| | | | |  | | By Catherine Kim | With help from Ella Creamer, Rishika Dugyala, Charlie Mahtesian and Teresa Wiltz
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POLITICO Illustration | What’s up, Recast friends! My name is Catherine Kim, and I’m an assistant editor at POLITICO Magazine subbing in for Brakkton. Today, we’re focusing on what makes a successful reparations package. Quick programming note: We're off for the long weekend, but we'll be in your inbox on Wednesday. The politics of reparations have rapidly changed over the past three years, evolving from what many considered a pipe dream — and some say an outlandish idea — to policy enacted in multiple cities. Ever since justice reform protests spread throughout the country in 2020, local governments have begun grappling with how to address the long-term impacts of slavery and racial injustice. Evanston, Ill., was the first city that voted to pay reparations in 2021, and cities like Asheville, N.C., Saint Paul, Minn. and Providence, R.I., are also gearing up to begin payments. In 2020, California became the first state to create a Reparations Task Force, which would study and recommend reparations policies. (The Recast featured California’s task force on its 2023 Power List.) However, as more people embrace the idea, some are concerned that confusion and disagreement on the best way forward may muddle the movement’s progress. William Darity, A. Kirsten Mullen and Lucas Hubbard hope to address that problem by releasing The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice — a comprehensive and definitive guide to how the U.S. government should tackle the stubbornly persistent wealth gap between white and Black Americans.
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The path forward will not be easy: Despite these widespread local efforts to address the impact of slavery — not to mention the lingering effects of Jim Crow, redlining and other racist policies — a majority of the public is still opposed to the idea of reparations. A 2021 poll found that nearly half of surveyed Americans opposed cash payments to the descendants of enslaved people. And yet, the authors see a glimmer of hope in those numbers: 28 percent of white Americans did support cash payments – that’s a 600 percent increase from 2000, when only 4 percent of white Americans supported the idea. Mullen and Hubbard, who spoke with The Recast, are betting on that number to grow as the nation continues to grapple with racial injustice. For now, they are simply laying the groundwork for when the majority of the public warms up to the idea of reparations with time — even if most white Americans remain lukewarm at present. They say they’re determined to be prepared for the moment the tide changes. ◆◆◆ This interview has been edited for length and clarity. THE RECAST: How have you seen discourse around reparations change over the years? MULLEN: One of the things that I think we find really striking is that the conversation has been sustained. I think we tend, as a people, to have fairly short attention spans, and I think very few people would have predicted that we would be talking about reparations today. And in as many spaces and places as it's taking place. It's one thing, I think, for people to talk among themselves about an idea that's of interest or that's puzzling. But that people are looking for references, that they are actively trying to find material to simply have a better grasp of what's at stake, what the issues are – we were just stunned. And I think that the Black Reparations Project, one of its key aims is to be that tool to this compendium that folks can have, you know, side by side with. HUBBARD: Once you learn about all these phenomena and all these injustices that have been perpetuated, it's really hard to remain ignorant and it's really hard to be okay with it and to not want to do anything. |  | But I think at the individual level, you know, when you hear about these things, you want to do something about it and you don't want to take it sitting down. Once the 1619 Project came out or Ta-Nehisi Coates’s “The Case for Reparations” in the Atlantic, as all this work has been done to uncover these stories and these cases, it becomes impossible to not know about it and to not care about it. THE RECAST: Do you think this sustained conversation around reparations has changed the politics around reparations? MULLEN: The conversations have heated up dramatically. You know, we were approached by Marianne Williamson in 2019 to appear with her in a town hall that she held in Charleston, S.C., and she was the first candidate for that round of presidential elections to actually say that, ‘Yes, reparations were due to Black American descendants of U.S. slavery.” She even said that the federal government should be giving financial compensation. Now, she assigned a pitifully low amount of money to those reparations. I think it was $500 billion. But her taking that courageous stand, I think, is why Julian Castro came forward. Tom Steyer came forward. I mean, all of the Democratic candidates, you know, spoke of some type of reparations.
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In 2019, Marianne Williamson said the federal government should give financial compensation to Black descendants of slaves. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images | THE RECAST: What’s the key to a successful reparations plan? MULLEN: In the book, we talk about the four pillars of reparations. [The first pillar is] who's eligible for reparations. For us, we're talking about Black American descendants of US slavery. So people who are descended from at least one person who was enslaved in the United States. The other standard is individuals who, for at least 12 years prior to the onset of a reparations program or reparations commission, self-identified as black, Afro-American, Afro-American or Negro. Individuals who have lived their lives as Black people. So that's the first pillar. The second is that one of the primary goals of reparations should be the elimination of the racial wealth gap. And on the low end, we estimate it to be at least $14 trillion. We're looking at that racial wealth gap; that's where our calculations spring from the racial wealth gap and looking at the position of Blacks’ wealth today versus that of white Americans. And that's where we come up with this $14 trillion figure. So it comes to about $850,000 per family or about $300,000 to $330,000 per individual.
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Andrea Levy, right, from New York joins other demonstrators for slave reparations on the National Mall in August 2002. | Manny Ceneta/Getty Images | | And then the third pillar is that reparations should be paid directly to the eligible community. This is what happened in the case of victims of the Holocaust. Those reparations distribution checks did go and still to this day are sent directly to the individual victims and to their estates. And interestingly, the United States government, which was not the perpetrator, also has paid reparations and continues to pay reparations to individuals who were harmed by that atrocity. The fourth pillar, we believe for many reasons, the United States government is the culpable party. They created this racial wealth gap. They made slavery legal in this country, which they did not have to do. They made segregation legal in this country. They made it legal to pay black people less for comparable work when they were as well trained as well educated as whites.
|  | Only the federal government has the capacity to pay. And we believe the federal government is the culpable party and must pay. THE RECAST: The looming question is, how do you get people on board with legislation that has all four of these pillars — especially when not everyone agrees on reparations? MULLEN: It's a hard battle. It's not easy. But I think having materials makes a difference, when people can stop and take a look and get some ammunition, get some information that they can share. People want to cherry-pick our history. We want to pick the parts that feel good or that somehow validate some feelings we have or some fantasies we have. But you have to take in the whole picture. And, you know, we have a capacity to do that. You know, even though there's something in our nature that wants to truncate history, that wants to simplify it, the story was always nuanced, it was always complicated. But I do think it's possible for us to hold these multiple ideas out here.
|  A special Board of Supervisors hearing is held about reparations in San Francisco in March 2023. | AP Photo/Jeff Chiu | I think it's quite likely that some 30 percent of Americans are going to be very, very, very hard to persuade. That reparations is something that should happen. And some members of that group are probably going to be violent. I think it's important that the U.S. government prepare for that. You know, just like during Reconstruction, when white supremacists tested the law. We have to protect people who are behaving legally. That's what a democracy does. HUBBARD: So in the book, there's a chapter by Trevon Logan; I think something that's really important that he mentions is just the changing of the narrative and establishing a more accurate narrative around this country and around its racial injustice in the past and present. And I think that idea of changing the narrative is something that, you know, everyone who picks up this book should realize that they have the capacity to do something, to change the narrative. Everyone can engage with this conversation in different ways and it will be a mixed bag of approaches that ultimately leads us to be successful. ◆◆◆ We’re sending you off into the long weekend holiday with our usual round-up of weekend recs. Here’s what you should check out. Rest in power, Tina Turner. Remember the rock ‘n’ roll icon with a selection of her best hits here. And you’ll definitely want to check out vintage Tina here, in this 1971-era live performance of “Proud Mary (Rolling on the River)."
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