It should be a cause for celebration that supporters of a reparations bill in the U.S. House of Representatives say that they have enough votes for its passage. But it is not.

H.R 40, the “Commission to Study and Develop Reparations Proposals for African Americans Act,” has languished in the House for more than 30 years, ever since the late Rep. John Conyers Jr. , D-Mich., introduced it in 1989. Conyers was motivated by President Ronald Reagan’s signing the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 providing reparation for Japanese Americans whom the government interned during World War II.

It seemed only fair that, if the U.S. could compensate citizens who were detained just because of their nationality, it should all the more do so for the descendants of millions of Africans who were brought here as slaves and forced to work without pay and played a crucial role in establishing the economic base of what would become the United States.

Not only that. The United States had in fact granted a form of reparation after slavery ended by leasing 40 acres and lending a mule to each family to work the land and become self-sufficient. That dispensation was, however, soon taken away.

Conyers’ bill failed but he re-introduced it, also unsuccessfully, in every legislative session until he resigned in 2017. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, took over as sponsor and she too re-introduced H.R. 40 – the number representing the 40 acres — at every session until it finally made it out of committee for the first time last April. It now appears to be on the verge of passage in the full House before going on to the U.S. Senate. H.R. 40, though, is not about compensation; as its name says, it would merely create a 13-member commission to study the issue.

So, no, HR 40 is not the answer to the demand for reparation for slavery and, despite the efforts of well-meaning lawmakers such as Democrats Conyers and Jackson Lee and, later, New Jersey Senator Corey Booker, the proposed commission will likely become an opportunity to kick this particular can down a street without end – very slowly.

For it is very doubtful that anything remotely related to reparation payment will happen unless, first, there is national acknowledgement of slavery as an important part of American history and the role it played in establishing the racist hegemony on which the state was built. That is unlikely to happen any time soon.

In fact, the “cancel culture” against which demagogues are railing is a notso-subtle propaganda tactic to erase slavery from the minds of Americans. This is being done through the sustained attack on Critical Race Theory (CRT), including enactment of laws in several states forbidding teaching it in schools and punishing teachers who do so.

Very few, if any, of the legislators and the anti-CRT crowd are interested in the fact that, far from being an attempt to make European American students feel guilty about slavery, CRT is intended to provide a basis for better understanding of how the nation came to be. What should be a unifying step is deliberately being promoted as divisive by those who make tens of millions of dollars a year peddling the lie. They are monetizing their campaign to cancel African American history.

They want Americans to forget horrors such as the more than 4,400 African Americans who were lynched. Indeed, just a few days ago, Republican House members Andrew Clyde of Georgia, Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Chip Roy of Texas voted against a long overdue bill to make lynching a federal crime. And all Republicans blocked legislation to ban race-based hair discrimination.

They also want to cancel the achievements which African Americans have made despite the lopsided socio-economic system which has prevented them from creating generational wealth. Donald Trump championed the falsehood that Barack Obama was not an American and could not run for president and Trump made it to the White House. Now, Tucker Carlson of Fox News is demanding to see the LSAT law school test scores of another brilliant African American, U.S. Supreme Court nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson, who, like Obama, is a distinguished Harvard graduate.

The racism is, of course, not unique to the United States. Just how ingrained is the sense of racial superiority in the European psyche was seen recently in comments, reported by several media outlets, on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, CBS News foreign correspondent Charlie D’Agata, reporting from Kyiv, the Ukrainian capital, said, “This is a relatively civilized, relatively European – I have to choose those words carefully, too – city, where you wouldn’t expect that or hope that it’s going to happen.”

British journalist and former proBrexit politician Daniel Hannan wrote in The Telegraph, “They seem so like us. That is what makes it so shocking.”

Al Jazeera English anchor Peter Dobbie said Ukrainian refugees “are not people trying to get away from areas in North Africa. They look like any European family that you would live next door to.”

Ukraine’s former deputy prosecutor general David Sakvarelidze said in a BBC interview that “it’s very emotional for me because I see European people with blue eyes and blonde hair being killed.”

And while more than 1.5 million “people with blue eyes and blonde hair” have fled without problem, some non-European students trying to leave Ukraine have complained of harassment by Ukrainian soldiers and citizens at the border.

That sort of racism will always be a feature of global conversation soaked with the blood of colonialism, as it will be in the United States, where racism is peddled for power and profit. It is a pity that not enough Americans at least have the courage to reject it and cancel the divisiveness.