Advocates urge Biden to apologize for slavery and take other racial justice actions before leaving office
“Biden has absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain in this circumstance.”
As lawmakers and advocates push President Joe Biden to issue more pardons in his final days in office after issuing a sweeping pardon for his son, Hunter, activists are calling on the outgoing president to tackle a range of actions to advance racial justice before a Trump administration hostile to racial equity enters the White House.
“We know that [Trump] is going to try to reverse everything that would represent inclusion [and] people of color in the policies and programs and funding priorities,” U.S. Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., told theGrio.
The longtime California congresswoman is urging President Biden to exhaust his executive powers to advance racial equality, gender equality, LGBTQ equality and protections for the disabled community.
“Historically, this administration has tried to repair much of the damage of the past,” Lee said of the Biden-Harris administration. She suggested that Biden take executive actions that would “make it more difficult for Donald Trump to unravel,” though there is nothing stopping an incoming President Trump from reversing any order Biden would sign during his final weeks in the Oval Office.
“Trump and his crew are going all in on hate and dehumanization. Why can’t this administration go all in for justice and repair at the end of their term?” said Dreisen Heath, founder of the Why We Can’t Wait Reparations Coalition. “Biden has absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain in this circumstance.”
Dr. David J. Johns, executive director and CEO of the National Black Justice Coalition, said he hopes that Biden is “watching Donald John Trump communicate all that he intends to do and spends every waking moment of every day until Jan. 20, intentionally focused on supplanting [and] disrupting the MAGA priorities, and protecting those of us who will be offered up to the most harm.”
Throughout Biden’s presidency, members of Congress, like Lee, and racial justice advocates have urged the White House to take up several initiatives to address racial inequality, including establishing a commission to study reparations for Black Americans impacted by U.S. slavery and a similar “truth and repair” commission that would acknowledge the material harms caused by the enslavement of African Americans.
Advocates tell theGrio they would like President Biden to tackle the unfinished business of his racial equity agenda — things he promised he would do when he ran for office – including pardoning incarcerated individuals who are behind bars for marijuana convictions, legalizing cannabis, and eliminating the federal death penalty. They would also like President Biden to issue a U.S. apology for slavery, much in the same way he did to Native Americans in October for the U.S.’s role in running boarding schools that abused Native American youth and sought to eradicate or whitewash their tribal identities.
“It’s never lost on me that next year marks 160 years since the end of the Civil War, which really was quickened by an executive order called the Emancipation Proclamation,” said activist and sociologist Dr. Marcus Anthony Hunter, who added that seeing Biden use his executive power to “acknowledge, memorialize and commemorate” the history of enslaved Black people and their contributions to America is “very important and critical.”
Hunter, who authored the book “Radical Reparations: Healing the Soul of a Nation,” argued that had the deaths of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor not happened, resulting in a nationwide racial justice uprising, Biden would “not have gotten 84 million votes” he did to win the presidency in 2020.
“Seeing him come to terms with that and publicly acknowledge that in ways that he bypassed during the administration, I think, is really important for him to do, and an important aspect of his legacy,” Hunter said of renewed calls for Biden to acknowledge the ills of slavery through executive action.
As for an official apology for slavery, Heath of Why We Can’t Wait Reparations Coalition said she would like to see a federal apology “paired with material reparations.”
“We’re talking about economically accessible damage and morally accessible damage that needs to be fully compensated for,” she told theGrio. Heath said she would also like to see President Biden “free all Black political prisoners” who were targeted by the FBI for their membership with the Black Panther Party and remain behind bars.
Calls for a truth and repair commission would similarly be meaningful, advocates say, even if symbolic.
Dr. Johns of NBJC said such a commission would honor “the lives and legacies of people who have fought for this country to have the opportunity to heal and grow from that which we’ve experienced,” including the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas, who died earlier this year. He said it’s also a way to “affirm and encourage” racial justice advocates who have been on the frontlines to “continue this work as we move through the next administration.”
He continued, “I think it’s also a way to reorient and or channel a lot of the defeated feeling that so many people have around this weight that comes with, ‘I don’t know that I can do this for another four years,’ acknowledging that we are already in the next election cycle.”
Even though President-elect Trump would end up “dismantling” a truth and repair commission or reparations commission, Dr. Hunter acknowledged that it would at least result in “some level of media attention to the dismantling of it, or to work with that concept going forward.”
He also sees any meaningful actions in Biden’s final days as “tracks laid toward things that he wasn’t able to do … but maybe can pass the baton to others coming after him.”
Heath said of the likelihood of Trump undoing any and all of Biden’s potential actions on racial justice: “So be it. At least you stood for something.”
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