Madame Vice President: Want My Vote? Put Reparations on the Agenda

Electric. The energy was palpable. This was the vibe at the first rally of the presumptive Democratic ticket held in Philadelphia yesterday with Vice President Kamala Harris and Governor Tim Waltz of Minnesota. It seems Democrats have assembled a ticket that a cross-section of the Dem coalition can believe in.

The Harris-Waltz campaign has an enormous opportunity to keep this energy and momentum going with a policy platform that centers a Black agenda and the working class, and moves to a humanitarian position on Gaza.

As much as some might not understand this, the Black agenda is the connective tissue for creating a true human rights economy.

In the run up to the 2016 election, someone told me something true: “The hood was the hood under Clinton, the hood was the hood under Bush, the hood is the hood under Obama. No matter who wins, the hood will still be the hood.” Fast forward to 2024, the hood has seen a Donald J. Trump presidency and a Joseph R. Biden presidency, and the hood is still the hood.

People are still struggling to get by, poverty is still ever present, food and health care cost too much. Some progress has been made, but not nearly fast enough. People are hurting.

Last week, former President Trump visited the conference for the National Association of Black Journalists for a sit down interview. He went on to say the following about current Vice President Kamala Harris: “So I’ve known her a long time—indirectly, not directly very much—and she was always of Indian heritage. And she was only promoting Indian heritage. I didn’t know she was Black until a number of years ago, when she happened to turn Black,” Trump said. “And now she wants to be known as Black. So I don’t know, is she Indian or is she Black?”

The comment has sparked a dialogue, from the political sphere to the Black community. And in the Black community particularly, this is not the first time the “conversation” regarding V.P. Harris’ ethnic identity has come up. It will not be the last. What is the most troubling to me in this segment of drama for the sake of drama is how this debate will do absolutely nothing to change the material conditions of Black people. It is a glaring distraction that takes energy away from the main thing, which is what policies will be pushed to edify the Black community.

In other words, where is the smoke for a Black agenda? This is the most important identity concern.

The inadequacy and misuse of identity politics is a threat to the struggle for Black liberation. Identity politics is foundational to American politics in general and to the construction of whiteness in particular. It is identity politics that bound the landless white wage slave to the white planter. Identity politics, rightly understood, is an organizing vehicle for advancing the political and economic interests of identity groups. The only question is which identity group is being advanced?

Identity politics can be and has been weaponized to undermine the political and economic interests of Black people by dividing Black people along the lines of class, gender, and nativity and by distracting Black people with individualized symbols of racial progress over and against substantive change.

Appeals to Black racial solidarity are not an adequate politics in and of itself absent a clear economic analysis.

The Black agenda is the first, second, and third thing the Black community should be focused on. Black Americans must demand policy that ameliorates the pain caused by centuries of government policies that have targeted us.

While the media and others can go back and forth on Vice President Harris’ Blackness, we must focus on what policies she is laying out to address the issues our community faces.

The hood needs attention. We need to see concrete solutions to things like Black maternal mortality rates, gun violence, the racial wealth gap, and so much more.

We must demand that this Vice President support things like universal health care so no one has to go into debt because they get sick and so people can have preventative care. While universal healthcare doesn’t automatically erase racism from factoring into patient outcomes, it’s a step in the right direction to ensure everyone has healthcare.

We also must demand a full implementation of H.R. 40: reparations as a starting point towards full reparative justice for the descendants of enslaved people. The hell Black Americans have caught as a matter of de jure government policies and de facto practices across the United States must be remedied. The deliberate and direct harm spans from enslavement, to Black Codes, to the failure of Reconstruction, to Jim Crow, to redlining, to a legal systems that too often barrels its full weight on Black bodies and so many other policies that have denied us the opportunity to gain generational wealth must be addressed—with direct cash payments and other programmatic remedies.

Black Americans have been deliberately targeted and denied remedies by our government since its inception. We must collectively and deliberately unite to demand policies that repair the harm done to us. We owe this to our collective past, present and future.

So while Vice President Kamala Harris’ Blackness is debated, the focus should shift to the most important identity marker: the social, political and economic well-being of millions of Black Americans. I’m calling on us, the collective us, to focus on the main thing and demand a Black agenda—a working class agenda that centers Black people. Because the hood needs it.

The Honorable Nina Turner is a former Ohio State Senator. In 2016 and 2020, she served as a national surrogate and national co-chair for Senator Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns. Currently, she is a Senior Fellow at The Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at the New School. She is a contributor to the highly anticipated anthology, Wake Up: Black Women and the Future of Democracy due for release in 2024.

The views expressed in this article are the writer’s own.

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