An outspoken advocate of taxpayer-funded “reparations” for black Americans to compensate for slavery is a member of Joe Biden’s transition team.
Mehrsa Baradaran, a professor at the University of California at Irvine, was appointed by Biden’s campaign to help make recommendations for policy at the U.S. Treasury, should Biden take office, the Washington Free Beacon reported.
Baradaran believes reparations are necessary not only to close the “racial wealth gap” but also to correct “white supremacy.”
Biden and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris have “dodged questions about reparations throughout the 2020 cycle,” the Free Beacon said.
Baradaran made her case in her 2017 book “The Color of Money: Black Banks and the Racial Wealth Gap.”
“A reparations program could take many forms from simple cash payments or baby bonds to more complex schemes such as subsidized college tuition, basic income, housing vouchers, or subsidized mortgage credit,” she writes.
Her background includes helping Sen. Bernie Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren pursue proposals for addressing a problem they define as the “racial wealth gap.”
Baradaran wrote on Twitter: “Insofar as capitalism was based on white supremacy, it would block black capital accumulation.”
It was not intentional or a slight. And I don’t think I’m making a case that black banks were capitalist. I’m simply saying that insofar as capitalism was based on white supremacy, it would block black capital accumulation. My thesis is not against black cooperatives at all
— Mehrsa Baradaran (@MehrsaBaradaran) August 3, 2019
Baradaran contends the “wealth gap” was created “by a failure of public policy” and that no “private markets” can solve it.
“Without major structural reforms, the wealth gap will continue to expand,” she writes. “A 2016 study glibly predicted that based on the current racial wealth gap, it would take 228 years for blacks to have as much wealth as whites today. The prediction, though grim, is based on a false assumption: that the wealth gap will naturally close over time—albeit a very long time—without intervention.
“In fact, as my previous research demonstrates, it is likely that the racial wealth gap will remain in place and continue to reproduce itself. In other words, if nothing changes, no amount of time will close the wealth gap because of the self-perpetuating effects of capital accumulation.”
She contends “public policy” created the wealth gap and therefore “must be used to address it.”
“Reparations could take many forms—all of which would have to be measured in monetary outcomes as are all contractual claims,” she says.
“One way to measure the remedy is to focus on outcomes rather than means. For example, reparations could mean that the federal government could enlist several programs and agencies at once intended to eliminate the racial wealth gap. The means of elimination would be flexible so long as within a stated amount of time, the wealth gap was eliminated.”
Kamala Harris, the Democrats’ vice presidential nominee, already has promoted the idea of equal outcomes, a tenet of Karl Marx.
“From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” he wrote in 1875.
In the video on Twitter, Harris insists it’s government’s job to make sure “we all end up at the same place.”
See it:
There’s a big difference between equality and equity. pic.twitter.com/n3XfQyjLNe
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 1, 2020
Conservative commentator Ben Shapiro said Harris is “openly making the argument that inequality of outcome is in and of itself inequity. Which is called communism.”
