Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay on reparations for The Atlanta ushered in widespread Bernie Sanders4acclaim for the writer. As Coates acknowledged in his essay, Congressman John Conyers has proposed a bill that would study the feasibility of reparations in this country, but lawmakers won’t pass it, preferring instead to dismiss the idea out of hand. Bernie Sanders joined that group of politicians recently when revealing he would not support reparations.
“Its likelihood of getting through Congress is nil,” Sanders told Fusion in an interview. “Second of all, I think it would be very divisive.”
Although Sanders does believe in reinvestment in America’s urban areas, he doesn’t believe reparations is the way to proceed.
Shouldn’t politicians at least research the feasibility of reparations before taking a position, as Coates reasoned?
“Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for ‘appropriate remedies’”, Coates wrote in 2014.
“A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.”
http://yourblackworld.net/2016/01/15/bernie-sanders-opposes-divisive-reparations-for-african-americans/]
[url]http://yourblackworld.net/2016/01/15/bernie-sanders-opposes-divisive-reparations-for-african-americans/[/url]
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