As debates continue over whether and how best to compensate African Americans for the crimes of slavery, one Ohio Republican has decided to toss another idea into the ring: reparations for white people. Bernie Moreno, a business owner seeking to challenge Democratic Senator Sherrod Brown in 2024, suggested at a campaign event this week that white descendants of soldiers who fought for the Union in the Civil War should be compensated for the actions of their ancestors, according to the New York Post. “They make it sound like America is a racist, broken country. You name a country that did that: that freed slaves, died to do that,” Moreno said, before asking, “Where are the reparations for the people in the North who died to save the lives of Black people?” Moreno, who lives in a state that produced iconic Union generals like Ulysses S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman, also claimed that the Civil War is “not taught a lot in schools much.”
