H.R. 40 - Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act Quotes

“Colonialism”

“Discrimination”

“Social inequality”

“Black Lives Matter”

“U.S. Rep. John Conyers”

“Reparations for slavery”

“Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.”

“Racism in the United States”

“Mitch McConnell... does not want to be responsible for enslavement that happened 150 years ago, but, yet and still, wants the right to operate his business or operate his career in a building that was built by enslaved people.”

“But when you start talking to people about actually paying that back or actually some sort of evenness around that... a lot of discomfort comes up. I understand that... But...you can’t... be a fair-weather friend to your country.”

“Wikipedia: H.R. 40 - Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans Act”

“I think the testimony was that one should not receive payment that would properly be due to the enslaved. But this country is, to this very day, receiving payment that was due to its enslavers. That’s the way inheritance works in this country...”

“'''If I assemble a mass of money, I have the right to pass that on to my kid. My kid has the right to do whatever and then pass it on to their kid. And so, there’s something fundamentally unjust if I have secured that money by taking it from one group, and then I pass that money on to my kid. '''”

“The onset of the Civil War, the greatest preponderance, the greatest population per capita of millionaires and multimillionaires in this country was in the Mississippi River Valley. It wasn’t in Boston, wasn’t in Chicago, wasn’t in New York. The richest people in this country were slaveholders.”

“The key point is that unpaid labor by millions of people of African heritage was a foundation of the social wealth in the United States. Immigrants with European heritage directly and indirectly benefited from this foundation of social wealth and white supremacy, even if they never had anything to do with slavery.”

“There’s no reason to believe a similarly viable program couldn’t be designed for Americans living with the ongoing effects of slavery, violence and discrimination. (Or, we should add, genocide. We believe there’s a similarly compelling case for reparations to America’s First Nations that deserves its own treatment.)”

“If I injure you, the injury persists even after I actually commit the act. If I stab you, you may suffer complications long after that initial actual stabbing. If I shoot you, you may suffer complications long after that initial shooting. That’s the case with African Americans... that are still suffering from the after-effects of that.”

“And so, that is the long history of this country, that doesn’t end, again, conservatively, until 1968. And so, there are people who are very, very much alive who have experienced that, who are suffering the after-effects and effects of that. And that’s what, you know, as far as I’m concerned, the whole movement around reparations is about.”

“So, when the state of Mississippi, for instance, taxes black people and then builds one facility for education and another for—one facility for education for whites and then an inferior facility for blacks, that’s theft. That’s theft. If I build a public pool system and then tell you you can’t use that public pool system, that’s theft.”

“You can’t decide that your past only matters... when you’re being called to be responsible for what made it possible for that country to be called “land of the free” in the first place, to act like you don’t owe anybody anything or you’re not part of it, especially... when a lot of this happened in your own lifetime. It isn’t the past. It happened while you were alive...”