Why (and how) Reparations are the right thing to do

Intro: Yeah, I know my worth, these colonizers got to pay me. - Rapsody (2019), from Sojourner.

Racism and capitalism are two potent and enduring forces in our modern society. The convergence of the two into what is called "racial capitalism" has exacted a terrible cost on the planet. No dollar amount can repair what the atrocities of slavery and wanton resource extraction have wrought over the centuries. The wealth of both the United States and Europe would not be possible without slavery and colonialism (Piketty, 2022, p. 48), which constitute the bedrock of racial capitalism. Especially in the Western world, racial capitalism shapes the ideas, interests, and institutions from which most policies and laws emerge. The price of that wealth comes at the detriment of untold lives, both nonhuman and human, clean air and water, and maybe even a habitable planet. I reiterate that there is not enough money in the world to balance the ledger, but that does not mean that we should not try to determine how to make things right for the descendants and future generations of those who have suffered and are suffering under the yoke of this awful system. Black Feminist Scholar Ruth Wilson Gilmore astutely pointed out the inherent unfairness and racialized nature of capitalism in that it requires inequality and that inequality is enshrined by racism (Perry, 2023, p. 172). 

However, even though the cost is unimaginably high, we should still attempt to find an appropriate place to start from. Racial capitalism endures, in part, because of reactionary views (generally from those in power) that trying to address something so potent is futile (Robin, 2021; Hirschman, 1991) or may make things worse socially and economically (Hirschman, 1991). When people have agitated and pushed for changes for more economic, civil, and social rights, it has generally led to improved outcomes for everyone. Ensuring rights and policies that allow all people time to learn, bodily autonomy, and to be able to live in healthy and safe environments allows people to innovate and contribute to society as they wish. The longer we delay addressing the harms of racial capitalism, the higher the price we will all pay. Our planet is on track to face a global temperature rise of 2.5 - 2.9C this century (Dickle, 2023), which will lead to unimaginable harm to every living thing. 

We have an opportunity and an obligation to start to address the harms of racial capitalism, and we can even use the systems we have in place to do so. Although racially restrictive laws persist in the United States, we did indeed end chattel slavery in the country, mainly in part because of the enslaved people themselves. At one point, enough people changed their minds, norms, and beliefs about something considered integral to the world economic structure (Fairchild & Weinrub, 2017). 

The story I am going to tell is not only about how racial capitalism came to be and endures, but I am also going to talk about some ways we can continue the work of repairing our broken planet and society. This is a big topic, and I have very limited time and space to cover everything, so I will focus on the debt that the systems of racial capitalism owe Black people in the US. I chose this departure because A. I am a Black American and B. Much like WEB Du Bois and Patricia Hill Collins, I believe that by focusing on those who have been marginalized the most, you reveal a lot about the society that enforces the marginalization. I am not making comparisons between oppressions, but for the sake of argument and because American society has consistently been organized against women and Black people, that is what I will do. 

Part 1: I'm not your personal whore, that's not what I'm here for/and nothing good gon' come to ya til you do right by me -  Queen Latifah (1993), from U.N.I.T.Y. 

As of today in 2023, the dollar amount for reparations of enslaved Americans, according to scholars such as Dorothy Brown (2022), Ellora Derenoncourt, and William Darity, is $10.7 trillion in US dollars (Derenoncourt et al., 2023, p. 24), or about $267,000 for the 40 million or so descendants of Enslaved Americans of African descent. This amount of money would be a start to closing the wealth gap between Black and white Americans, but it would only be a start. The systems of oppression that created our modern capitalist system have been functioning for centuries. As Piketty rightly points out in A Brief History of Equality, it is impossible to write about inequality without mentioning the colonial heritage of the Western world and also that because we have (somewhat) just exited the period of colonial expansion, it would be silly to think that we can repair its effects in a short period; even decades would not be long enough (Piketty, 2022, pp. 48-49). 

While I disagree that colonialism is over, Piketty makes a good point that is further reinforced by solutions that Brown, Derenoncourt, and others propose. Those solutions require substantial changes in collecting and redistributing tax information and capital and educating people about how our economic system functions (Brown 2022, p. 95; Derenoncourt et al., 2023, pp. 23-25). We must also be conscious of the "Propaganda of History" that Du Bois (1935, p. 484) warns against. Sven Beckert's account of "war capitalism" brings up the "capacity of the rich and powerful Europeans (from the 17th to the 19th centuries, give or take) to divide the world into an 'inside' and an 'outside,” where the inside received protections through laws and norms of the state, while the outside was subject to domination, violence, and imperial expansion  (Beckert, 2015, p. 35). 

The global market for raw materials, chief among them cotton and energy sources that started in the 17th century, created a series of institutions and ideas that still affect us today. Piketty (who quotes Beckert's research) notes how crucial the institution of slavery was to the global cotton industry; right before the US Civil War started, 75 percent of cotton that was sent to power the European Textile industry was a product of the labor of enslaved people in the southern United States (Piketty, 2022, p. 56). Outside of the costs of purchasing, transporting, and providing the bare minimum of sustenance to millions of enslaved people, European and American societies saved up costs on an unfathomable amount of labor, which allowed those countries to become global hegemons to this day. Suppose the functioning of your institutions depends on the forceful extraction of labor from people. Why would you want to upset that equilibrium by offering "rights" and "equality" to those people? 

The global market, which is a construction of society, not independent of it, would, of course, be "subordinated to politics, religion, and social relations " (Polanyi, 2001, p.13). It would then follow that the capitalist system that has dominated our methods of exchange for centuries would reflect beliefs of racial and gender hierarchies in our political and social norms. Even when living close to each other as colonizers and the colonized, there had to be an established "inside" for the mostly white men in power and an "outside" for women, poor, and non-white people. On the one hand, there were people with the power, backed up by governments, to legally own thousands of people, land, and property, and on the other, Black women who had close to zero degrees of bodily autonomy on a day-to-day basis. 

There is nothing "natural" about how the global market was arranged; it did not emerge as a "working out of cosmic law" (Du Bois, 1935, p. 486), nor is it an autonomous, self-regulating force. It was created and is maintained by people, and according to Matthew Desmond in The 1619 Project, it transforms common goods into controllable commodities by a business or single entity (Desmond, 2019, p. 130). Our capitalist organization of the economy grew during a time when it was common practice to denigrate and devalue the land and people that were necessary to sustain the wealth-building that was happening. Very similar to many religions that were created, in part to make sense of what was going on in the world, (racial) capitalism tried to explain away the inequalities in society as being the fault of those at the economic bottom due to sloth, inherent vices (such as being born a woman, or being descended from the wrong group of people) or "natural order" instead of acknowledging the systems that were put in place to create and maintain the "natural order." 

One interpretation of the colonial period where these ideas, interests, and systems were developed starts with European expansion, which started around 1500 and still exists today, albeit in a more modern form (Piketty, 2022, pp. 48-49). Given this, the institutions we can break down into the laws and customs that govern our relations with each other and the land (CORE Team, 2019, p.104) have been heavily skewed against the more vulnerable members of society. Over that time, those in power created an effective welfare system that found increasingly ingenious ways to redistribute wealth and protect their well-being, at the exclusion of nearly all others, absent protests, and social movements that forced the modification of laws and norms that uphold inequality. 

In the Americas (including the Caribbean), the laws and norms that were developed by the colonizing forces after the genocide of the native peoples across the continent relegated indigenous peoples, African-descent peoples, and indentured servants as lower than human to the benefit of planters and other imperial agents (Perry, 2021, p. 171). As time went on, the imperial powers built the economic and physical institutions to extract whatever they could from the colonized: sexual reproductive power, labor, energy, etc., for the benefit of the industrial revolution. Even if we just focus on the amount and proportion of enslaved people in the Americas and Caribbean, we are looking at millions of people and their descendants suffering from institutional disenfranchisement over a protracted period. 

The societal rules and regulations we have lived with for centuries have affected millions of people and acres of land and water. We are driving our planet to the brink of habitability for many life forms. According to the World Bank (n.d.), the current GDP of the United States is about $25 trillion. On the one hand, I can understand the immediate pushback for demanding that the government give about 40 percent of its GDP to thirteen percent of the population. However, on the other hand, it is nowhere near enough to bridge the wealth gap between white and Black people in the country. Because the gap has persisted for so long and only began to converge after the US Civil War, the road to economic equality will continue for centuries unless we change how our institutions and ideas function radically. The racial wealth gap is effectively at the same level as in 1950 (Derenoncourt et al., 2023, p25) and is a bit higher now. The 10.7 trillion dollars of reparations should only be considered a down payment for the colonial project's damage to the world. In the next section, I will investigate the likelihood and ability of our institutions to address the inequalities formed by racial capitalism.

 Part 2: Tell a hater, ‘Fuck you.’ They keep comin’, tellin’ me these bitches mad, what’s new? - Megan Thee Stallion, (2020), from What's New. 

As W.E.B. Du Bois did, one could argue that the end of slavery in the US resulted from one of the most potent and triumphant labor actions in history (Du Bois, 1935, p. 494). The combination of the abolitionist movements, economic pressures, and the actions of the enslaved to flee and fight against their captors. In less than a century, the non-enslaved Black population in the state of Georgia went from about 1.3 percent to 100 percent, as you can see in the figure below from one of Du Bois'data portraits:

Source: Rusert & Battle-Baptiste (2015), Plate 12. 

We can say the same about Haiti, which defeated the French government and established its own country (Piketty, 2021, pp71-72), the first that arose from a successful slave revolt. It is common for Americans to say they love an underdog story. Yet, when we look at how the major colonial powers treated those populations through legal and policy-based punishment, the color of the underdog makes a big difference. 

Joseph Stiglitz (2009) says that governments (ostensibly) impose regulations to prevent the wealthy and powerful from exploiting the more socially vulnerable, even if the exploitation is efficient, according to the market. However, governmental values generally do not reflect that, especially in the US. What and how a government chooses to regulate matters and how the US government refuses to regulate firearms effectively, race-based environmental issues or financial institutions reveals the political values and systemic preferences of those in power. Wight (2015, p. 196) reinforces that those in power can influence policy by changing the rules to favor their preferred outcomes.

If we return to the post-civil war period known as Reconstruction in the US, the reunited country had an extra four million citizens who had to be integrated into the country's public life. This was one of the largest, if not the largest, expansions of civil and labor rights in the history of our country, and for about two decades, things were headed in the right direction. Because the majority of Black people were able to own property and money for the first time, the Black-white wealth gap converged from almost 60 to 1 to 10 to 1 between the late 1860s to 1920 (Derenoncourt et al., 2023, p. 2); we can see that illustrated in the graphic below, (which dovetails nicely with the Du Bois one above). 

(Source: Derenoncourt et al, 2023, p. 33). 

The administration of services for the newly freed Black population (who were primarily concentrated in the Southern United States) was handled by the Freedmen's Bureau, which had to provide services for the newly freed, providing pathways to education, property ownership, and political participation (Solomon et al., 2019); in short, it was a government welfare program specifically for people who had lived for generations in bondage. It would have also been nice to compensate the newly emancipated population for the centuries of labor that played a critical role in establishing the US as a country, but that was not to be. The Northerners, who now had control of the country, were not exactly friendly towards the Black population and their ambitions to join the society (the men, anyway) as full citizens with property rights. 

While the Northeastern and Midwestern states did not directly depend on the economic model of chattel slavery, they practiced racial capitalism differently. According to Piketty (2022, p.80), those regions utilized colonial expansion through the violent displacement of the indigenous populations of the land. The ideas of the people who shaped and ran the institutions that were supposed to help Black Americans thought of Black people as deserving of contempt, poor, and ignorant (DuBois, 1935, p. 490). However, how could people who have had no property or capital of their own and happened to be legally barred from learning and participating in white society as equals (for centuries) immediately be expected to meet those criteria upon freedom from bondage? 

This can partially be explained by Hirschman's breakdown of reactionary theses and Du Bois' accounting of the poor moral character that was ascribed to Black people both before and after emancipation. Because it had been legally and culturally accepted (even written in the constitution) that Black people were "naturally" inferior for so long, reactionary rhetoric toward their emancipation emphasized our poor moral character. It minimized the contributions of Black people to society (Du Bois, 1935, p.490). As for Hirschman, we can apply his futility thesis that the alleged societal change (providing welfare and freedoms to Black people) would be superficial (Hirschman, 1991, pp. 43 - 50) since the deeper issues lie within the very nature of Black people. 

It is no wonder that one of the most effective social welfare and labor policies was abandoned after two decades. While the wealth gap did continue to decrease over the next forty years, the institutions motivated a deep animus against Black people. They implemented an apartheid state known as Jim Crow that socially and politically punished the Black American population for another century. So not only did we not get our proverbial 40 acres and a mule as promised, but we also had to continue to fight the government itself to claw back civil rights that we had been granted postbellum. 

The contributions of formerly enslaved Black people and their descendants to the economic and cultural success of the US have been ignored in the service of attempting to maintain the status quo of racial capitalism, where white men still sit at the top of the social hierarchy.  The grand economic shifts in labor policies and human rights that derived from the efforts of the most vulnerable populations changed how regulations were utilized, but only briefly before bouncing back to a more unequal state. To address the inequalities that come from racial capitalism through regulation, we have to find ways to make the regulations stick around for the long term. In the final section, I will showcase some ways to implement policies that can ameliorate harm using our existing state and policy infrastructures. 

Part 3: Pay me what you owe me, don't act like you forgot / Bitch better have my money  Rihanna, (2015), Bitch Better Have My Money.

As I hope I have established, the economic system of racial capitalism has wrought destruction over hundreds of years upon an untold number of people, non-humans, and the land itself. In America, we never saw what would happen if our government made amends for some damages over time. The abolition of slavery and the Reconstruction period displayed the potential to address inequalities that were forced on about 4 million people. However, the interests of the more extreme adherents to white supremacy won out against the wills of the newly emancipated and of the white population in general, who did not seem ready to accept that Black people were no different from them. Therefore, we have much catching up to do, but how long will that take?

Derenoncourt and their colleagues (2023) found that the wealth gap between Black and white Americans is multifaceted, in that the differences in how wealth is created between the two groups is a crucial factor in policy-based remedies. For Black populations, most of our wealth (67%) is tied to housing and other non-financial assets, with business assets at 13% and stock equity at 5%. In contrast, white households tend to have businesses and stock equity (25% and 16%, respectively) to go along with their housing assets of 41% (Derenoncourt et al., 2023, p.20). In addition to that, Dorothy Brown, in her 2022 book, makes a strong case that our tax system, which funds the activities of our government, is shaped by racism; it both punishes Black (and generally non-white) individuals and families at the profit of primarily well-off white families and individuals. 

This punishment is a function of the convergence of the interests and institutions of those in power and effectively redistributes the income from less wealthy individuals to those at the top of the income distribution since taxpayers in the highest income areas claim the highest number of deductions (Brown, 2022, p.90). Many of these deductions are weighted heavily toward things such as second homes and stock benefits – options generally only available to wealthier members of the population, which tend to be predominantly white (Brown, 2022, p. 92). As I mentioned in the paragraph above, white household wealth is more diverse than black household wealth, and stock equity has played a significant role in white wealth-building, especially since the growth of financialization in our economy since the 80s (Derenoncourt et al., 2023, p. 22). Even if we can distribute that 10.7 trillion dollars to Black Americans, we must also holistically address the other factors that drive the wealth gap. As Derenoncourt and their colleagues (2023, pp. 25-26) suggest, the differences in returns on wealth matter in closing the gap and making sure it does not keep expanding; given how our economy currently functions, they hypothesize that the gap would be very unlikely to converge, if ever. 

That being said, if we can create enough social and political pressure to alter our tax code and intentionally address the wealth gap, we already have tools to get money to Black people through our federal tax systems through reforms and payment. This is, of course, a heavy lift because the financial and social interests of Black people are often at odds with the legacy institutions of the US. Nevertheless, we could implement a tax credit (like the Earned Income Tax Credit) targeting Black taxpayers (Brown, 2022, p.94). The credit amount (probably broken up over many years) should be about $267,000 for the 40 million Black Americans who are descended from enslaved Americans; this would reduce the black-white wealth gap to about 1.4 from the current 6:1 ratio (Brown, 2022, pp. 94-94; Derenoncourt et al. 2023, p. 24). To reiterate, there would be enormous reactionary backlash and legal challenges to this, so sustained social and movement pressure would have to be a vital component of a change this large and targeted, much like the work the Freedman's Bureau did that made a significant dent in the wealth gap. 

In addition to targeted payments, we need to change how wealth is distributed, some of which we can also do through amending tax policy. Some of these solutions should be targeted at Black communities, and some would be universal. However, they would buttress the maintenance of a smaller wealth gap since real-world evidence shows that even the monumental decrease of the Black-white wealth gap immediately post-slavery eventually began to widen again after economic elites adjusted by creating socio-political alliances (Derenoncourt et al., 2023, pp. 24-25). These relationships likely led to the return of the primacy of the ideas and interests driven by racial animus (Du Bois, 1935, p493). 

One solution that, on its surface, may seem insignificant, but it would provide a wealth of data and information for governments, interested community residents, and academics to understand and address inequality. The Internal Revenue Service (IRS) currently does not publish tax data based on race (Brown, 2022, p.89). There are ways to collect this information through proxies such as ZIP Code, Social Security numbers, or surveys, all without people having to self-identify on their tax returns, which could lead to biases expressing themselves through audits (Brown, 2022, pp. 89-90). The IRS could utilize this data to target reparations payments to Black taxpayers. The data would also help make legal and political arguments in favor of policies that directly address wealth inequality, amongst other things. Brown (2022, p.90) points out that bringing daylight to this information would "counter the fallacy that our tax system affects everyone equally…or that only white Americans pay taxes." 

Access to information is a crucial component of a functioning economy and society and can be a principal component of movement building. The US environmental justice movement, which started with outraged activism, was the fuel for the engine; being able to document injustice makes it hard to dismiss claims of discrimination as anecdotal or happenstance (LoMonte, Delgado, 2023, p. 828). The correction of a market failure in symmetrical information availability allowed communities to build coalitions across the country that, in turn, have coalesced into policy changes, even up to Executive Orders from the White House, with the cases of Biden's Justice 40 and Clinton's EO 12898 (Cohen et al., 2023; Provost & Gerber, 2019). 

The last policy recommendation is to simplify the tax code, making all income taxable and eliminating deductions and exclusions. Brown (2022, p. 90) states that taxing all income, including home sales, stock sales, and inheritances, could "halt the cycle in which established white wealth continues to grow, and black wealth continues to diminish." This last policy would also work to the benefit of the general population, as this would create much more tax revenue that could be used to fund needed federal programs such as infrastructure repair, health care, and investment in a green economy. We have the tools and frameworks to keep closing the wealth gap; the key drivers to change are the political, legal, and social pressure to shift public sentiment enough to change our institutions. 

 Outro: *explosion noise* TO FREEDOM  - Nicki Minaj, (2018), Queen Radio Episode 4

Economic opportunity and freedom are closely linked, especially in a capitalist economy. I wholeheartedly agree with Milton Friedman when he says economic freedom is indispensable in achieving political freedom (Friedman, 1962, p.15). For better or worse (definitely worse), we live In a society that is rooted in the drive to accumulate wealth at the expense of women, impoverished, and minority communities, and there is much overlap between those groups. Our society also promotes ideas that those at the margins deserve their position due to things like "culture, "inherent nature," and being less enterprising. 

The truth is, of course, not that simple. The monumental roles that the enslaved played in gaining their freedom have sadly been overlooked in our accounting of the development of Post-Reconstruction America (Du Bois, 1935, p. 490). The preferences that shape our institutions under racial capitalism depend on fictions that may keep a white supremacist hegemony on top. However, it can sometimes go against the best interests of elite class members (Rodrik, 2014, p. 190). If white people in 1873 were so worried about freshly freed people not having jobs, money, or education and claiming they were a drain on society, why not provide the means for those communities to thrive independently of government assistance? Instead, we got Jim Crow for a century, which denied political freedom to Black people by instituting poll taxes and other measures that took advantage of the precarious economic conditions that were not only part of our laws but also prevented those laws from being changed. 

The US government is responsible for addressing the black-white wealth gap for moral, financial, and practical reasons.  Neither the evidence nor the solutions I have discussed here are exhaustive, but I hope they paint a picture of what racial capitalism has wrought and what we can do to start addressing its harms in the medium and long term. We have to be persistent in changing our systems, and the only way to do that is to change the minds of those who can be persuaded that injustice against one is injustice against all and that we are all in this together. As Dani Rodrik (2014) hopefully states, "new ideas about what can be done…can unlock what otherwise may seem like the iron grip of vested interests." Some of the ideas and solutions from scholars such as Derenoncourt and Brown further loosen the grip of those vested interests. 

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