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Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., said during an interview on Sunday that Black Americans would stop voting if they aren’t given reparations.
Lee slammed President Donald Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund,” and argued, “They are playing psychological warfare with us.”
“And that’s what they do,” she continued. “Because, again, they’re trying to disenfranchise you. Because if you believe that you’re never going to get reparations from this system, then you tap out, and you don’t just tap out of the conversation, you tap out of the system. You don’t want to vote anymore. You don’t participate anymore.”
“And they know that that’s how they don’t control Congress,” Lee added. “That’s how you can get your school boards, your board of supervisors. They want us that far out of this system. So right now, we fight for reparations because it’s owed us. It is owed us, so we’re not going to back down on that one way or another.”
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Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., warned that Black Americans may refuse to vote if they don’t get reparations. (Nathan Posner/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Lee reintroduced a resolution in May that, if passed, could give federal dollars to the descendants of enslaved people brought from Africa to the United States. Former Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo. — who lost her 2024 primary to a more moderate Democrat — introduced the reparations bill in the last Congress. Bush’s bill, unveiled in May 2023, called for $14 trillion to be put toward reparations payments for descendants of slavery in the United States, but it did not go anywhere.
Lee told “The Native Land Pod” that she wasn’t surprised Democrats weren’t backing reparation efforts.
“I’m not shocked that my colleagues are not on it, that Democratic colleagues aren’t on it,” she said. “Again, there is a level of comfort in this building that sustains people. And I know that the people who don’t want reparations back a lot of my colleagues, Democrat and otherwise. So no, I’m not shocked, but it is why we have to keep people on the outside encouraged.”
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Lee also criticized her fellow Democrats for not backing reparations efforts. (Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images)
The Democratic congresswoman was asked about how reparations would work in practice, and about what host Andrew Gillum said was how the right has made the term reparations so “raggedy, ugly, so unattractive that White liberals are avoiding signing onto it.”
“The reality is, is that the cowardice that liberals are able to show when it comes to all types of things that sound scary, but we know you have, you know, just data, evidence, empirical evidence behind it,” Lee said. “And that comes with — that comes with police accountability, that comes with criminal legal reform, that comes with reparations, right?”
“We give liberals very often a pass to not be their most courageous selves,” she added. “So whatever it is that we’re talking about, we have to create the conditions for them to be more courageous.”
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Rep. Summer Lee, D-Pa., speaks at the People’s State Of The Union Rally And Boycott Outside The Capitol on the National Mall on Feb. 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. (Jemal Countess/Getty Images)
Lee said in May that she knew there would be pushback on reparations legislation.
“We know there will be pushback,” she said after she reintroduced the proposal. “Reparations are a proposal to level the playing field, but the only way we could ever have a level playing field is by remedying the harms that have been done by the system.”
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But Lee signaled on Wednesday that the long odds would not deter her.
