Racial Justice Plan

White supremacist violence has plagued this country and terrorized people of color — especially Black people — for generations.

With over 200 explicitly white supremacist organizations throughout the United States and more than 1,000 hate groups that include white supremacy as a significant part of their platforms, white supremacist terror represents an immediate national security crisis.

We must address this emergency by targeting systemic racism and provide its victims with the justice and protection they deserve.

Our District is one of the most diverse in the State. However, this diversity alone does not protect our communities from the ills of racism and white supremacy.

As a Black woman, I intimately understand the dangers of racism. I’ve experienced it first hand and I’ve seen it on a systemic level.

The first march I ever attended as a child was to protest a police brutality incident on my block. At just eight years old, I was called the n-word for the first, and certainly not the last, time. As a law student, I served as a Legal Observer during the Baltimore Uprisings following the violent murder of Freddie Gray by law enforcement.

As your Congresswoman, I will fully commit to eradicating white supremacy and bringing true justice to our District, our State, and our country. I will:

  • Aggressively combat the threat of white supremacist terrorism by funding a robust domestic counterterrorism program focused on targeting and reversing the spread of white supremacist ideology through compiling data and producing reports on the tools and mechanisms used to facilitate white supremacist domestic terrorism. Moreover, I will ban active duty military members and federal law enforcement from belonging to white supremacist organizations and wearing white supremacist images and paraphernalia while on active duty.
  • Provide matching funding to states that reallocate money away from law enforcement entities and towards social workers, public mental health professionals, anti-violence programs, trauma centers, addiction treatment, and community support networks.
  • Institute monthly $3,000 checks to direct descendants of enslaved people in the United States and Indigenous peoples, funded through a combination of inheritance taxes and payments from U.S. companies, educational institutions, and banking institutions that used or otherwise benefited from slave labor.
  • Establish a National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (NTRC) to investigate, document, and assess the federal government's role in America's history of racism. The NTRC will be modeled on the transitional justice approaches that we've seen previously in Germany, South Africa, and Rwanda. The purpose of the NTRC is to:
  • Establish national memorials and curriculum standards to enshrine and pass on the truths of our history;
  • Assess the amount of harm caused by our government's past and current policies;
  • Research and create a database consisting of the current living descendants of enslaved people in the United States so that they may be compensated for past wrongs; and
  • Create a proposal that covers the full spectrum of the reparations needed to rectify the harms that our government has caused.