Jewish US candidate Williamson calls for slavery reparation plan
‘It’s time for us to realize that this country will not heal’
Marianne Williamson, the Jewish spiritual guru seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, turned heads Tuesday night when she revealed a detailed plan for the government to pay reparations to African-Americans for slavery during a candidate debate in Detroit.
Williamson is one of America’s best-known New Age self-help gurus, is the author of a dozen books – four of them New York Times best-sellers – and counts Oprah and Deepak Chopra among her pals.
Williamson grew up in Houston attending Congregation Beth Yeshurun, a Conservative synagogue that was hit hard by 2017’s Hurricane Harvey. She went to Hebrew school there while attending local public schools, and recalled joining a Jewish sorority while at Bellaire High.
The 67-year-old candidate received numerous rounds of applause during the Tuesday night debate when she revealed a detailed plan for paying slavery reparations.
“It’s $200 billion to $500 billion payment of a debt that is owed,” she said. “That is what reparations is. We need deep truth-telling when it comes; we don’t need another commission to look at evidence.”
Williamson said that “it is time for us to simply realize that this country will not heal. All that a country is, is a collection of people. People heal when there’s some deep truth-telling. We need to recognize, when it comes to the economic gap between blacks and whites in America, [that] it does come from a great injustice that has never been dealt with. That great injustice has had to do with the fact that there was 250 years of slavery followed by another hundred years of domestic terrorism.”
Last year, Williamson told JTA that she admires Herzl.
“He was a whole-person thinker, addressing the spiritual as well as the political aspirations of the Jews,” she said. “And that’s what the new Zionism needs to concern itself with” today.
JTA contributed to this report.