I believe the United States of America owes reparations to the descendants of the individuals who were kidnapped from their homeland, shipped across the Atlantic Ocean aboard slave ships (where an estimated 15% of prisoners died at sea), sold in flesh markets, beaten, tortured, raped, their children and parents and spouses ripped from their arms, their wombs turned into slave mills, and their descendants relegated to the lowest caste in American society for four-hundred years and counting.
I believe the United States of America owes reparations to the descendants of the individuals whose labor was stolen from them, whose right to own property was denied them, whose right to vote continues to be challenged by white-supremacist power brokers in the Republican party, whose right to healthcare continues to be withheld lest upper-caste doctors, pharmaceutical brokers, and insurance executives see their profits diminish, whose bodies continue to be objects of fear and scorn to publicly-funded security professionals, whose freedoms have been curtailed and whose ability to earn an honest income has been stolen by a prejudicial justice system, whose families have been broken by ghettoization, unjust imprisonment, untreated mental illness, and the need to self-medicate after a life of continuing, constant trauma caused by nothing more than their subordinate role in the caste hierarchy.
I do not know how to determine which living individuals in the United States deserve to be the recipient of these reparations, nor do I know how the cost of reparations could be funded, but I believe the bill is long past due.
H.R. 40: An Attempt to Make Congress Deal with the Question of Reparations
In June 2019, the U.S. House of Representatives held a hearing on H.R. 40, which is a bill named after the “forty acres and mule” promise made by General Sherman during the Civil War. H.R. 40 aims “to establish a commission to study and consider a national apology and proposal for reparations for the institution of slavery.”
The bill was originally introduced by Rep. John Conyers in 1989 and reintroduced by him every year until he left Congress in 2017. Rep. Conyers passed away in 2019 without ever getting the bill to a vote.
Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee took up Conyers’ cause last year and introduced it to the 116th Congress. The bill is now cosponsored by 154 other representatives, including every member of “The Squad” and my representative, Peter Welch, but not including a single Republican politician.
The Juneteenth hearing on H.R. 40 held in 2019 lasted three hours. If passed, the bill would “authorize $12 million for a 13-member commission to study the effects of slavery and make recommendations to Congress.”
As of today, that Juneteenth hearing is the only action taken on the bill. It still sits in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, waiting for a vote.
There is a version of H.R. 40 in the Senate as well. S. 1083 was introduced by Senator Cory Booker in April 2019 and cosponsored by 19 other senators, including my senator, Bernie Sanders, and again, not including a single Republican politician.
Neither H.R. 40 nor S. 1083 will move forward until Sen. Mitch McConnell’s leadership of the Senate is removed, which all good Americans hope will happen this November.
The Cost of Reparations
There is no consensus yet on the cost of the moral, physical, and financial debt accrued by the United States’ white-supremacist policies, but there have been plenty of proposals.
The Black Manifesto of 1969: $500 million ($3.53 billion in 2020 dollars)
The Black Manifesto of the National Black Economic Conference of 1969 was penned by James Forman, an active member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a Black Panther, and a member of the League of Revolutionary Workers, as well as an author and professor.
The Black Manifesto demanded “white Christian Churches and Jewish Synagogues, which are part and parcel of the system of capitalism” pay $500 million to the estimated 30 million black people in the United States, or as Forman formulated it, “$15 a n****r.”
The NBEC manifesto called for the $500 million to be spent in the following ways:
- $200 million for a Southern land bank for black people “who want to establish cooperative farms but have no funds”
- $130 million for the creation of an all-black university in the South
- $80 million for black-controlled media groups to be set up in New York, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and Detroit “as an alternative to the racist propaganda” and “the white-dominated and controlled” publishing, printing, and television fields
- $40 million for the creation of research-skills centers that focus on “the problems of the black people” and communications-skill centers that teach community organization, movie-making, television-making, photography, radio, etc.
- $20 million for a National Black Labor Strike and Defense Fund to protect black people who fight racist working conditions
- $20 million for the establishment of the International Black Appeal, an organization committed to establishing cooperatives with African countries and African Liberation Movements, as well as the establishment of a Black Anti-Defamation League
- $10 million to organize the recipients of welfare to advocate for their rights
The Roosevelt Institute Report of 2020: $12 trillion
Written by William Darity, Jr., a professor of Public Policy, African and African-American Studies, and Economics at Duke University, and A. Kirsten Mullen, a writer, folklorist, museum consultant, and lecturer on race, art, history, and politics, the Roosevelt Institute Report, titled Resurrecting the Promise of 40 Acres: The Imperative of Reparations for Black Americans, expands on the work the writers completed for a book on reparations.
Darity and Mullen contend that the United States government is “the culpable party” who must pay a debt worth $10-$12 trillion (in 2016 dollars) to “black American descendants of persons enslaved in the U.S,” a group whose number they estimate to be around 40 million Americans.
To qualify for reparations, an individual must have “self-identified as black, negro, or African-American on an official document—perhaps making public the self-report of their race on the U.S. census—for at least 12 years before the enactment” of reparations.
The claim anchors on General Sherman’s Civil War-era promise in Special Field Orders 15 to provide the former slaves of the South with “a plot of not more than forty acres of tillable ground” of confiscated Confederate land, but it does not rest on that claim. It brings into focus three eras for which reparations are due, each of which individually would make a compelling case, and as a group, are undeniable.
- The era of chattel slavery, which produced white supremacy in the U.S.
- The era of Jim Crow, which created an American-style apartheid
- The era following the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which continues to include mass incarceration; police brutality and murder; discrimination in employment, housing, and credit; and “the immense black-white wealth disparity.”
The $10-$12 trillion figure is based on closing the gap in the black-white (pre-tax) wealth differential (though don’t ask me to explain the math).
With that being said, they argue that however the figure is calculated, “the racial wealth gap is the economic measure that best captures the cumulative effects of the full trajectory of American white supremacy from slavery to the present,” and the final tally ought to be indexed to it.
The Unremunerated Labor Formula of 2015: $14 trillion
In an article published in the journal Social Science Quarterly, Professor Thomas Craemer from the University of Connecticut placed a value on the unremunerative hours the slaves labored (18 hours a day in some instances) and multiplied it by historical free labor market wages, compounded by 3% interest. Craemer’s results ranged from $5.9 to $14.2 trillion (in 2009 dollars).
The amount, however, does not take into account the emotional and physical trauma suffered by the slaves or their descendants, the colonial era preceding the creation of the United States, the inequalities of the Jim Crow era (since his estimation ends with slavery), nor the inequalities following the Civil Rights era and continuing today.
The Minimum Wage Formula of 2018: $97 trillion
In the 2018 book, The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets, Jason Hickel, an economic anthropologist with the London School of Economics, goes further than Craemer’s formula by including the colonial era in his estimate of unremunerated labor.
He writes that “the United States alone benefited from a total of 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and the abolition of slavery in 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that is worth $97 trillion today.”
Like Craemer’s formula, however, Hickel does not take into account anything that happened following President Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation.
The Asheville Resolution of 2020: ~$10 trillion
On July 14th of this year, the City of Asheville, North Carolina, unanimously passed a resolution “Supporting Reparations for Black Asheville.” Along with apologizing for a variety of offenses against the city’s black residents going back to the time of lawful slavery, the resolution directs the City Manager “to establish a process within the next year to develop short, medium and long term recommendations to specifically address the creation of generational wealth and to boost economic mobility and opportunity in the black community.”
The resolution also calls for the creation of a commission to make recommendations, and it imagines (though does not require) the following solutions recommended by the commission:
- increasing minority homeownership and access to other affordable housing
- increasing minority business ownership and career opportunities
- strategies to grow equity and generational wealth
- closing the gaps in health care, education, employment, and pay
- neighborhood safety and fairness within the criminal-justice system
It does not give a cost to these priorities or solutions, nor does it provide any direct funding to the commission, but if we extrapolate from its priorities and assign them to the country as a whole, we will probably end up at a figure similar to the ones above: somewhere around $10 trillion.
A Modest Proposal: Reparations as a Pilot Program for a Universal Basic Income
In this year’s Democratic primary, one of the “political outsider candidates” was businessperson Andrew Yang, whose major policy proposal was the creation of a Universal Basic Income (UBI) for every American. Yang envisioned a new entitlement program whereby each American citizen over the age of 18 receives a “Freedom Dividend” of $1,000 a month.
Yang’s rationale for establishing a UBI focuses on the economy’s shift to automation. Over four-million manufacturing jobs have been lost since 2015 due to automation, and “the smartest people in the world now predict that a third of all working Americans will lose their job to automation in the next 12 years.”
Yang’s Freedom Dividend hopes to cover the basic costs of living for most Americans. While $1,000 a month won’t cover everything (the average rent in the U.S., for example, is roughly $1,400/month), it would ease the paycheck-to-paycheck stress that forces Americans to allow their employers to exploit them.
The Cost of a UBI
The number of citizens over the age of 18 in the United States is roughly 255 million. At $12,000 per citizen, we’re talking a gross cost of roughly $3 trillion per year. The net cost, however, would be (according to some estimates) roughly $539 billion per year, or roughly 2.5% of the U.S.’s 2017 GDP.
But if we’re to reimagine reparations as a pilot proposal for UBI, we don’t want to do the math for every citizen. We want to do it for every black citizen. I don’t have a number for how many black Americans are above the age of 18 in the United States, but there are roughly 44 million black individuals in the country, which would give us a gross cost of roughly $529 billion per year. The net cost would be lower.
For comparison, the U.S. spends roughly $182 billion a year (2017) to support the nation’s mass incarceration policies.
How To Pay for a UBI
To pay for his proposal, Yang would like to add a Value-Added Tax (VAT) on the production of goods and services produced by American businesses. Every country in Europe already has a VAT, and 160 of 193 countries have one. He also adds that governments can’t tax the incomes of robots or software, so as automation increases, the country’s revenue from income taxes will decrease. A VAT, however, keeps the money flowing.
Yang estimates that the country could pay for a UBI through not just a VAT, but also a reduction in social-service expenditures (a citizen can choose the current array of social-service programs [welfare, food stamps, etc.] or the Freedom Dividend, but not both), a reduction in healthcare costs (since the dividend would be used to fund regular doctor visits), a reduction in prison costs (since people would be able to take better care of themselves, and thus not be forced into a life of crime), a growing economy (since every U.S. citizen over the age of 18 would have an extra $12,000 to spend each year), and changes to the tax system to draw in more money from top earners and big polluters.
Reparations As A UBI: ~$5 trillion over 10 years
Yang’s rationale for a UBI makes sense, and virtually every major Democratic politician (excluding V.P. Joe Biden, the party’s current standard-bearer) supports some version of either a UBI or a Federal Job Guarantee to offset the losses to automation and software. The same politicians (and still excluding V.P. Joe Biden) support some form of reparations.
The Democrats could combine these efforts to help reduce opposition to both UBI and reparations. If the Democrats take both houses of Congress and the White House in November, they should put forward a UBI pilot program that envisions paying black adults $1,000 a month and black minors $500 a month for the next ten years
Throughout the decade of reparations payments, researchers could study the effect of the UBI, and if it results in the rewards that Yang and other supporters predict (above and beyond the improvements in racial equity predicted by the supporters of reparations), Congress could use the data to inform the effort to pass a true Universal Basic Income for every American.
A cost of $5 trillion over 10 years (gross) is among the lowest proposals on the table. It would need to be accompanied by a national reckoning, apology, and truth-telling initiative to help Americans face our nation’s long history of institutionalized racism. This initiative would have costs of its own, but it would probably not exceed the $12 million requested by H.R. 40.
Combining UBI with reparations for slavery would allow the United States to (as a friend of mine likes to say) “feed two birds with one seed.” It won’t cure every ill facing the United States, but it will start to put the bloodiest stains of our nation’s past policies and actions behind us and urge us toward a better, more equitable future.