Monday on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” former Obama HUD Secretary and 2020 Democratic presidential primary candidate Julián Castro said if he wins, he will establish a reparations task force.
Castro said, “I have long believed that this country should resolve its original sin of slavery and that one of the ways we should consider doing that is through reparations for people who are the descendants of slaves. It is interesting to me that under our Constitution and otherwise that we compensate people if we take their property. Shouldn’t we compensate people if they were property sanctioned by the state? So I believe that that is a conversation that is worth having. And I see that as right and wrong. I don’t see that as political or non-political.”
He added, “So if I’m president, what I said was that I would establish a task force to look at how that might be done. I know that there is a lot of disagreement both about whether it should be done and if it were done, how it would be done. I’m not naive about that. But I do think that that dark cloud still hangs over our country. I believe that we ought to move forward in the 21st century as one nation with one destiny and that until that issue is resolved until that original sin is addressed, we may think that we’re moving forward as one nation and I don’t think that we ever really will.”
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