Eugene Scott is a journalist.
Lawmakers hoping to compensate the descendants of Black people enslaved in America face an uphill battle during the Trump presidency — and the president’s support for book bans is one of the reasons why.
Democratic Representative Ayanna Pressley recently reintroduced a bill that would create a federal commission to examine the lasting impact of slavery, systemic racism, and racial discrimination. The bill would also explore ways to address those harms, including reparations.
“We are in a moment of anti-Blackness on steroids, and we refuse to be silent,” Pressley said earlier this month during a press conference at the US Capitol.
“We will not back down in our pursuit of racial justice,” she added. “The antidote to anti-Blackness is to be pro-Black, and we will do it unapologetically. The United States government owes us a debt, and we need reparations now.”
A large majority of Black Americans agree with Pressley. Nearly 3 in 4 Black adults support reparations, according to a 2024 survey from the Association of American Medical Colleges.
But the percentage of Americans of other races and ethnicities who back the idea is low. Less than half of Hispanic (47 percent) and Asian American (45 percent) respondents are in favor of reparations. And only about a third (34 percent) of white adults surveyed back the idea. Only 36 percent of Americans overall back the idea, according to a 2024 poll from Princeton University.
The reasons for this vary. Some of it may be rooted in prejudice and bias. After all, Japanese Americans received reparations in 1988 after being abused by the US government during World War II. And the US government backed the payment of reparations to some Jewish Americans who survived the abuses of the Holocaust.
But some of the opposition to reparations is rooted in ignorance. As communities prepare to commemorate the ending of slavery later this month on Juneteenth, the majority of Americans finish high school knowing very little about just how atrocious slavery was. Only 8 percent of high school seniors were able to identify slavery as the central cause of the Civil War, according to a 2018 Southern Poverty Law Center study.
And in 2017, nearly 60 percent of social studies teachers surveyed said their textbooks did an inadequate job of teaching about slavery.
There are long-term consequences for this knowledge gap. Just 1 in 4 adults (24 percent) strongly agree that the legacies of slavery affect the position of Black people in American society today, according to the Princeton survey.
And America’s ignorance about slavery is likely to become more widespread given that support for book bans has reached the federal level.
In an executive order aimed at preventing students from reading books that introduce ideas about privilege and oppression and their relationship to race, President Trump accused schools that teach students books like “Beloved” by Toni Morrison or “The 1619 Project” by Nikole Hannah-Jones of indoctrinating “children in radical, anti-American ideologies.”
“Such an environment operates as an echo chamber, in which students are forced to accept these ideologies without question or critical examination,” he wrote in the executive order. “In many cases, innocent children are compelled to adopt identities as either victims or oppressors solely based on their skin color and other immutable characteristics.”
It’s understandable why Trump, who made white grievance a foundational part of his presidential campaign, believes his effort to silence authors is popular.
His return to the White House is largely viewed as confirmation of many Americans’ rightward shift — even on matters of race — since the summer of 2020, when people filled the streets across the country to protest anti-Black racism after the police killing of George Floyd.
Most Americans approve of the Supreme Court’s 2023 decision banning the use of race in the college admissions process. And the number of corporations rolling back diversity initiatives continues to grow.
But Trump is misguided. Americans may not be in favor of what they consider preferential treatment based on race. But they are not fans of banning books — including those that aim to make a case for the need for that preferential treatment. Two-thirds of Americans oppose efforts to restrict books in public schools, according to a 2024 Knight Foundation study.
While former vice president Kamala Harris was unsuccessful in her attempt to keep Trump from returning to the White House, she seemed much more in line with where most Americans are when it comes to learning about this country’s history.
“We just need to speak truth about history. In spite of the fact that some people try and erase history and try and teach our children otherwise,” Harris told TheGrio last year. “We need to speak truth about the generational impact of our history in terms of the generational impact of slavery, the generational impact of redlining, of Jim Crow laws.”
“We need to speak truth about it in a way that is about driving solutions,” added Harris, who as a senator cosponsored the bill that Pressley recently reintroduced.
In a country where interest in history is declining, accusing authors of indoctrinating children when they simply aim to educate them about America’s past is uncharitable to say the least. But seeking to keep America’s children — and future voters — uninformed through book bans is something much worse — regardless of what comes of the reparations debate.