On Monday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “Jesse Watters Primetime,” Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed argued that “we need to have an honest conversation about the incredible debt that was put upon black folks as a function of slavery, that we have yet to pay, and I just think that’s fair.” And “if public policy created a level in which black folks disproportionately suffer everything from maternal mortality and infant mortality, to lack of access to jobs, I think it’s important for our country to have a conversation about how do we make people whole.”
Host Jesse Watters asked, “Reparations, do you support that?”
El-Sayed answered, “I think we need to have an honest conversation about the incredible debt that was put upon black folks as a function of slavery, that we have yet to pay, and I just think that’s fair. Like, if people are enslaved and forced into servitude, and then we don’t actually have a conversation about all that was owed, that our own country agreed was owed, I just think that it’s past time to have that conversation. That shouldn’t be a crazy thing. I understand that, like, for folks who really want to inflame [the] culture war, I just think it’s important to think about how do we make sure that communities like the city of Detroit, that have been segregated so that you have a disproportionate number of people, as a function of redlining, who are forced into certain communities, how do we make sure that their schools are made whole. I’ll just tell you this: In the city of Detroit right now, they just had $700 million invested in their schools, they’re still $1.7 billion behind. And a lot of folks want to say, oh, well, that’s profligacy, etc., etc. No, a lot of that has to do with public policy. And if public policy created a level in which black folks disproportionately suffer everything from maternal mortality and infant mortality, to lack of access to jobs, I think it’s important for our country to have a conversation about how do we make people whole.”
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