[Despite the raised awareness around the issue of reparations, the
political will to enact a federal plan is currently lacking. ]
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FIVE PRINCIPLES FOR MAKING STATE AND LOCAL REPARATIONS PLANS
REPARATIVE  
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Kyle K. Moore
February 15, 2023
Economic Policy Institute
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_ Despite the raised awareness around the issue of reparations, the
political will to enact a federal plan is currently lacking. _

, Anjali Nair / NBC News; AP; Getty; Mapping Inequality

 

We are still living in the aftermath of 2020’s overlapping crises of
racial injustice, our nation’s polycrisis. Between the emergence of
the COVID-19 pandemic, the ensuing economic recession, and the public
police murder of George Floyd, we saw a harsh truth about the
structure of American political economy: White supremacy has shaped
our institutions such that their outcome is consistent Black precarity
and premature death.

This confluence of tragedies brought awareness of the Black American
condition to a new generation. It also reinvigorated interest among
academics and policymakers to finally do something about the problem
of racial disparities (though activists and community organizers
largely never lost interest in this).

This renewed awareness and interest in addressing racial disparities
brought attention to arguably the only structural solution to
persistent Black-white economic and social disparities, one that we
have put off as a country for generations: reparations for slavery,
Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration.

William Darity and Kirsten Mullen’s 2020 book, _From Here to
Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century_
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outlines a clear strategy for implementing a reparations plan that
would close the Black-white racial wealth gap in America—a
foundational source of inequality across several social and economic
domains. Darity and Mullen call for a federal reparations plan, on the
grounds that the federal government is the only institution with the
means to enact a transfer at a large enough scale to close the racial
wealth gap, and is further the culpable party for allowing the
institutional atrocities being rectified to exist in the first place.

Despite the raised awareness around the issue of reparations, the
political will to enact a federal plan is currently lacking. H.R. 40,
a bill to establish the Commission to Study and Develop Reparations
Proposals for African Americans, is an important first step toward
passing such a federal plan, but has yet to be brought to the House
floor for a vote in its 32-year history.

In the absence of a federal plan, various states and localities have
convened their own commissions and, in some cases, enacted their own
reparations-style plans at the sub-federal level (i.e, below the
federal level). California’s Reparations Task Force
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investigate reparations thus far, but cities like Evanston, Illinois
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Paul, Minnesota
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and Providence, Rhode Island
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all investigated and worked toward creating and implementing programs
under the auspices of reparations.

As more states and localities attempt to design reparations plans, it
is important that they keep certain principles in mind to ensure that
the plans are effective as reparations. There is an important
difference between policy that is simply “good” for Black people
or people of color more broadly, and policy that is reparative.

Darity and Mullen identify three criteria for an effective federal
reparations plan. The plan must
include ACKNOWLEDGEMENT and APOLOGY for the harm committed; it
must provide material REDRESS for that harm; and it must
bring CLOSURE through a mutual understanding between the
beneficiaries (white Americans) and victims (Black Americans) of the
oppressive systems that were implemented. In this post, I expand these
criteria slightly to provide guidelines for states and localities that
are attempting to create their own reparations-style plans in the
absence of a federal effort.

In addition to ACKNOWLEDGEMENT and REDRESS, I suggest that any
sub-federal reparations plan that aims to be effective should:

* Specify what harms are being addressed and who will benefit.
* Stay within its capacity to provide redress for its harm—and
avoid absolving the federal government from its responsibility.
* Commit to structural change designed to prevent future racial
injustice.

SUB-FEDERAL REPARATIONS PLANS SHOULD ACKNOWLEDGE AND APOLOGIZE FOR THE
HARM DONE

Acknowledgement and apology of the atrocities committed are essential
to making any reparations plan legitimate, whether federal or
sub-federal. Attempting to rectify harms committed at an institutional
level without speaking directly to the history of those harms would be
institutional gaslighting and likely lead to poorly designed policy.
Acknowledgment and apology are also the preconditions for
reconciliation, closure, and a future commitment to avoid causing harm
in the future.

For example, if the cities of Wilmington, North Carolina
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or Tulsa, Oklahoma
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developed reparations programs centered around the massacres that took
place in those cities in 1898 and 1921, respectively, those plans
would need to include explicit acknowledgement of and apology for
those massacres. An indirect compensation plan designed to
disproportionately benefit Black residents would not suffice for
legitimate reparations.

SUB-FEDERAL REPARATIONS PLANS SHOULD INCLUDE MATERIAL REDRESS TO THE
BENEFICIARIES

Any plan for Black American reparations needs to include material
redress. For example, if the harm being rectified is an historical
exclusion from a local housing program, the descendants of those
excluded should be the beneficiaries of a new housing
program _and _be materially compensated for the lost potential
wealth from having been excluded. Darity and Mullen are explicit that
a federal reparations plan should include direct transfers of wealth
from the federal government to the descendants of Black American
slaves in an amount sufficient to compensate for both the unpaid labor
and the lost appreciation of the fruits of that labor. The current
racial wealth gap reflects the cumulative effect of Black Americans’
experience with economic racism over time, and closing that gap would
be the way to redress that experience. Plans at the local and state
level do not have the capacity to do this and should instead focus on
addressing disparities that are within their scope.

SUB-FEDERAL REPARATIONS PLANS NEED TO SPECIFY WHAT HARMS ARE BEING
ADDRESSED AND WHO WILL BENEFIT

For a plan to be considered reparative, it must explicitly outline the
incident or historical precedent being addressed and the victims that
are being compensated through the plan, in as much specificity as
possible. A universal plan (that is, one that would benefit everyone)
that would disproportionately benefit the descendants of those
impacted by Jim Crow laws could _not_ be considered
reparative—though such policies may be worth pursuing on their own
merits. The fact that a policy benefits the disadvantaged is not
enough on its own to consider it a part of an agenda for racial
justice, nor enough to make that policy reparative. The beneficiaries
of reparations must be the descendants of the aggrieved parties—in
the cases of American chattel slavery and Jim Crow, for example, those
beneficiaries would be Black Americans. At the sub-federal level,
reparations plans should specify the injustices committed by the state
or locality, and redress should be provided to the victims of those
specific policies and their descendants.

SUB-FEDERAL REPARATIONS PLANS SHOULD NOT ATTEMPT TO ABSOLVE THE
FEDERAL GOVERNMENT IN ITS RESPONSIBILITY TO PROVIDE REDRESS FOR ITS
HARM

The idea that a sub-federal reparations plan should stay within an
appropriate scope for its capacity is important for more reasons than
just feasibility. It also ties into which parties are ultimately
culpable for what institutional harms have been committed. For
example, it would be inappropriate for a reparations plan at the city
level to attempt to circumvent the federal government and provide
reparations to its Black residents for chattel slavery, because the
city government is not the culpable party for legalizing and
supporting chattel slavery. Only the federal government can play that
role.

State and local reparations plans should be grounded in an historical
analysis of what institutional atrocities have taken place at that
level. This similarly applies to the statistics being cited for
developing state and local reparations plans. For example, citing the
national racial wealth gap as part of the acknowledgement component of
a city-level reparations plan would be inappropriate. Instead, that
city should probe its own history and account for its own legacy of
racial injustice.

SUB-FEDERAL REPARATIONS PLANS SHOULD INCLUDE STRUCTURAL CHANGE AND A
COMMITMENT TO ONGOING VIGILANCE AGAINST FUTURE RACIAL INJUSTICE

In the spirit of the “closure” aspect of the criteria put forward
by Darity and Mullen, I suggest that sub-federal reparations plans
should also commit to making racial justice an ethic and practice,
rather than a one-time occurrence. This would mean including elements
of structural change—permanent or ongoing laws and institutions
designed to prevent these atrocities from happening in the future or
to stop these disparities from re-opening in unjust ways in the
plan’s aftermath. These commitments would also serve to protect
against the backlash to racial progress we have so often seen in
American history—when reactionaries attempt to roll back policies
designed to achieve some level of equity. If we have seen these
periods of backlash in response to raised awareness of racial
disparities and symbolic progress, we can expect them to follow
successful reparations plans at any level. Policymakers should be
aware and prepared for this.

Sub-federal reparations plans like the ones being explored in
Providence and Evanston represent an important step forward in our
collective recognition that Black Americans deserve redress for the
harms inflicted by government institutions against them throughout
this country’s history. However, it is important to reiterate that
these plans are not and cannot be substitutes for a federal
reparations effort. As Darity and Mullen point out in their work, the
federal government is the culpable party for the racial wealth gap and
the long-term national consequences of chattel slavery,
Reconstruction, Jim Crow, and mass incarceration for Black Americans.
The federal government is also the one with the requisite resources to
meet the reparative challenge. But as long as state and local
reparations plans are a part of the national conversation on achieving
justice and equity for Black Americans, these guidelines should be a
useful framework for making plans that are effective and, most
importantly, reparative.

_KYLE K. MOORE is an economist with the Economic Policy Institute’s
Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy. He studies economic
inequality in the frameworks of stratification economics, political
economy, and public health. Prior to joining EPI, Moore was a senior
policy analyst with the Joint Economic Committee’s Democratic Staff,
where he authored reports on economic policy issues centered on race,
class, age, and gender disparities for use by Members of Congress and
the public._

_Moore’s research focuses on the intersection between racial
economic disparities and health inequity across the life course, with
particular focus on “upstream” structural causes of morbidity and
mortality differences across race. In 2019 Moore was a Dissertation
Scholar at the Washington Center for Equitable Growth. Prior to this
he worked as a doctoral fellow and research associate with the
Retirement Equity Lab at the Schwartz Center for Economic Policy
Analysis. He is currently a PhD candidate at The New School for Social
Research._

_THE ECONOMIC POLICY INSTITUTE (EPI) is a nonprofit, nonpartisan
think tank created in 1986 to include the needs of low- and
middle-income workers in economic policy discussions. EPI believes
every working person deserves a good job with fair pay, affordable
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* reparations
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* slavery
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* Racism
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* Inequality
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* Equity
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* economic justice
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* legislation
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