Republican TV Ad Would Like To Remind Texas Voters That Colin Allred Is Black

The ad baselessly claims Rep. Colin Allred (D-Texas), who is challenging Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), supports reparations for slavery.

A right-wing political action committee put up a TV ad on Friday indirectly highlighting the racial differences between Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and his Democratic challenger, Rep. Colin Allred.

The ad shows a Latina woman talking about how hard her family has always worked and how she would resent the government paying African Americans reparations for slavery — and falsely suggesting that Allred, who is Black, supports doing so.

“Colin Allred’s group would take our tax dollars to pay for reparations,” the unidentified woman says in the ad. “I’m not okay with it.”

Allred’s “group,” per text on the screen, is the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation, an organization affiliated with the Congressional Black Caucus — a Capitol Hill group that counts most Black lawmakers, including Allred, as members.

But Allred, a moderate, is not one of the 130 cosponsors of H.R. 40, the main pro-reparations legislation on Capitol Hill. The bill itself would not make the government pay reparations — it would establish a commission to study and develop proposals for doing so. Even if Congress passed the bill, which is unlikely anytime soon, lawmakers would have to vote again to actually pay anyone.