Last Updated on November 18, 2020
Democrat presidential candidate Joe Biden has taken to shopping the idea of unity now that his team believes he will prevail in the still undecided election. But his actions are speaking louder than words are and his at least one of his “transition team” appointees is a radical.
During the campaign Biden routinely dodged questions on an assortment of topics. One of those topics was the Black-centric issue for reparations. The idea behind reparations is that Black people in the United States are due compensation because Black people 150 years ago were enslaved.
The country has endured a bloody Civil War and a Civil Rights movement since then in a quest to be a “more perfect Union.”
But Biden, in agreement with his running-mate Sen. Kamala Harris (D-CA), have seen fit to appoint a reparations activist to their “transition team” as their Treasury chief.
Mehrsa Baradaran, a law professor at the University of California – Irvine, has been appointed a member of Biden’s Department of the Treasury agency review team. Baradaran is outspoken in her advocacy for reparations, both as a way of correcting “white supremacy” and as a tool to close the “racial wealth gap.”
Baradaran chastised both Biden and Harris for their avoiding the issue during the campaign. In June of 2019 she tweeted, “Dear Kamala, Reparations or go home.”
Dear Kamala, Reparations or go home.
— Mehrsa Baradaran (@MehrsaBaradaran) June 28, 2019
In December of the same year, referencing Biden’s performance in a DNC debate, she took aim at Biden himself, tweeting, “Biden just dodged that reparations question like a much nimbler and younger man.”
Biden just dodged that reparations question like a much nimbler and younger man.
— Mehrsa Baradaran (@MehrsaBaradaran) December 20, 2019
In a book she penned, Baradaran states that closing the “racial wealth gap” means acknowledging acts perceived as past wrongs and, to prove that acknowledgement, providing compensation.
“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,” Baradaran wrote.
Before accepting Biden’s invitation to join his pre-maturely formed transition team, Baradaran counseled Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), and failed Democrat presidential candidate and former South Bend mayor Pete Buttigieg.
Other notable Democrats, such as failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams – who is now instigating manipulative interference in the Georgia run-off election, have gone further than Biden and Harris on the issue of reparations. Abrams backs reparations explicitly.
