House Dems pitch bill on reparations for descendants of slaves

On Wednesday, House Democrats reintroduced legislation that would see a plan created to give black Americans who are the descendants of slaves reparations.

The reintroduction of HR 40, or the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act, is being co-led by Rep. Ayanna Pressley (D-MA) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ), per Fox News.

In a news conference, Pressley said that "reparations are a necessary step in achieving justice," and that "We are in a moment of anti-Blackness on steroids and we refuse to be silent. We will not back down in our pursuit of racial justice."

The bill would create a commission to "study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans as a result of" the "institution of slavery," the "de jure and de facto discrimination against freed slaves and their descendants from the end of the Civil War to the present," the "lingering negative effects of the institution of slavery and the discrimination," the "manner in which textual and digital instructional resources and technologies are being used to deny the inhumanity of slavery and the crime against humanity of people of African descent in the United States," and the "role of Northern complicity in the Southern based institution of slavery."