WASHINGTON – Democratic presidential hopeful Julian Castro took a jab at fellow 2020 candidate Bernie Sanders for shunning reparation payments for slavery descendants while wanting to write a “big check” for his democratic socialist agenda.
Sanders recently told “The View” he wants to help distressed communities, but wouldn’t back monetary payments to African-American slave descendants, saying “I think there are better ways to do that than just writing out a check.”
Castro, the former Housing and Urban Development Secretary, took issue with Sanders’ dismissal while wanting to spend big elsewhere.
“It’s interesting to me that, when it comes to Medicare-for-all, health care, the response there has been, we need to write a big check,” Castro told CNN’s “State of the Union.” “When it comes to tuition-free or debt-free college, the answer has been: ‘we need to write a big check.’ And so, if the issue is compensating the descendants of slaves, I don’t think that the argument about writing a big check ought to be the argument that you make, if you’re making an argument that a big check needs to be written for a whole bunch of other stuff.”
Castro said if he were president he’d address the “original sin of slavery” by appointing a commission to consider how best to handle reparations.
“If under the Constitution, we compensate people because we take their property,” Castro said, “why wouldn’t you compensate people who actually were property?”
Comments