Ex-NFL Player Unloads on Pro-Reparations Dems: ‘Let’s Start With the Party of Slavery’

Burgess Owens, a former NFL player and conservative commentator, slammed Democrats while testifying Wednesday at a House hearing on H.R. 40, a bill that would establish a commission to study reparations.

“I used to be a Democrat until I did my history and found out the misery that that party brought to my race,” said the Fox News contributor and author of “Liberalism or How to Turn Good Men into Whiners, Weenies and Wimps.”

“I do not believe in reparations,” he added. “Because what reparations does is, it points to a certain race, a certain color, and points to them as evil and points to the other race, my race, as one that not only becomes racist, but also beggars.”

The former Pro-Bowler explained, however, that he does believe in “restitution.”

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“Let’s point to the party that was the party of slavery, KKK, Jim Crow, that has killed over 40 percent of our black babies – 20 million of them,” he said, referring to the Democrats’ history of anti-black racism and current support for abortion rights.

MORE: Man Allegedly Justified Sexual Assault on White Woman Because of Slavery: ‘She Deserved It’

“How about the Democratic Party pay for all the misery brought to my race and those — after we learn our history — who decide to stay there, they should pay also.”

Quillette columnist Coleman Hughes was booed when he joined Owens in testifying against reparations. Offering reparations would make black Americans “victims against their consent,” the Columbia University undergrad said.

The House Judiciary panel heard the flip side of the argument from actor Danny Glover, writer Ta-Nehisi Coates and Sen. Cory Booker, a New Jersey Democrat and presidential candidate.

Booker, who introduced H.R. 40, said the United States had “yet to truly acknowledge and grapple with the racism and white supremacy that tainted this country’s founding and continues to cause persistent and deep racial disparities and inequality.”

Coates testified that “the matter of reparations” went beyond simply “making amends.”

“It is also a question of citizenship,” he said.

“In H.R. 40, this body has a chance to both make good on its 2009 apology for enslavement, and reject fair-weather patriotism, to say that this nation is both its credits and debits because the question really is not whether we’ll be tied to the somethings of our past, but whether we are courageous enough to be tied to the whole of them.”

MORE: ‘Spartacus’ Cory Booker Vows to Defeat Slavery in ‘White Supremacist’ America With Reparations Bill

Burgess Owens and reparations in the broader culture

In the run-up to the 2020 elections, slavery reparations have become something of a liberal cause célèbre. A March INSIDER poll found that 54 percent of liberals supported reparations. However, only 13 percent of conservatives backed them.

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