Environmental justice activist Anthony Rogers-Wright lives full-time in Seattle, Washington, but just happened to be in Massachusetts last weekend when he heard that Senator Ed Markey was holding a town hall about the Green New Deal in Northampton, a crunchy college town in the heart of the state. So Rogers-Wright attended, in the hopes of asking Markey whether the Democrats’ emerging grand plan to fight climate change includes reparations for black and brown people.

Rogers-Wright believed that it did. After all, a paragraph on page six of the 14-page resolution Markey and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez introduced in February says the Green New Deal should “promote justice and equity by stopping current, preventing future, and repairing historic oppression” of vulnerable and minority communities. But Rogers-Wright wanted to be sure. So when he got to the microphone, he cited the passage above and asked, “Does that mean reparations?”

Markey would not commit to a definitive answer. The resolution, he said, deliberately “doesn’t mention any individual item” or specific policy, adding, “It’s meant to open up a big debate in our country” about how to fight climate change. A Green New Deal must eventually “ensure that every race, every economic strata is fully represented in this discussion—that we leave no one behind and it is environmental justice,” he added. But how that will be done is still up for discussion.

“He did not answer my question,” Rogers-Wright later told me. To be fair, he asked a lot of questions while he had the microphone, and did so about as rapidly as the guy in the Micro Machines commercials. But his reparations question did include a good point: “How can a bill committed to environmental justice and climate justice not include reparations for black folk for slavery, white supremacy-fueled and concentrated oppression, as well as restitution to indigenous folk for genocide, brutal land theft, and broken treaties?”

As the 2020 presidential race gets underway, Democratic candidates are getting asked a lot of questions about the Green New Deal—whether they support it, what policies should be in it, how much should be spent on it. They’re also getting asked a lot of questions about reparations—whether African Americans and others hurt by slavery, Jim Crow laws, redlining, and other racist or discriminatory policies deserve recognition and compensation.