Mitch McConnell on reparations

Just in time for Juneteenth 2019, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, weighed in on reparations by the US government for slavery:

“I don’t think reparations for something that happened 150 years ago for whom none us currently living are responsible is a good idea …

“We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We elected an African-American president.

“I think we’re always a work in progress in this country, but no one currently alive was responsible for that, and I don’t think we should be trying to figure out how to compensate for it. First of all, it would be pretty hard to figure out who to compensate. …

“No, I don’t think reparations are a good idea.”

Juneteenth celebrates June 19th 1865 when the slaves were freed in Texas. But it was the freedom to go hungry: they did not get “40 acres and a mule”, as some had proposed, they got nothing, nothing for the hundreds of years of slave labour that helped to build the country. To this day the wealth gap between Blacks and Whites remains wide, on the order of 14 to 1 as of 2014.

Mitch McConnell, the Republican leader of the Senate, was born to Whiteness in 1942 in Alabama in the Deep South. Jim Crow was law till he was a grown man. To this day, over 50 years later, he is still against making it easy for Black people to vote.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, who wrote “The Case for Reparations” in 2014, said of McConnell’s comments:

“For a century after the Civil War black people were subjected to a relentless campaign of terror, a campaign that extended well into the lifetime of Majority leader McConnell.”

and:

“Majority Leader McConnell cited civil-rights legislation yesterday, as well he should, because he was alive to witness the harassment, jailing, and betrayal of those responsible for that legislation by a government sworn to protect them. He was alive for the redlining of Chicago and the looting of black homeowners of some $4 billion…

“Victims of that plunder are very much alive today. I am sure they’d love a word with the majority leader.”

H.R. 40: Coates was speaking at hearings in Congress on H.R. 40, the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. It would set up a committee to study the matter of reparations, something Coates has urged as the next step, something the US government has never done, even though slavery ended over 150 years ago, even though H.R. 40 has been introduced to Congress every year for the past 30 years.

Sheila Jackson Lee, the Texas Congresswoman who introduced H.R. 40 this year, said of McConnell’s comment:

“Payments are not the focus of H.R. 40. Knowledge is the focus of H.R. 40. … [McConnell] can’t deny the free labor that slavery brought; he can’t deny the people who died in transit; and he can’t deny that this is the 400th anniversary of the beginning of the slave trade.”

McConnell is against even studying the issue!

– Abagond, 2019.

See also:

• reparations
  • Bernie Sanders on reparations
  • UN on reparations
  • Ta-Nehisi Coates on reparations
  • H.R. 40
  • 40 acres and a mule
  • ADOS
• Black Americans
  • 1619
  • American slavery
  • Juneteenth
  • Jim Crow
  • The New Jim Crow
  • racial wealth gap
• tropes:
  • Teflon Theory of History
•  arguments:
  • The Black president argument
  • How to talk like a mobster’s daughter-in-law

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