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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, Roosevelt Senior Fellow Sandy
Darity and folklorist Kirsten Mullen write for the blog that only a
comprehensive reparations
program 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.
- Another angle:
“Darity, who has enlisted other Black academics and activists in what
he calls a ‘Reparations
Planning Committee,’ 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.
 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.
- 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 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.
 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.
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