The racial wealth gap is, as you know,
is staggering.
Blacks are about 13% of the U.S. population,
but only have 2.6% of the nation's wealth.
And that translates into an average
household differential between Blacks and
whites in net worth of about $800,000
in 2016 dollars.
That's the gap that needs to be
closed by a reparations program.
In the aftermath of the Civil War,
the ancestors of today's living Black
Americans were promised restitution
for their years of slavery in the form of
40-acre land grants
that were never given to them.
We estimated that if you took the most
conservative interpretation
of that allocation,
it would be 10 acres per formerly enslaved
person. So there were 4 million folks who
were emancipated at the
end of the Civil War.
So that would mean
40 million acres of land
should have been allocated
to them on that basis.
And that's the low-end estimate.
The present value would probably be
anywhere between $4 and $6 trillion.
The Black rate of mortality nationally,
that's derived from data drawn from the
states that actually
have collected data on
the basis of race and ethnicity.
The Black mortality rate is
2.2 times as high
as both the Latino and
the Asian rate, and is
2.4 times as high as the white rate.
And if we explore potential explanations
why that's the case,
I think it can be linked
in some significant ways to wealth
differentials. So for example,
wealth position
makes it more essential for Blacks to hold
low-wage employment in arenas where
their work is deemed essential,
even if they are not deemed essential.
I would like people to pay close attention,
not only to what happened in Tulsa in 1921,
but the entire wave of
white massacres that
took place from the end of the Civil War
up until World War II.
These massacres not only
cost Black people
their lives, but also resulted in extensive
damage to Black property or the
appropriation of that property by whites.
I think people need to have a much better
understanding of the history of white
violence in the United States
and how that's
connected to the racial wealth gap.
But if we're going to address the question
of restitution for Black Americans for the
cumulative effects of slavery,
the period of Jim Crow or
legal segregation in the United States,
accompanied by white terror campaigns,
and ongoing atrocities like
mass incarceration,
police executions of unarmed blacks,
discrimination in labor markets and
credit markets and housing markets, then
we need something
that is going to focus on
the racial wealth gap, which to my way of
thinking captures the cumulative,
intergenerational consequences of this
entire trajectory of harms.
The GI bill was established in such a way
after World War II
that it’s administered in
a decentralized fashion,
which gave Southern
authorities complete discretion over who
would get the benefits.
So, for example, in the
state of Mississippi,
only two GIs who were
Black veterans received any mortgage
support from the GI bill.
In the book that I've just completed with
Kirsten Mullen, “From Here to Equality:
Reparations for Black Americans
in the 21st Century,”
we argue that the payments might
be made in the form of endowments or a
trust account, where individuals will be
allowed to spend the interest
off the account
in any given year,
but could only dip into the
principle subject to approval for a plan
of action or a proposal that they develop.
In the present moment,
you know, the federal government
overnight essentially came up
with, well, some people say
it's $2.2 trillion,
some people say
it's as much as $6 trillion
because of the loans
that were made by the
Federal Reserve board. But it came up with
that money overnight. There were no new
taxes administered.
I think that the present experience
or the current experience
demonstrates that the
federal government could spend on
virtually anything it wants to spend on.
You're denying all newly emancipated
Black Americans,
virtually all of them, you're
denying them any initial stake
in wealth as compensation for
their years of forced labor
and forced time under slavery.
That's how you begin to create,
that's the origin point, I think,
for the contemporary racial wealth gap.
That's where it starts.