From Here to Equality

Abstract

Racism and discrimination have choked economic opportunity for African Americans at nearly every turn. At several historic moments, the trajectory of racial inequality could have been altered dramatically. Perhaps no moment was more opportune than the early days of Reconstruction, when the U.S. government temporarily implemented a major redistribution of land from former slaveholders to the newly emancipated enslaved. But neither Reconstruction nor the New Deal nor the civil rights struggle led to an economically just and fair nation. Today, systematic inequality persists in the form of housing discrimination, unequal education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and massive wealth and opportunity gaps. Economic data indicates that for every dollar the average white household holds in wealth the average black household possesses a mere ten cents. In From Here to Equality, William Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen confront these injustices head-on and make the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery. After opening the book with a stark assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on black economic well-being, Darity and Mullen look to both the past and the present to measure the inequalities borne of slavery. Using innovative methods that link monetary values to historical wrongs, they next assess the literal and figurative costs of justice denied in the 155 years since the end of the Civil War. Finally, Darity and Mullen offer a detailed roadmap for an effective reparations program, including a substantial payment to each documented U.S. black descendant of slavery. Taken individually, any one of the three eras of injustice outlined by Darity and Mullen--slavery, Jim Crow, and modern-day discrimination--makes a powerful case for black reparations. Taken collectively, they are impossible to ignore.

Structural Racism and Quantitative Causal Inference: A Life Course Mediation Framework for Decomposing Racial Health Disparities

“…We are not interpreting any of the decomposed effects in isolation as what would actually happen if we were to somehow equalize black-white exposures or effects of exposures. But we agree with arguments made by Robinson and Bailey (2020) that precise quantitative identification of such hypothetical future causal effects is not a prerequisite for supporting a broad policy agenda aimed at dismantling pathways of structural racism affecting health, an agenda based on retrospective quantitative and qualitative causal triangulation, a robust theory of racism, and longstanding social movements (Bailey et al 2017;Darity and Mullen 2020;Ford and Airhihenbuwa 2010;Taylor 2016).…”

Association Between Racial Wealth Inequities and Racial Disparities in Longevity Among US Adults and Role of Reparations Payments, 1992 to 2018

“…Although analyses of wealth shocks or other quasi-experimental variation might support a causal relationship, such analyses may fail to capture the effects of overall racial wealth inequities, which are largely inherited (eg, through the inheritance of property or educational opportunity), reflecting the long-term effects of structural racism. 7 , 12 , 14 , 21 , 23 , 24 , 42 Because our interest was in capturing the consequences of historically mediated wealth gaps, we opted for a more associational approach. We note that our approach, by focusing on wealth at baseline, addresses (at least in part) concerns related to reverse causality (ie, that robust health facilitates asset accumulation).…”

“…22 Craemer et al 12 have suggested figures as high as $300 million per person, based on the value of lost freedom, wages, and assets, with compound interest. Darity and Mullen 23 have advocated closing the mean pretax wealth gap via payments of approximately $800 000 per Black household.…”

Redress and worldmaking: Differing approaches to algorithmic reparations for housing justice

“…This plays out in many existing massive-scale reparative projects; for instance, federal reparations programs for human rights violations in Argentina, Chile, and El Salvador, reparations for Japanese internment in the US, and reparations by the German government for Holocaust war crimes all provide recourse to victims and families of a specific historical atrocity (De Greiff, 2008). In the case of US reparations to Black Americans, Darity details an economic history of injustice, from exploitation through slavery to Jim Crow era discrimination to present-day inequities in the wealth gap (Darity and Mullen, 2020). Darity proposes sending an itemized reparations bill to the US government and to institutions that have benefited and continue to benefit from racial injustice, and he also suggests non-economic compensation in the form of education and apology.…”