Roadmap for Reparations
This week: conversations with William Darity Jr., Kirsten Mullen, and Thomas Craemer about reparations. Listen today at 2 pm or anytime at our website.
A little over a week ago, Nikole Hannah-Jones elaborated on what the United States owes black Americans in terms of reparations, which could close the wealth gap between white and black families. And something needs to be done about that inequality. She writes, “the racial wealth gap is about the same as it was in the 1950s . . . The typical black household today is poorer than 80 percent of white households.”
This inequality gets realized in a number of ways. For instance, Hannah-Jones quotes William Darity Jr., co-author with Kirsten Mullen of the new book From Here to Equality, on how the wealth gap effects homeowning: “‘It’s actually parental and grandparental wealth that facilitates the acquisition of a home.’”
Wealth is accumulated over generations, and so, if past generations have been systematically oppressed, their descendants today are born into an unjust social order. As William Darity Jr. spells out on this week’s show:
In the present moment, black Americans constitute about 13 percent of the nation’s population, but only possess about 2.6 percent of the nation’s wealth. And we think this is an index of the cumulative intergenerational effects of a variety of atrocities that have been inflicted on the black community that have adversely affected their position in terms of economic security and well-being. And so what we argue is that the target of a reparations program must be elimination of the racial wealth differential in its entirety.
As a consequence, we focus on the mean difference between black and white. Well, so at the household level, that would amount to a difference of eight hundred thousand dollars between the average black and the average white household. It would also require at least a target goal of the United States government intervening with the provision of upwards of 10 to 12 trillion dollars on behalf of the black community in the United States to eliminate that differential.
Mullen and Darity have a roadmap for widely allocated reparations. Here’s Mullen on this week’s show:
This is a portfolio that we’re talking about . . . So, yes, it certainly could contain, for example, funds to create endowments for historically black colleges and universities. It might include establishing hospitals or clinics in communities where there was none. It might include, you know, college scholarships. But we think in addition to those kinds of programs that larger numbers of folks and communities could participate in, that there also should be direct payments of cash to these black American descendants of U.S. slavery.
Ta-Nehisi Coates advanced the popular conversation about reparations a few years ago, when he explained, among other things, how so much of the wealth established in the US came directly from slaves:
The wealth accorded America by slavery was not just in what the slaves pulled from the land but in the slaves themselves. “In 1860, slaves as an asset were worth more than all of America’s manufacturing, all of the railroads, all of the productive capacity of the United States put together,” the Yale historian David W. Blight has noted. “Slaves were the single largest, by far, financial asset of property in the entire American economy.”
Coates’s essay has been on our minds as we’ve been thinking about reparations. Also part of the conversation are other reparations that have worked, historically. Joining our conversation this week is Thomas Craemer, who studies reparations at the University of Connecticut, and who on our show reflects on his own experience as a German encountering Holocaust survivors who received reparations. Such reparations, Craemer saw, could contribute to “faith in the fact that Germany actually had changed.”
Listen: The Tightrope
Cornel West has a podcast! His co-host is Tricia Rose, director for The Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America at Brown Univeristy where Tricia teaches courses on racism, hip hop music, and culture. You’ll hear a lot of West’s standard riffs, but the first episode features a terrific discussion on the musical legacy of Prince. Turns out they were good friends. Other episodes include basketball player Isiah Thomas, hip hop musician Lecrae, and filmmaker Michael Moore.
We can’t help but prefer him in conversation with Chris, but let every pod flower bloom!
Listen: Wind of Change
Did the CIA write the the 1990 power ballad “Wind of Change” by the German band Scorpions as a tool to end the Cold War? New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe (author of the excellent book Say Nothing) gets a hot tip. Cold War espionage meets 80’s hair-metal.
Coming Up: “This Attack on Our Liberty, Our Magnificent Liberty”
In the past week, Donald Trump and liberals alike sounded the alarm about the peril of censorious progressives. An open letter in Harper’s, signed by Malcolm Gladwell, J.K. Rowling, David Brooks, Sean Wilentz, Jeet Heer, Noam Chomsky, and many more, stated:
The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty.
And President Trump made similar claims about the dangers of what gets called “cancel culture,” a culture of totalitarian political correctness:
THE PRESIDENT: One of their political weapons is “Cancel Culture” — driving people from their jobs, shaming dissenters, and demanding total submission from anyone who disagrees. This is the very definition of totalitarianism, and it is completely alien to our culture and our values, and it has absolutely no place in the United States of America. (Applause.) This attack on our liberty, our magnificent liberty, must be stopped, and it will be stopped very quickly. We will expose this dangerous movement, protect our nation’s children, end this radical assault, and preserve our beloved American way of life. (Applause.)
In our schools, our newsrooms, even our corporate boardrooms, there is a new far-left fascism that demands absolute allegiance. If you do not speak its language, perform its rituals, recite its mantras, and follow its commandments, then you will be censored, banished, blacklisted, persecuted, and punished. It’s not going to happen to us. (Applause.)
Make no mistake: this left-wing cultural revolution is designed to overthrow the American Revolution. In so doing, they would destroy the very civilization that rescued billions from poverty, disease, violence, and hunger, and that lifted humanity to new heights of achievement, discovery, and progress.
To make this possible, they are determined to tear down every statue, symbol, and memory of our national heritage.
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Not on my watch! (Applause.)
THE PRESIDENT: True. That’s very true, actually. (Laughter.)
What’s happening here? Is “cancel culture” just a scary trope for authoritarian political speeches, or an illusion in the minds of elites who would rather not be criticized, or a genuine threat to free speech? Is it a combination of these things? For Trump, there’s no ambiguity here.
Over at Current Affairs, Nathan Robinson writes,
This is the same conservative persecution complex we have heard for decades; some of the richest and most powerful people in the world complaining that the “far left” are totalitarians. The left is permanently tarred as Stalinist thought police trying to put dissenters in the gulag — even as the contemporary left is trying to dismantle both police and prisons and reduce the power of the carceral state.
Meanwhile, at The Nation, Jeet Heer says it’s worth being wary of cancel culture not because it’s one of our major problems, but because of what it represents in an age of rising authoritarianism:
. . . to the extent it is real, it still seems like a minor problem in the age of (in no particular order) climate change, Covid-19, the second economic meltdown in two decades, and a racist buffoon occupying the White House.
But Trump himself has forced me to be less blasé about free speech. The president’s authoritarianism has exhibited itself in many ways, one of the most dangerous of which is his attacks on dissent.
This week, we’ll look for clarity on this gnarly subject.
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Coyneworks on Etsy
You’ve seen Susan Coyne’s vibrant and unforgettable illustrations (of James Baldwin and more) for our shows. Now you can get a print of her work at her Etsy store!
This Week’s Ephemeral Library
Jia Tolentino on the discipline of hope. Pankaj Mishra on the Failing United States. Masha Gessen asks: what do college students think about schools reopening in a deadly pandemic? Patricia Lockwood’s diary: Insane After Coronavirus?
That’s all for this week. We hope you’re staying cool and safe.
The OS Debt Collectors
