Centering Blackness to dismantle racism. View this in your browser and share with your friends. <[link removed]>
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Why Reparations Are a National Debt
Previewing their forthcoming book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century <[link removed]>, Roosevelt Senior Fellow Sandy Darity and folklorist Kirsten Mullen write for the blog that only a comprehensive reparations program <[link removed]> can achieve redistributive justice for Black Americans—and that only the federal government can get it done. “The specific case for reparations for black American descendants of US slavery is predicated on 1) the cumulative damages of slavery; 2) nearly a century-long epoch of legal segregation (known as the Jim Crow era) and white terrorism; and 3) the ongoing harms of racialized mass incarceration, police executions of unarmed blacks, credit, housing, and employment discrimination, as well as the enormous racial wealth gap,” they write. “We must emphasize: Black reparations are not a matter of personal or singular institutional guilt; black reparations are a matter of national responsibility.” Read on. <[link removed]>
- Another angle: “Darity, who has enlisted other Black academics and activists in what he calls a ‘Reparations Planning Committee <[link removed]>,’ said a comprehensive reparations program should raise the Black share of the nation’s wealth to the Black share of the nation’s population. That will require increasing Black wealth by at least $10 trillion, he said.” Read more from the Washington Post. <[link removed]>
Centering Blackness in the 2020 Debate
"Darrick Hamilton has become the wonk for this political moment because of his talent for quietly reframing the conversation,” Kara Voght writes in a Mother Jones profile on the Roosevelt fellow. “The work of Hamilton and fellow economists in quantifying the racial wealth gap has given progressives in the 2020 field a grammar for talking about inequality, one that has long eluded the Democrats. Is the country’s most pernicious division one of class or race? For the first time in more than half a century, the putative party of the worker and of Black rights has begun to figure out where it stands on the question, with Hamilton helping to direct it toward the answer: Yes.”Read on. <[link removed]>
- Beyond the gap: “If we focus on the structural, then we can think about [racial wealth inequality] beyond just the pure financial measure of looking at a dollar amount, but rather focusing on all the kinds of less-tangible areas that wealth bestows,”Roosevelt Fellow Anne Price <[link removed]>tells CityLab, “such as allowing us greater kinds of decision-making and less-constrained choices, which enables us to live much more dignified lives.”Read more. <[link removed]>
The Racism of Neoliberalism
Strategic racism stoked the neoliberal revolution, Darrick Hamilton and the Kirwan Institute’s Kyle Strickland argue in a piece for Evonomics. “. . . an honest and sobering confession of our historical sins, accompanied with redress, would counter the neoliberal frame that characterizes Black, brown and poor people as ‘undeserving,’ and, instead, pave the way for narratives that accurately frame inequality and poverty as grounded in resource deprivation and exploitation.”Read more. <[link removed]>
What We’re Reading
11 Charts That Track the Progress America Has Made in Racial Equality—and All the Visceral Ways We Still Have Left to Go <[link removed]> - Business Insider
The Case for Accelerating Financial Inclusion in Black Communities <[link removed]> - McKinsey & Company
Where Might Trumpism Take Us? <[link removed]>- New York Times
Under Trump, Income Growth Slows across US <[link removed]> - Capital & Main
Supreme Inequality: The Supreme Court's Fifty-Year Battle for a More Unjust America <[link removed]> - Adam Cohen
Soak-the-Rich Tax Plans Take Hold in the Entire Democratic Field <[link removed]> - Bloomberg
How Swing Voters Feel about Medicare-for-All <[link removed]> - Vox
We’re All on This Sick Planet Together <[link removed]> - New Republic
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