Today I'll be talking to Duke University professor William Darity and his partner
Kirsten Mullen about the racial wealth gap between African Americans and white
Americans, and how reparations to African Americans could help close it.
He co-authored his most recent book titled "From Here to Equality: Reparations
for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century" with Kirsten Mullen.
Kirsten is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual.
Thank you both for joining me today.
It's a pleasure to be here.
Thank you.
Who should be financially responsible for paying reparations to
Black Americans?
The federal government must pay this debt.
This is the entity that gave itself the authority to enslave Black
Americans and to institute nearly a century of legal segregation.
When we're talking about legal segregation, we're not only talking about keeping Black people separate from
white people, we're also talking about nearly a century of white terror
attacks on Black communities.
And these were focused on primarily two different things: turning a blind eye
to the destruction of Black people's property.
And in some cases, the federal government was party to those destructions.
So you're talking about the seizure and appropriation of black property.
The federal government is also the only entity that has the capacity to pay the debt.
So the federal government is both the culpable and the capable party and should pay the debt.
You all are arguing that the federal government should be footing the bill for these reparations, but does
that mean that the cost would ultimately be passed on to the taxpayers?
Not necessarily.
We make the point in the final chapter of our book that there have
been a number of recent instances in which the federal government has made
huge expenditures without raising taxes.
One of those instances is the substantial expenditures the federal
government made to address the health crisis associated with Covid.
You don't necessarily have to raise taxes to
undertake these massive expenditure projects.
However, you do have to be concerned about the inflationary effects of these
types of projects.
And what we suggest in "From Here to Equality" is that there are
two major steps that could be taken to minimize the inflation
risk. One of those steps is to spread the payment of the $14
trillion out over several years.
We recommend no more than ten years, or a decade, but that would
reduce the amount of annual expenditure that would be needed.
And then the second thing that could be done to minimize the inflation
risk is to provide people with these funds in the form of
an asset that is somewhat different from a direct cash transfer,
something that's less liquid, that they cannot spend entirely
all at one time.
This could include giving them reparations in the form of an
annuity or a trust account or some type of an endowment
where there were limitations on the amount that could be spent at each moment.
But the key thing is that ultimately, the discretion for the use of the
funds must reside with the recipients.
Who is eligible for reparations should be Black descendants
of individuals who were enslaved in the United States.
And we propose that there are two criteria that would be relevant for
determining eligibility in this context.
The first of these is what we refer to as a lineage standard.
An individual would have to demonstrate that they have at least one ancestor who was
enslaved in the United States of America.
And secondly, an individual would have to meet what we refer to as an
identity standard.
So for at least 12 years before the adoption of a reparations
plan or the enactment of a study commission for reparations,
an individual would have to demonstrate that they self identified
on a legal document as Black, Negro, African American or
Afro-American. And we argue that this is the relevant population
for reparations because this is the community that has descended
from the folks who were promised 40-acre land grants by the federal
government as restitution for their years of bondage.
And this was a promise that was not kept.
At the same time, the federal government was giving one and a half million white
families 160-acre land grants in the Western territories
under the Homestead Act of 1862.
And this is the foundation for the racial wealth gap.
Why is it important that monetary reparations be made specifically
to African Americans as opposed to a broader group such
as Black Americans, which would include Caribbean Americans, possibly
African immigrants, or expanded to the broader umbrella of people of
color, which includes other racial groups as well?
So we are focusing on the descendants of the individuals
who were promised those 40-acre land grants and denied them.
You know, these are folks who had the promise of the opportunity
to build wealth and, importantly, to pass that wealth on
to their children.
This is not the case of the more recent immigrants.
We know that for the most part, unless your family was part of the diplomatic
corps, Black people from the Caribbean and from the continent were not in the United States in
large numbers until the late sixties.
They did not experience enslavement in this country.
Their ancestors did not experience Jim Crow in this country.
They did not experience nearly 100 years of racialized terror
against their families in this country.
Yes, it is indeed quite likely that many of
these individuals have a case that can be made for reparations, but not to the
United States government. Individuals who are from Antigua or from Jamaica would take their case for
reparations to the U.K.
Our histories are not the same.
There's a huge difference between being forced to come to this country in shackles
versus coming voluntarily for the opportunities that you believe
will be available to you.
Our research suggests very strongly that the more narrowly,
the more specific these claims are, the more likely they are to
be to be supported.
At minimum, a reparations plan must be
sufficient to eliminate the racial wealth gap.
The amount of expenditure to close the racial wealth gap would be closer to $14
trillion. We do the calculation for the amount that's required on the basis of
the mean difference or the average difference between Black and white households.
The average amount of wealth that's held by a Black household
circa 2019, based on the survey of consumer finances conducted by the
Federal Reserve, is closer to the vicinity of about 140,000
while the white average household had an amount that was in
excess of $980,000.
And we use that difference as the basis for calculating what's required to
close the racial wealth gap.
Well thank you both so much for your time today and this very insightful discussion.
I really appreciate it.
Thank you so much for having us, Cheyenne.
It's been a pleasure.
Yes. Thank you so much.