Grand Rapids Reporter

Senior adviser to President Joe Biden, Cedric Richmond said the White House will start working on reparations or direct payments to African Americans even without Congress.

Richmond told Axios on Feb. 28 they were going to take action immediately and not wait on a study.

“We have to start breaking down systemic racism and barriers that have held people of color back and especially African Americans,” Richmond said, The Epoch Times reported. “We have to do stuff now.”

“If you start talking about free college tuition to [historically black colleges and universities] and you start talking about free community college in Title I and all of those things, I think that you are well on your way,” he said, adding that there is no known timeline for Congress’s commission to study reparations.

The bill for reparations was first introduced in 1989 by Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.). Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Texas) has repeatedly introduced the measure in recent years. Biden, through the press secretary Jen Psaki, said he was ready to set up a commission to study the proposal.

“He certainly would support a study of reparations,” she said as reported by The Epoch Times. “He understands we don’t need a study to take action right now on systemic racism, so he wants to take actions within his own government in the meantime.”

There has always been debate around the issue of reparations with some questioning the criteria to be used in selecting recipients, amount to be rolled out, who would foot the bill and how much it would cost.

“Pure reparations would be impossible to implement, but we can deal with the issue [of racial inequality] if we just admit, first of all, that it exists and then come up with some straightforward ways to deal with it," House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn (D-S.C.) said to the Post and Courier in 2019.

Clyburn said in the same interview that eligibility would be difficult to determine due to extensive family trees that have come about since the abolition of slavery more than 150 years ago. Clyburn said some white people could claim reparations, cliamiing they have family ties to former slaves, The Epoch Times reported