An Excerpt from ”The Clear and Secular Case for Reparations”

by Cynthia McDonald

Policy And Wealth Creation

The United States has used federal policy countless times to create wealth in predominantly white communities. Policies such as the New Deal largely went to whites and excluded Blacks. The GI Bill was enacted toward the end of World War II. This policy was to give economic assistance to veterans, such as getting a house, investing in a business, or paying for college. Unfortunately, the management of this policy was given to the states, so Black soldiers coming home from war were often denied this benefit and never told why. An example is the state of Mississippi only granted two Black veterans the GI Bill when it was first enacted. Some 1.2 million Black men served in the U.S. military during the war. There were 237,000 soldiers from Mississippi and a large contingency of those soldiers were Black.

Why does this matter? Oftentimes, the question is raised: “What is wrong with Black people?” What about Black-on-Black crime? What about Black gangs? What about the marriage rate being low? What about Chicago? What about this and what about that? The “what-aboutisms” are what I like to call the symptoms of the deep and never-ending disease. I also like to call them “work avoidance.”

Since I hit you with a little history of economic injustice, let us delve into the wonderful world of statistics. Currently, Black Americans own less than two percent of the wealth in the United States. The median income of an African American [Freedman] household is roughly $30K to $43K versus the median income of a white household being nearly $66K per year. The estimated median wealth of Black households is $36,000 (not liquid), while white households estimated their parents’ median wealth at $150,000. A Black household median wealth for the head of that household with a bachelor’s degree is roughly $15,000 less than the head of a household that is white without a high school diploma.

According to the Economic Policy Institute, African Americans’ median household income and wealth is lower than that of ALL racial and ethnic groups. The myth that African Americans have this spending power of $1.3 trillion is a solid fallacy. That number was based on self-reporting surveys and the combined incomes of African Americans for approximately a year. If you did not know by now, income does not equate to wealth and it for damned sure does not mean buying power.

Reparations Defined

So – What Now? How is this going to be solved? The only way this is going to be solved is by how the government always solved the issue of groups of people coming into wealth: Policy. Massive economic policy – and that policy specifically targeted towards the injured group is defined as Reparations. This can only be achieved through what leading Reparations scholar and Duke University Professor William Darity Jr. calls ARC – or Acknowledgment, Redress, and Closure.

So, before we go into ARC, I think it is important to define Reparations:

Merriam-Webster generally defines Reparations as... A: a repairing or keeping in repair – the act of making amends, offering expiation, or giving satisfaction for a wrong or injury... or B: something done or given as amends or satisfaction [repair and redress]. The Encyclopedia Britannica defines Reparations as a levy on a defeated country forcing it to pay some of the war costs of the winning countries.

Reparations were levied on the Central Powers after World War I to compensate the Allies for some of their war costs. Another example of the later definition is when Germany was forced to pay reparations to Jewish Holocaust victims and their descendants if the direct victim did not survive. Other countries such as France and Croatia, who were also complicit in this behavior also paid reparations.

No Reparations Paid To Freedmen

When the Civil War ended, Union General William Tecumseh Sherman met with former slaves who were pastors and other leaders in their community and asked them what they wanted. They told him they wanted land that they could work and farm on their own. On January 16, 1865, during the American Civil War, he issued Special Field Order No.15, wartime order to allot land to some freed families in plots of land no larger than forty acres. That wartime order was rescinded by the government and the land was redistributed back to the former slave owners after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln when Andrew Johnson became president. According to an article in Yes! magazine, those land grants alone would have been worth at least $6.4 trillion dollars today. Another economics Ph.D. candidate told me recently, those land grants would have been worth over $19 trillion today.

America has actually acknowledged its malfeasance. On July 29, 2008, the U.S. House of Representatives issued an apology to Black Americans [Freedmen] for the national institution of slavery, and the subsequent Jim Crow laws that for years discriminated against Blacks as second-class citizens in American society. U.S. Representative Steve Cohen, a Democrat from Tennessee, issued the Resolution (H.Res.194 – introduced 2/27/2007 – 110th Congress) and it had 120 co-sponsors. Along with the acknowledgement, President Joseph Biden recently signed into law Juneteenth as a national holiday, acknowledging the last of the enslaved to be told in Galveston, Texas, that the war was over and they were free.

So – the United States is already very aware of its complacency, and despite the recent laws in various states banning the teaching of critical race theory (or what I call teaching actual history) it would not negate the fact that America has done a deep injustice and harm to Black Americans.

Read Cynthia McDonald’s entire blog piece/speech at

https://freedmenabsolute.com/2023/07/10/the-clear-and-secular-case-for-reparations/