Top Reparations Scholars Dr. Darity And Kirsten Mullen Push Reparations In Economist Magazine Photo: Dr. William Darity And Kirsten Mullen. Photo By Justin B. Cook.
Reparations scholars Dr. William A. “Sandy” Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen continue their push for reparations for Native Black Americans, showing the “why” and “how” in a new article in the Economist.
The need for reparations, they said, started with the government’s failure to deliver the promised 40-acre land grants to their formerly enslaved ancestors in the aftermath of America’s civil war. Had the land been allocated and its ownership protected, they said that reparations may not have been necessary today.
“Freedom without an economic foundation laid the basis for the enormous contemporary gap in wealth ($840,900 per household as of 2019) between Black and white Americans,” Darity and Mullen wrote.
“Wealth is the best single indicator of the cumulative, cross-generational impact of white supremacy—a transfer of resources across generations,” they wrote in the Economist. “We estimate it will take $12 trillion-14 trillion to close that gap.”
A married couple, Dr. Darity and Mullen co-wrote the book, “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century” (The University of North Carolina Press; April 2020).
Their work on reparations is crucial, tweeted @Ebehi_Iyoha, and assistant Professor @HarvardHBS and incoming economist @BostonFed. “There are no actions that black Americans can take unilaterally that will have much of an effect on reducing the racial wealth gap. For the gap to be closed, America must undergo a vast social transformation…,” Ebehi said.
Darity and Mullen showed how the racial wealth gap was created by four phases of federal actions and inactions they call the Wagon Train, Blood Lust, Picket Fence, and Freeway periods.
“While the federal government was denying Black Americans land grants, it established the Homestead Act of 1862. Over the 124-year life of the legislation, over 270m acres of western land in 160-acre plots were given to white Americans—including recent European immigrants—completing the country’s colonial settler project,” they pointed out.
The Wagon Train period occurred between 1862 and 1976. Early on, white Americans traveled by covered-wagon caravans, or “wagon trains” to the West where they could seek their fortunes. They were added by the Homesteads Act, which distributed land to white families. “More than 1.5 million white families received land patents, and today as many as 45 million of their living descendants reap the wealth benefits,” Darity and Mullen wrote. By contrast, Black families were never given 40 acres to start building their generational wealth. The Homesteads Act was finally repealed in 1976, except for Alaska, where it continued for another 10 years.
The Blood Lust period began in 1865 and continues today. As the two scholars explained, during this phase there has been “legal segregation and white terror campaigns explicitly intended to prevent African-Americans from engaging in electoral politics and to steal their possessions.” Historic massacres are just some of the evidence of this, such as eight months of massacres in 1919 in areas including Elaine, Arkansas, and Chicago, that became known as “Red Summer.” Today, the value of the property lost by the Black townspeople of Elaine, Arkansans’ due to the 1919 white massacre is estimated to be $10 million.
The Picket-Fence period started in 1934 and continues today. During the 19th century, white homeowners were able to take advantage of federal programs designed to promote asset accumulation centered on the acquisition of land. Then in the 20th century, ”federal policies aimed at asset buildings focused on homeownership: on dreams of white picket-fences keeping yards pristine,” they wrote. There were such policies as the GI Bill and practices of the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) that, because of entrenched discrimination and racist outcomes, Black people never benefit from. And, instead, the government approved restrictive covenants, redlining, and predatory mortgage lending that blocked Black acquisition of equity-building homeownership.
“Redlining, a hallmark of the National Housing Act, was a system of color-coding neighborhoods by security and desirability. African-Americans could not live in desirable green zones, and they could not get an FHA-backed loan in a red zone,” they explained.
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The Freeway Period, which started in 1956 and continues today, involved the Los Angeles highway system destroying Black communities that had large shares of homeowners (in 1910, at least 36 percent of L.A.’s Black residents owned their homes, compared with 2 percent in New York City).
Due to the history of denying Black people wealth-building opportunities in the U.S., Darity and Mullen say reparations are needed.
They feel that reparations should be limited to those who self-identify as Black, African-American, Afro-American, or Negro on a legal document at least 12 years before a reparations-study commission or reparations program begins. They also must prove their descent from at least one ancestor enslaved in America.
They are calling for reparations to be made through direct payments, whether cash transfers, trust accounts, or endowment, and recipients should have complete discretion over the use of the funds.
Dr. Darity is the Samuel DuBois Cook Distinguished Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, Economics and Business at Duke University. Mullen is a writer, folklorist, and museum consultant, as well as the founder of Artefactual, an art consultancy.
