True Reparations Are A National Debt
An Article Excerpt By William A. Darity, Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen
I. An Appropriate Level of Restitution
The specific case for reparations for Black American descendants of United States slavery is predicated
on 10 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. We do not assign blame for this litany of harms to specific individuals or institutions.
We must emphasize: black reparations are not a matter of personal or singular institutional guilt; black
reparations are a matter of national responsibility.
In our estimation, black-white wealth inequality is the most powerful indicator of the full effects of racial
injustice in the United States. Black Americans constitute about 13 percent of the nation’s population but
own less than 3 percent of the nation’s wealth. Although there are many ways to calculate reparations,
including an estimation of the present value of the time stolen from the enslaved or the present value of
the 40-acre land grants promised – but denied – to the freedmen, we believe that a true reparations policy
must make the black wealth share at least consistent with the black share of the American population.
This will necessitate building the eligible black American level of asset holdings by $10 to $12 trillion, or
approximately $250,000 for each black individual.
So, who should pay the bill? In From Here to Equality, we argue that the culpable party is the United
States government. Authority is constructed and contextual, and all three phases of atrocities catalogued
here were products of the legal and authority framework established by the federal government. In many
instances, the federal government further sanctioned racial atrocities by silence and inaction.
This means, in turn, that local or piecemeal – little by little – attempts at racial atonement do not
constitute reparations proper. In many instances. local initiatives that parade under the label of
“reparations” are not that at all. Local government actions called “reparations” – whether at the state or
municipal level – frequently constitute an admission that atrocities have been committed followed by
allocations for research, or the construction of centers, rather than compensatory payments to black
Americans. However, these scattered steps to stop an ongoing harm do not heal the wound produced by
the harm; usually, they do not involve any compensatory payment.
Even if they do afford compensatory payment, a series of local initiatives is highly unlikely to match the
minimum bill for black reparations. As we noted above, it will require at least $10 trillion to eliminate the
black-white wealth disparity. Taken separately or collectively, there is no evidence that local
“reparations” will come close to addressing the full scope of the measured harm or achieving an
appropriate level of restitution.
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national-debt/
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