Biden could repay black supporters by canceling student debt

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The critical role black women played in electing President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris and two Democratic senators from Georgia, taking over the body from Republicans, has been well documented. Black women organizers in Georgia and elsewhere in the South and the country have devoted years of hard work to fighting widespread voter suppression and identifying the voters who made those victories possible.

Now black women are asking what the Biden administration plans to do to repay them. In one viral tweets Sent days before the January 20 presidential inauguration, U.S. Representative Ayanna Pressley, a Democrat from Massachusetts, made a suggestion: If the Biden administration wants to thank black women, it must cancel student debt — all of it.

“Black women have more student debt than any other group in America,” Pressley noted.

About 45 million Americans owe a total of $1.6 trillion in student debt, according to Data of the Federal Reserve and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Although most borrowers are white, black borrowers on average have to $25,000 more than their white counterparts, EducationData.org reports. And black female borrowers “spend more of their income on repayment than any other race or gender subgroup,” a recent NAACP Report found.

“While current systems of student loans and higher education funding work to the detriment of black students as a whole, there is an even more acute effect on black female borrowers,” the NAACP report states. “This is attributable to the ways in which racism and sexism converge to shape the unique experiences of black female borrowers before, during and after college.”

President Biden has proposed a plan to forgive up to $10,000 in federal student loan debt per borrower, which would cost about $370 billion. But defenders say that’s just not enough. Why? Consider that two decades into their studies, the median black student borrower has $18,500 in loans remaining, while the median white borrower has only $1,000 in loans, according to a 2019 report by the Institute of Assets and Social Policy at Brandeis University.

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York and Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts to say Biden has the power to cancel student loans by executive order. They propose to him to cancel $50,000 per borrower, which eradicate the debt of 75% of borrowers. But Biden is reluctant to take action on such a scale and questioned whether he actually has such authority.

Fenaba Addo, associate professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Ashley Harrington, federal advocacy director at the Center for Responsible Lending in Durham, North Carolina, discussed the need for debt cancellation black student loan in a recent Yahoo news article. They noted that the extreme and persistent racial wealth gap in the United States, where white households have between six and 10 times the savings of black households, that means student debt affects even white and black borrowers with similar incomes differently.

“Substantial cancellation of student debt is perhaps the most progressive and productive action a new president can take in an unstable economy,” they concluded.

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