Two important events recently happened on the “reparations” beat. First, the U.S. House, led by Representative Ayanna Pressley, re-introduced H.R. 40, “federal legislation to study reparations for slavery.” At the same time, 2024-25 data began to circulate widely – showing greatly increased opposition to reparations and support for President Donald Trump among minorities.
Sitting down for an interview with NBC, Rep. Pressley waxed poetic about the need for the federal government to award her ethnic group billions, calling the legislation more necessary than ever in “a moment of emboldened white supremacy and anti-Black racism,” as “a weaponized Supreme Court is actively gutting protections and progress that has (sic) been made.” Her bill seems unlikely to pass the GOP-led House (although the Pachyderms’ current in-practice margin is “three”), but it easily racked up 130 co-sponsors when it last appeared in Congress, and seems likely to do so again.
H.R. 40 has a bit of a history on the Hill. Some version of the same legislation has been introduced every year or three for well over two decades, with Michigan’s legendary congressman, the late John Conyers (ret.) first bringing it to the floor in 1989, and the late Shelia Jackson Lee taking over for him when he retired from politics in 2017. Lee’s recent death from cancer resulted, after months of delay, in the reparations torch being passed to Pressley and her left-leaning “Squad.”
The bill itself is a one-pager, with current text almost identical to that in past versions. At its core, the legislation would establish a formal federal commission with the power to “study and develop reparations for African Americans.” This commission would (1) “compile documentary evidence of slavery in the United States,” (2) “study the role of (U.S.) federal and state governments” in administering the Peculiar Institution, (3) summarize the body of U.S. law which historically discriminated against freed “African slaves and their descendants,” and (4) “recommend ways the United States may recognize and remedy the effects of slavery and discrimination on African Americans.”
These strategies might include an official national mea culpa on slavery, or the payment of “compensation” (“i.e., reparations”) to Blacks. In a USA which, we frequently hear, is moving toward majority-minority status, many seem to feel that the eventual passage of the bill into law is an inevitability. But, there is an unexpected spanner in the works!
Several data sets released within the past year or two indicate that the majority of minorities now oppose reparations, and are swinging to the right in overall political terms. Per a large-N 2024 study conducted by the pro-reparations AAMC Center for Health Justice, only 40% of US adults “express support for…reparations” for slavery. Importantly, results for non-Black people of color (“POC”) were close to identical for those for the sample – 74% of Blacks, but only 47% of Hispanics, 45% of Asian-Americans – with more liberal Pacific Islanders included – and ~35% of whites supported cash or transfer payments to the American descendants of slaves. The only large U.S. regions where even a simple majority backs reparations are the majority-Black District of Columbia (67%), and the next-door “DMV” state of Maryland (52%).
This reparations data, from April of 2024, tracks with a great deal of other recent information about rightward shifts within U.S. minority communities. During the 2024 Presidential election, for example, 46% of American Hispanics and well over 50% of Hispanic men voted for The Donald. So did 13% of Black Americans – a low figure, but 260% greater than the 5% to pull the level for Barack Obama’s 2008 opponent.
Further, given that Kamala Harris famously received 92-94% of all votes cast by African-American women, it logically stands to reason that Mr. Trump polled at least around 20% among Black men. Trump also pulled in 39% of Asian American ballots and an astonishing 65% of votes from Native Americans, at least per 2024 exit polling and the discourse around it on new media.
These results, for a fairly hard-right Republican candidate – who ran with the author of Hillbilly Elegy in the aftermath of George Floyd – appear to basically resolve a question that has been advanced everywhere from online dissident right forums to best-selling books like Ruy Texiera’s The Emerging Democratic Majority: is racial demography equivalent to national destiny? Simply put, the answer appears to be “No.”
Likely inspired by such post-St. Floyd trends as the surge of murders back up to 1990s levels, Hispanics – who are now by far the largest minority group in the United States – have become almost a 50/50 partisan voting population. Entertainingly, the true core of the Democratic left, and one of the few groups on record as still supporting political correctness, currently seems to be upper-middle class white women. While white men without college degrees, white women without college degrees, and white men with degrees currently support Trump by 41%, 14%, and 1-2% respectively, educated white women break against the current U.S. bossman by (-38).
To briefly detour: one reason for the level of ambiguity in modern American discussions of demographics, and for some of the common-place confusion around minority and white patterns of behavior, is the plain fact that the broad race categories used in the United States make little sense. As Dave Berenstein points out in his excellent – and also fairly recent (2023) – book Classified, today’s affirmative action standards lump Egyptians, Arabs, many brown-skinned South Asians, and non-black Brazilians together as whites. However, all bi-racial people, and all Spanish-speakers of whatever race, are oppressed minorities by law. To complicate things further, Hispanic Spanish-speakers can be of any bio-genetic race – and, in the representative 2019 American Community Survey, 66% of them identified as white. DNA tests largely back up this claim, if we take white to mean “European.”
These entertaining realities help place frenzied U.S. debates about “the great replacement” and “the majority-minority future” in calmer context. In 1980, less than a decade after “Spanish-speaking” became a Census option, and with many Caucasian Hispanics still unsure about how to reply, the United States population was recorded as being 80% white. Today, if we simply still count all Caucasian Hispanics as white, these States United remain 72% white – with Asian-Americans (our highest-performing group) making up another 6% of the population, and bi-racial citizens 4% more. The population of ADOS Blacks, the archetypal American minority, has in fact not budged in decades – with us making up about 13% of the national total in 1990, 12.06% in 2000, 12.21% in 2010, and 12.05% in 2020.
Fascinating data points, to be sure. But, more to the point, the latest stats to emerge from this rainbow of country-men point to a conclusion that might have seemed unbelievable 20 years ago. A reparations bill has once again reared its crowned head in the Congress…but reparations are quite unlikely ever to become reality, because most minority American are trending right and oppose them.
Life is complex. Who knew?
Wilfred Reilly is a professor, author, and PRI senior fellow.
