Renowned economist, researcher and reparations pioneer Dr. William ‘Sandy’ Darity Jr. is being honored for devoting his career to mitigating racial inequality He is the 2020 recipient of the Triangle Business Journal’s Leaders in Diversity Lifetime Achievement Award, the publication reported.
“I am honored to receive the Diversity Lifetime Achievement Award from Triangle Business Journal,” Darity said. “It was a terrific surprise to receive this recognition, and it has been especially uplifting in a year where we all are experiencing such profound loss and grief. Past honorees are people I deeply admire, and it feels wonderful to share in the glow of their accomplishments.”
The Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University, Darity is also the director of the school’s center on social equity (also named for DuBois) and founder of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality.
Darity has fought tirelessly for reparations for Black Americans throughout his lifetime. He has authored many studies, reports, articles and op-eds on the subject.
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He published “From Here to Equality: Reparations For Black Americans In The Twenty-First Century” in April and the book quickly sold out on Amazon.
During a TED Talk recorded June 30, Darity shared he was the fourth generation removed from slavery. He also debunked the argument that no living Black Americans were victims of slavery and its long-standing effects.
“People say there are no living victims of slavery, but there are a number of us who are living victims of the Jim Crow period,” Darity said.
It is a claim Darity made in his prior work with Andrea Kirsten Mullen, “Resurrecting the Promise of 40 Acres: The Imperative of Reparations for Black Americans.”
“The reparations plan we put forward designates Black-American descendants of U.S. slavery as the target community. This community’s claim for restitution anchors on the U.S. government’s failure to deliver the promised 40-acre land grants to their newly emancipated ancestors in the aftermath of the Civil War (Fleming 1906, 721-737). That failure laid the foundation for the enormous contemporary gap in wealth between Black and white people in the U.S. If the land allocation had been made to the freedmen and freedwomen, and had that ownership been protected, we speculate that there would be no need to consider the case for Black reparations,” Darity and Mullen wrote.
