate direct cash payments to the African American descendants of people enslaved in America.
Harris, who hails from California, pledged to force taxpayers to pay “reparations for descendants of Africans enslaved” many times.
While running for president in 2020, she told Reverend Al Sharpton, an MNSBC host and activist, that she would sign a reparations bill if she became president.
“In the area of reparations for descendants of Africans enslaved: If you’re elected president would you sign that bill [Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act proposed by Representative Shelia Jackson Lee] if it came across your desk?” Sharpton asked.
“When I am elected president, I will sign that bill,” Harris replied:
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.