President Joe Biden is revamping the effort to make Harriet Tubman the new face of the $20 bill.
But not everyone is convinced the iconic abolitionist would approve of the honor.
‘Harriet Tubman would not want to be on the $20 bill,” says columnist Victoria Gagliardo Silver.
“She would see it for what it is: a performative, pandering act of faux-activism to please adoring liberals while working toward little effective change. Wealth is the source of all American inequality, and it is not something Tubman would have wanted to be associated with.”
Born around 1820, Tubman escaped slavery and later became a “conductor” for the Underground Railroad, where she led enslaved people to freedom before the Civil War.
In an editorial for The Independent, Gagliardo Silver says she believes Tubman would be horrified by the plight of African Americans today.
If Harriet Tubman could see the state of things for Black individuals in our nation, she’d be rolling in her grave. She was a liberationist, a radical who sought freedom and equality as the bare minimum for Black people by putting her life and body on the line. And despite slavery being “a thing of the past”, our country has yet to achieve racial equality because racism is baked into this nation. Harriet Tubman was never American, until whitewashing her into an American hero benefited the narrative.
America was founded with the idea that Black people are less than human — three-fifths of a human, to be exact — an idea that continues to influence laws and policy today.
Nevertheless, the Biden administration is committed to fast-tracking the new Tubman bills.
“It’s important that our notes, our money… reflect the history and diversity of our country and Harriet Tubman’s image gracing the new $20 note will certainly reflect that.” White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki told reporters during a briefing on Monday afternoon.
Psaki added that the administration is trying to find ways to “speed up that effort.”
Barrack Obama first proposed putting Tubman on the paper currency in 2016.
The goal was for the replacement of Andrew Jackson, the seventh U.S. president, to take place in 2020.
Tubman would be the first black woman and the first African American to appear on U.S. currency.
Obama’s Treasury Secretary Jack Lew first announced the change in 2016 after a viral online campaign to feature a woman on the currency.
In 2020, Trump administration Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin announced that the new $20 bill would not be released until 2030, and the next administration’s secretary would make the decision on the change.
