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Children’s YouTuber Ms. Rachel posted support for reparations on Instagram Monday in the latest in a series of political moves by the online educator.
Ms. Rachel, whose real name is Rachel Accurso, posted a quote on her account from Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations” about the need to “reckon” with America’s history of slavery.
“Two hundred fifty years of slavery. Ninety years of Jim Crow. Sixty years of separate but equal. Thirty-five years of racist housing policy. Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole,” the quote read.
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Ms. Rachel is pictured during an appearance on the “TODAY” show on Tuesday, Sept. 24, 2024. (Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images)
Digital reached out to Accurso and Coates for comment but did not immediately receive a response.
“The Case for Reparations” was one of Coates’ most famous essays, in which he argued that “American prosperity was ill-gotten” and that the nation needs to reconcile with its past beyond handing out money.
“What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices — more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe,” Coates wrote. “What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling ‘patriotism’ while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.”
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Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” essay claimed that American prosperity was “ill-gotten.” (Getty Images)
The post was the latest openly political move by Accurso, who has increasingly spoken out in favor of progressive causes using her children’s entertainer brand.
Last month, she endorsed a dozen Democratic candidates, including former Rep. Cori Bush, D-Mo., and Michigan U.S. Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed, ahead of major primary elections.
Days before that, she suggested that race was a factor in the investigation into Nolan Wells’ mysterious death.
“We know the investigation and everything that followed would have been different if Nolan Wells were White and his friends were Black,” Accurso wrote in a post. “Nolan and his family deserve justice.”
At the time, former Palm Beach County, Fla., State Attorney Dave Aronberg attacked Accurso for weighing in on the investigation as it was being conducted, as well as “injecting division” through her past comments on the Israel-Hamas war.
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Children’s educator Rachel Griffin Accurso, known as Ms. Rachel, has taken part in several forms of political advocacy in recent months. (Maxine Wallace/The Washington Post via Getty Images)
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“Ms. Rachel is at it again. Whether it’s injecting division into domestic tragedies or spreading toxic, antisemitic rhetoric in her posts about the Middle East, she constantly pushes narrative over facts,” Aronberg told Digital, adding, “We need real investigative transparency [in the Wells case], not popular children’s creators using tragic deaths and foreign policy to divide us.”
