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Mellisa: I'm Mellisa Harris-Perry, and you're with The Takeaway on Election Day 2022. Now, y'all shared with us what you are thinking about and hoping for on this important day.

Kyle: My name is Kyle and I'm from Pennsylvania. My hopes for the elections on this election day are that the ballot initiatives and questions out there to help preserve a woman's right to choose and a woman's right to an abortion will be passed. The initiatives to help that are intended to block a woman's right to choose will be denied by those states.

Mellisa: You're not alone, Kyle. A recent Gallup poll indicated that a majority of voters say abortion is extremely or very important to their vote for Congress this year.

Ron: My name is Ron Eubanks. I'm in Dallas, Texas. I'm an election clerk at a voting center, and my hope for the election is that honest intelligent people of goodwill will vote and that the same kinds of people will be elected.

Mellisa: Sure, I love this Ron Eubanks, honest intelligent people of goodwill. There's no doubt about it in a country as large and diverse as ours will never be in full agreement about all matters of policy, or all approaches to politics. Honesty and goodwill surely make this project of democratic self-governance a whole lot more likely to succeed. In fact, those themes of reproductive justice and of self-governance through honesty, intellect, and goodwill are core themes of a recent conversation I had with Representative Barbra Lee of California.

Lee: This is about telling the truth because that's the only way. That's psychology. I'm a psych major 101. You have to come forward and tell the truth before you can heal.

Mellisa: First elected to the US House in 1998, Congresswoman Barbra Lee represents California's 13th district in the Bay Area, including Oakland. Lee is the highest-ranking African-American woman in Democratic leadership. She and I sat down for a conversation as part of her keynote address at Harvard Kennedy School's Truth and Transformation Conference. Just a note, we spoke several days prior to the attack on Paul Pelosi, husband of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was both representative Lee's close colleague in the house and neighboring representative in San Francisco. We started by assessing the realities of where we find ourselves two years into the COVID Pandemic.

Lee: I serve on the committee that oversees CDC and Labor Health and Human Services. I have a 102-year-old aunt, and I'm on airplanes five times a week in a hundred different countries. I stay masked and I test as much as I can every other day because I don't want to be one who's going to transmit the virus. People say, "Why are you wearing your mask? Why?" I say, "COVID is not over." We've come a long way, thanks to President Biden and our Vice President and the House of Representatives, the Democrats we've come a long way. We've saved lives and livelihoods and so I feel really good about that. Also am concerned about the new variants and people feeling too relaxed.

Mellisa: For Representative Lee, the responsibilities of caring for one another in a diverse democracy go beyond masking and vaccination during a deadly pandemic. For Lee, collective responsibility extends to truth-telling about our shared and sometimes painful past. In 2020, and again, in 2021, Lee introduced legislation that would establish the first truth commission in the US. The bill titled H.R.19 urges, "The establishment of the United States Commission on Truth Racial Healing and Transformation." Its goal is to investigate the effects that slavery, institutional racism, and discrimination have had on our current laws and policies.

Lee: I want it to be a national commission, but it's got to have people who are impacted by the legacy of slavery. We've got to have young people division what the future looks like without these barriers of systemic racism.

We have to have academics and historians, and we have to have a couple of politicians on it because they have to help shepherd the reparations and the final conclusion of this process through the United States Congress. It's got to be intergenerational, it's got to be intersectional.

The US Institute for Peace, and I've talked to them, they have envisioned this all around the world. Some of them have worked, some haven't. Rwanda, South Africa, you look at 41 countries, they have a formula for what works and what doesn't work. I would want them, even though I fund the US Institute for Peace, but it's their mandates only for commissions abroad. I want them, and I'm trying to get the funding and the direction for them to help us in the United States because we have our own unique character here of racism and institutional racism. We have to get their input and their insight into what works and what doesn't work around the world, and then apply that to our own place.

Mellisa: As Representative Lee was clear about, she believes that fact-finding and truth-telling are only the first step in the meaningful process of national healing.

Lee: The outcome has got to be repair the damage, that's got to be the outcome. You can't just move forward and heal without transforming this country. That means reparations.

Mellisa: Barbra Lee was discussing this idea of reparative action to address past racial harms during a Harvard University event in the same week that the Supreme Court was hearing oral arguments in the case of Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard. Many court observers expect that the justices will end or significantly curtail any consideration of race in college admissions.

Lee: Judge Ketanji, she is just like laying it out there during her questioning and debates on the Supreme Court in terms of the context, in terms of-- She's brilliant at how she has done this laying out the historical context for repairing the damage. In California, Proposition 209 ended affirmative action when I was in the legislature, and I led the effort to try to stop that but it went up. It passed, but what has happened is not only did we lose the reparative aspect of affirmative action but when you look at what it has done in terms of University, California, very few African American students.

When you look at what it has done in terms of employment and state service, very few African Americans, when you look at what it has done in state contracting, very few black businesses. I am telling you, not only did it--It work for what they wanted it to do because it has really turned the clock back in California to really a tragic moment when the only way we can address affirmative action is through federal resources that come into the state, which still have that close semblance of racial [chuckles] equity in some of our policies.

It's really bad. We have got to talk about repairing the damage because otherwise, all the work that we've done, everything that people who've done and fought for before us, all that's going to be turned back and be dismantled. The critical part of our historic human rights, civil rights struggle, freedom fighters, what happened after reconstruction, all of that did not repair the damage of the past. I think we have to realize that that's the missing link to move forward, to make this a country that really is about liberty and justice for all.

Mellisa: Representative Lee also connected these movements for racial justice to the issue of reproductive justice.

Lee: From day one there's been a disconnection between reproductive justice and racial equity and reproductive rights. Let me just give you a bit of my history. I was a staffer to a great member of Congress, Ron Dellums. Henry Hyde instituted The Hyde Amendment. It was late 70s. I was a staffer there. I was furious.

Mellisa: Now, The Hyde Amendment prohibits the use of federal funds for any health benefit coverage that include abortion, specifically targeting people enrolled in Medicaid, Medicare, and the Children's Health Insurance Program. The only exceptions are for rape, incest, or life-threatening conditions. The Hyde Amendmen disproportionately affects access to reproductive healthcare for women of color and low-income women.

It's been included in congressional spending bills since its passage in 1976. When Lee took office in 1998, she started her work to repeal The Hyde Amendment, and now serving in her 12th term, Lee has brought about incremental change. In 2021, The Hyde Amendment was struck from two appropriation bills.

Lee: This takes long. The moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Now with [unintelligible 00:09:16], we got to do the same thing. We got to push back the states like California, which is really a safe haven that we provide the resources for low-income women, Black and brown women primarily in the South, who need and want access that we are able to help. Don't give up hope. Keep mobilizing, keep organizing, and vote.

Mellisa: Bending that moral arc towards justice in a diverse multiracial democracy is a difficult challenge, as we witnessed with the intimacy and power battles that have rocked the Los Angeles City Council in recent months.

Lee: What it says to me as racist and as horrible as what took place and they all should resign. It was a moment to talk about multiracial democracy, and it's a moment now for communities of color to come together. I think if there is a silver lining-- I see so many people who are non-Black saying this is wrong, we're going to deal with this, we're going to not let this happen again and we're going to try to figure out these systems that allow this to happen, so that's the silver lining. What I'm seeing in LA are people coming together across race, across gender, across multi-generational, intergenerational saying we're not standing for this.

Melissa: My thanks to representative Barbra Lee of California and to Harvard's Kennedy School for hosting our conversation. We're going to post the link to our full discussion on The Takeaway social media pages @The Takeaway.

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