Commissioning A Study To Consider Reparations for African Americans (H.R. 40)
Do you support or oppose this bill?
What is H.R. 40?
(Updated September 30, 2021)
This bill is tasked with a more daunting goal than perhaps any other. Its goal is to make amends for the enslavement of African American people. It would try and do so by establishing, as its name suggests, a commission to investigate reparations.
The commission would examine:
- The practice of slavery, addressing elements such as how Africans were captured, transported to, and sold in the United States;
- The ways in which federal and state governments supported slavery;
- The effects slavery had, and continues to have on the lives of African Americans after it ended, and any other types of discrimination that they face.
There’s plenty of information about those things though, the hard part. Based on these findings, the commission would have to put forth a recommendation on how the U.S. can recompense for slavery and ongoing forms of discrimination. Specifically, it would have to determine if financial compensation to the descendants of slaves is warranted and, if so, how much it should be, and how it should be distributed.
The commission would be made up of three individuals appointed by the President, three appointed by the Speaker of the House, and one person appointed by the President pro tempore. The commission would have one year to conduct its research.
Argument in favor
Until the U.S. and its inhabitants reckon with their moral debts, this country will never be whole.
Argument opposed
Yes, African Americans were brutalized, but so were other groups — you don’t see them asking for free money.
Impact
African Americans in the U.S., the President, the Speaker of the House, the President pro tempore of the Senate, taxpayers.
Cost of H.R. 40
A CBO cost estimate is unavailable. The bill would, however, appropriate $8 million to carry out its work.
Additional Info
In Depth:
It’s not unusual for a member of Congress to introduce the same piece of legislation for two years in a row — click through a couple other bills and you’re sure to find a bill for which this is the case — but this legislation is special. Sponsoring Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) has introduced it every single year since 1989, and says he’ll do so until it passes.
Though it hasn’t passed in twenty-five years of introductions, Rep. Conyers has already outlasted Congress once. He began introducing legislation to make Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday a holiday in 1968. It passed fifteen years later, in 1983.
Unlike other bills that get introduced repeatedly, the number on this one has stayed the same. It’s always been H.R. 40, in remembrance of the forty acres and a mule that the U.S. promised African Americans freed from slavery after the Civil War.
Of Note:
The idea of reparations isn’t exactly new — that forty acres and a mule was arguably the first type proposed. Martin Luther King, Jr. called for them in the 60's, as well. But the idea has received increased attention since the publication of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” in in 2014. The 16,000 word essay set a new traffic record for the site and ignited a debate from publications across the mediaspehere.
As Coates explains it, it’s not just slavery that has harmed African Americans, it’s the innumerable discriminatory practices adopted by whites since then: Jim Crow laws, sharecropping, redlining, predatory lending. These affect African Americans’ status today. Coates cites a Pew Research Center finding that states, on average, white households are worth twenty times as much as black households.
Media:
Sponsoring Rep. John Conyers (D-MI) Press Release
The Atlantic: The Case for Reparations
Forbes (Opposed)
NPR (Previous Bill Version)
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