America cannot tackle “white supremacy” without “reparations,” socialist congressional candidate Melat Kiros said during a recent discussion.
Kiros, who unseated 15-term Democrat Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado’s First Congressional District primary, spoke with Walter Rhein and explained that she believes there is a racism that exists as a “product of growing up in a white supremacist society.”
“One of the things that brought me into starting my PhD program was finally coming to the realization that we were never really going to be able to tackle white supremacy in the way that we need to without reparations,” she said, asserting there is “no way to truly heal” and progress without that.
She said she researched wealth inequality data by race and found that “the gap between poor white people and rich white people and the gap between poor black people and rich black people is actually identical, and the gap between black people, white people in general, can actually be reasonably explained by the failure of the Reconstruction Era and our inability to actually repair the harm that was done.”
From there, she claimed, the “harms just continued to compound on one another, leading to a lot of the wealth inequality that we’re seeing today.”
Americans must understand “where” the harm is, she continued, and they must be able to “quantify racism.” She also believes there must be a new word for “white supremacy.”
“I almost think there needs to be a new word, because there’s racism that is coming from, you know, places of hatred and, you know, true bigotry, and then there’s racism that is just a product of growing up in a white supremacist society,” she said, declaring that America is “objectively a white supremacist society.”
“And I think there are a lot of people that engage in these kind of racist stereotypes without the intention of doing so, and so I think there has to be a little bit of separation in order for people to not be so afraid of being tacked on with this idea of racism, acknowledging that it exists within every single group,” she said, essentially calling on Americans to admit they are racist, even if they are not.
“You know, there’s anti-blackness within the black community as well, and you know, being able to understand all of these things, I think, is going to be the first step that’s necessary before we’re able to actually meaningfully fight for reparations, but I do not think we can’t get any kind of meaningful change without reparations,” she said, later emphasizing, “If we want to really address white supremacy in this country, we have to talk about reparations.”
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