Beyond pathetic!
A Blueprint for Reparations
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Beyond pathetic!
Academic Study Finds Reparations to Black Americans Would Narrow Racial Health Gap, Increase Life Expectancy
Study published in JAMA Network Open presents research linking African Americans' poor health outcomes and shorter life expectancy to substantially lower wealth
Compensating Black families for the economic legacy of slavery and discrimination would do more than heal their finances – it would improve their health and add years to their lives.”
— Dr. Kathryn Himmelstein
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, UNITED STATES, November 7, 2022 // --
A study published today in JAMA Network Open concludes that the racial wealth gap has lethal implications for Black Americans. On average, White households have more in mean wealth, $980,549 to $142,330, contributing to widespread racial health inequities and shortened life expectancies.
Completed by researchers at Harvard Medical School, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Drexel, and Duke, the study finds that eliminating the wealth gap with reparations payments would shrink racial inequities in health and longevity. The study links the low wealth of Blacks, a product of the legacy of slavery and subsequent discriminatory public and private policies and practices, to their shorter life expectancy.
“Our study demonstrates a reparations plan that raised Black net worth sufficiently to eliminate the racial wealth gap for Black American descendants of U.S. slavery would lengthen Black lives dramatically,” said Dr. William Darity Jr., professor of Economics, African and African American Studies at Duke University, and a co-author of the study.
The researchers analyzed data on 33,501 Black and White middle-aged Americans who were tracked for up to 26 years in the federally-funded Health and Retirement Study, which collects comprehensive data on each person’s wealth. Specifically, it includes data rarely available in health studies, such as net value of investments, housing equity, vehicles and other assets.
Among the research subjects, whose average age was 59 at the outset of the study, the odds of dying for Blacks was 26% higher than their White counterparts, equivalent to 4.0 fewer years of remaining life expectancy. The researchers found that differences in wealth accounted for much of the life expectancy gap and projected the effect of equalizing wealth through reparations payments. Their analysis indicates that fully closing the wealth gap would nearly equalize the two groups’ odds of dying, greatly reducing the current Black-White inequity in life expectancy.
“Our findings add to the compelling moral case for reparations,” said Dr. Kathryn Himmelstein, a study co-author and infectious disease fellow at Harvard's Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's Hospitals. “Compensating Black families for the economic legacy of slavery and discrimination would do more than heal their finances – it would improve their health and add years to their lives.”
Some activists and scholars have long advocated reparations for Black Americans as compensation for the racism that began with slavery and continued with Jim Crow laws, New Deal programs that initially excluded many Black Americans, housing policies that limited Black families from gaining intergenerational wealth, and other racist government policies and practices. Reparations advocates point to historical precedents like the U.S. government’s payments to previously-interned Japanese Americans and Germany’s payments to Holocaust survivors. Poll data from 2021 suggest 36% of all Americans, including 86% of Black Americans, support reparations (up from 15% of Americans in 2014), and 196 members of Congress have signed on to a bill that would establish a federal commission to study reparations.
“Many health workers are aware of the deadly impacts of racism on health for Black people, but few have supported reparations as a remedy,” said Dr. Michelle Morse, a co-author of the study and internal medicine physician and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. “This research makes it clearer than ever for the medical and public health community to consider reparations as a remedy to advance racial justice and health equity.”
www.einnews.com
Study published in JAMA Network Open presents research linking African Americans' poor health outcomes and shorter life expectancy to substantially lower wealth
Compensating Black families for the economic legacy of slavery and discrimination would do more than heal their finances – it would improve their health and add years to their lives.”
— Dr. Kathryn Himmelstein
BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS, UNITED STATES, November 7, 2022 // --
A study published today in JAMA Network Open concludes that the racial wealth gap has lethal implications for Black Americans. On average, White households have more in mean wealth, $980,549 to $142,330, contributing to widespread racial health inequities and shortened life expectancies.
Completed by researchers at Harvard Medical School, the University of Pennsylvania, Johns Hopkins, Drexel, and Duke, the study finds that eliminating the wealth gap with reparations payments would shrink racial inequities in health and longevity. The study links the low wealth of Blacks, a product of the legacy of slavery and subsequent discriminatory public and private policies and practices, to their shorter life expectancy.
“Our study demonstrates a reparations plan that raised Black net worth sufficiently to eliminate the racial wealth gap for Black American descendants of U.S. slavery would lengthen Black lives dramatically,” said Dr. William Darity Jr., professor of Economics, African and African American Studies at Duke University, and a co-author of the study.
The researchers analyzed data on 33,501 Black and White middle-aged Americans who were tracked for up to 26 years in the federally-funded Health and Retirement Study, which collects comprehensive data on each person’s wealth. Specifically, it includes data rarely available in health studies, such as net value of investments, housing equity, vehicles and other assets.
Among the research subjects, whose average age was 59 at the outset of the study, the odds of dying for Blacks was 26% higher than their White counterparts, equivalent to 4.0 fewer years of remaining life expectancy. The researchers found that differences in wealth accounted for much of the life expectancy gap and projected the effect of equalizing wealth through reparations payments. Their analysis indicates that fully closing the wealth gap would nearly equalize the two groups’ odds of dying, greatly reducing the current Black-White inequity in life expectancy.
“Our findings add to the compelling moral case for reparations,” said Dr. Kathryn Himmelstein, a study co-author and infectious disease fellow at Harvard's Massachusetts General and Brigham and Women's Hospitals. “Compensating Black families for the economic legacy of slavery and discrimination would do more than heal their finances – it would improve their health and add years to their lives.”
Some activists and scholars have long advocated reparations for Black Americans as compensation for the racism that began with slavery and continued with Jim Crow laws, New Deal programs that initially excluded many Black Americans, housing policies that limited Black families from gaining intergenerational wealth, and other racist government policies and practices. Reparations advocates point to historical precedents like the U.S. government’s payments to previously-interned Japanese Americans and Germany’s payments to Holocaust survivors. Poll data from 2021 suggest 36% of all Americans, including 86% of Black Americans, support reparations (up from 15% of Americans in 2014), and 196 members of Congress have signed on to a bill that would establish a federal commission to study reparations.
“Many health workers are aware of the deadly impacts of racism on health for Black people, but few have supported reparations as a remedy,” said Dr. Michelle Morse, a co-author of the study and internal medicine physician and Assistant Professor at Harvard Medical School. “This research makes it clearer than ever for the medical and public health community to consider reparations as a remedy to advance racial justice and health equity.”
Academic Study Finds Reparations to Black Americans Would Narrow Racial Health Gap, Increase Life Expectancy
Study published in JAMA Network Open presents research linking African Americans' poor health outcomes and shorter life expectancy to substantially lower wealth
Being the first, to some he could do no right. To some he could do no right. I think for most, we accept that he did as much as he felt he could get away with, without making it harder for the next "Black" president.
Did I want him to do more, yes.....but if the first black president was Mr "I'm Black y'all, I'm Blavk y'all, I'm blickity BLACK!'
The first may as well be the last.
How the racial wealth gap has evolved—and why it persists
New dataset identifies the causes of today’s wealth gap
Article Highlights
“He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
The dawn of emancipation in the United States saw 4 million former slaves, 90 percent of the Black American population, gain their freedom. But they did so in poverty, as Du Bois describes: A few years prior, they had been counted as wealth, earning and owning nothing in their own name.
After emancipation, proposals to provide former slaves with land so they could survive economically were largely defeated. Thus in 1870, the wealth gap between Black and White Americans was a staggering 23 to 1. That's equivalent to just $4 of wealth for Black Americans for every $100 for White Americans.
“We wanted to see if there was something to be learned for policy: Do we see that certain periods were particularly good, particularly bad in terms of convergence? What conclusions can we draw from that?”
—MORITZ KUHN
Fast forward 150 years and that gap has narrowed to about 6 to 1—and yet, a significant gap remains: average per capita wealth of White Americans was $338,093 in 2019 but only $60,126 for Black Americans.
In the new Institute working paper “Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860–2020,” former Institute visiting scholar Ellora Derenoncourt and colleagues Chi Hyun Kim, Moritz Kuhn, and Moritz Schularick study the evolution of the Black-White racial wealth gap to understand how it has changed and what forces drove those changes.
“We wanted to see if there was something to be learned for policy: Do we see that certain periods were particularly good, particularly bad in terms of convergence? What conclusions can we draw from that?” Kuhn said about one motivation the author team had for undertaking the research.
Drawing on numerous historical resources, the economists construct a new dataset that fills in around 100 years of missing wealth data, from the 1880s to the 1980s, when modern surveys of wealth began. They then use a model of wealth accumulation to investigate the sources of the wealth gap.
So where does wealth come from? Yesterday’s wealth, mostly. Unlike income, which can change quickly—lose a job, take a new job—wealth builds slowly from interest on previous wealth and new savings from income. For that reason, “it takes a lot of time to build wealth and to close an existing wealth gap, especially if the world around you is not stopping to accumulate wealth,” Kuhn said.
The economists’ analysis suggests that, more than 150 years after the end of slavery, today’s racial wealth gap is the legacy of very different wealth conditions after emancipation. While the White-Black income gap has narrowed over time, differences in Black and White Americans’ capital gains rates and savings rates throughout history have slowed the convergence (closing the gap) between Black and White wealth.
The result: An enduring wealth gap that shows no sign of resolving. “It was interesting for us to see how extremely persistent the racial wealth gap is. We saw a lot of things changing in the U.S. economy in the last 70 years, but the racial wealth gap seems to be pretty ignorant of all that,” Kuhn observed.
Evolution of the racial wealth gap
Tracing 150 years of the racial wealth gap1 reveals rapid early progress followed by frustrating stagnation (Figure 1).
1
White-Black wealth gap, 1860-2020
Dawn of emancipation: 1870 to 1900
The thirty years following emancipation saw rapid narrowing of the racial wealth gap, falling from a ratio of 56 to 1 in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War to 23 to 1 in 1870 following emancipation and 11 to 1 in 1900. (In 2019 dollars, that comes to average wealth of $34,000 for a White American and $3,100 for a Black American.) White slaveholders’ loss of slaves as “wealth” explains about a quarter of this convergence. The rest was due to a higher wealth accumulation rate for Black Americans than White Americans.
This convergence, however, is more a matter of statistics than reflection of meaningful economic or political change. Because Black Americans’ wealth was so low in 1870, even small gains translated to big percent increases in wealth and thus large reductions in the wealth gap, even though the difference in the amount of average wealth held by Black Americans and White Americans remained large.
Unfortunately, an early period of rapid wealth convergence was relatively short lived. Proposals to redistribute property to former slaves ultimately failed, and early enforcement of Black Americans’ rights were similarly reversed.
Unfortunately, this period of rapid convergence was relatively short-lived. Proposals to redistribute property to former slaves, such as General William Sherman’s field order allowing freed slaves to establish 40-acre farms on federal land, ultimately failed to garner sufficient political support, and early enforcement of Black Americans’ rights were similarly reversed. By 1900, a racist economic and social order was largely restored.
Racist resurgence: 1900 to 1930
Between 1900 and 1930, the racial wealth gap narrowed tepidly, at a rate around 0.3 percent a year. During this period, Black Americans’ share of national wealth stayed fairly constant, at 1 percent (Figure 2).
“Barriers to Black economic progress were pervasive in the post-Reconstruction era,” the economists observe. For instance, Black Americans had limited access to financial institutions or credit; they had little opportunity to purchase land; they experienced the violent destruction of their property; they faced widespread discrimination in education and the labor market. In the South, the vast majority of Black farmers were renters or sharecroppers in an economic system that hindered Black workers’ economic progress because White landlords were able to capture their tenants’ improvements to the land simply by not renewing the lease.
2
Black share of U.S. population and national wealth
Global upheaval: 1930 to 1960
Wealth convergence picked back up modestly during this period, and by 1960 the gap was 8 to 1. (In 2019 dollars, that translates to average wealth of $76,000 for White Americans and $9,000 for Black Americans.) A closer look at the timing reveals this does not appear to be the result of New Deal economic relief or new social insurance policies, which tended to exclude sectors with large representations of Black workers. Rather, labor market dynamics around the time of World War II led to Black workers moving into higher-paying occupations, notably related to war production and defense, which reduced the racial income gap and led to greater gains in Black Americans’ wealth. This movement was facilitated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, which banned “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”
Civil rights: 1960 to 1980
The civil rights movement was responsible for the fastest period of racial wealth convergence since 1900. Tireless efforts by Black activists to demand equal rights and protections led to the passage of numerous laws that reduced social, political, and economic discrimination, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and expansions to the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets federal minimum wage policies.
These legislations helped narrow the racial income gap, which in turn narrowed the wealth gap; it fell from 8 to 1 in 1960 to 5 to 1 in 1980. Figure 2 shows that Black Americans’ share of national wealth started increasing more rapidly in 1960 even as the total U.S. population of Black Americans was also increasing.
Stagnation: 1980 to 2020
And then—convergence stopped. In the 40 years between 1980 and 2020, the racial wealth gap actually increased by the equivalent of 0.1 percent a year. The reasons for this stagnation are discussed in the section “A widening gap: The role of capital gains” below.
Unequal initial wealth, unequal wealth accumulation
The next step in the economists' research is to analyze the causes of the racial wealth gap. To do this, they engage in a thought experiment: What if Black and White Americans started with the radically different levels of wealth in 1870 that they did in real life, but their wealth accumulation rates were identical after that? The resulting wealth gap in 2020 would be about 3 to 1 ($100 dollars of White wealth for every $33 dollars of Black wealth). That’s about half of what the actual wealth gap is today, suggesting that unequal levels of wealth in 1870 are a major source of today’s racial wealth gap.
The fact that today’s racial wealth gap is larger than it would be under this optimistic scenario is due to unequal wealth accumulation rates, which of course haven’t been identical for White and Black Americans, as the brief history above of political and economic exclusion makes plain.
Wealth accumulation can be described as a fairly straightforward equation. It starts with yesterday’s wealth and the interest earned on that wealth (capital gains rate). Add to that new savings from income, which is the product of yesterday’s income level, how much income has changed (income growth rate), and how much of that income is saved (savings rate).
While historical data on these rates is difficult to come by, since at least 1950, White Americans have enjoyed a higher average savings rate and capital gains rate than Black Americans (see Table 1).
Table 1. White and Black Americans' savings and capital gains rates
Source: Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, and Schularick, “Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020.”
What drove wealth convergence, then? The income growth rate. The economists estimate that the average annual income growth rate for Black Americans was larger than that of White Americans from 1870 to about 1980. At that point, income convergence stalled; over the last 40 years, the annual income growth rates for Black and White Americans have been essentially the same.
A widening gap: The role of capital gains
Now that income convergence has stalled, the difference in the capital gains rate experienced by Black and White households is the main factor pushing their wealth apart.
The role of capital gains is particularly important here. The high rate of return to capital holdings over the last 40 years—economic parlance for “stocks have really gone up a lot”—is a leading cause of the wealth dispersion in the United States today. According to analysis by economist Emmanuel Saez and others, wealth has become significantly more concentrated during this period: In 1980, the richest 0.1 percent of Americans—about 160,000 households—owned 7.7 percent of national wealth. In 2020, they owned 18.5 percent.
“Given that there are so few Black households at the top of the wealth distribution,” Derenoncourt and co-authors write, “faster growth in wealth at the top will lead to further increases in racial wealth inequality.”
And that’s what’s happening now. On average between 1950 and 2010, Black households held about 7 percent of their wealth in stock equity; among White households, it was 18 percent (Table 2). The portfolios of White households are also more diversified than Black households, which are concentrated in housing wealth. Housing has appreciated since the 1950s, but stock equity has appreciated five times as much.
Table 2. White and Black households' wealth portfolio composition
Note: Equity refers to wealth in stocks and mutual funds. Liquid assets include cash, checking accounts, and savings accounts. Other nonfinancial assets include household items like cars or boats.
Source: Survey of Consumer Finances 2019 and calculations by Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, and Schularick.
“At a more general level,” Kuhn stated, “this research emphasizes how important portfolio choice and investment behavior is. It’s not only about putting money aside, but where you put it.”
Why wealth matters
The distribution of wealth in the United States comes under frequent scrutiny because of how skewed it is—and because wealth is a determinant of social and economic outcomes far beyond what someone can buy.
“Wealthier families are far better positioned to finance elite independent school and college education, access capital to start a business, finance expensive medical procedures, reside in higher amenity neighborhoods, lower health hazards, etc.; exert political influence through campaign financing; purchase better counsel if confronted with the legal system, leave a bequest, and/or withstand financial hardship resulting from any number of emergencies,” Institute advisor William Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton wrote in a 2010 article analyzing policies to address the wealth gap.
Now that income convergence has stalled, the difference in the capital gains rate experienced by Black and White households is the main factor pushing their wealth apart.
It matters a great deal, then, that White Americans hold 84 percent of total U.S. wealth but make up only 60 percent of the population—while Black Americans hold 4 percent of the wealth and make up 13 percent of the population. Put another way: The wealth of the richest 400 Americans is approximately equal to that of 43 million Black Americans.
The historical analysis and counterfactual simulations by Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, and Schularick provide useful context for thinking about policies to address the racial wealth gap. Without redistribution, the wealth gap will likely persist for centuries. But redistribution alone, without attending to disparities in wealth accumulation, will see the gap reemerge. These approaches, the economists argue, are complimentary.
They are also necessary if the wealth gap is to meaningfully narrow before another 150 years slip by.
Suggested citation: Lisa Camner McKay, “How the Racial Wealth Gap Has Evolved—And Why It Persists,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, October 3, 2022, https://www.minneapolisfed.org/arti...al-wealth-gap-has-evolved-and-why-it-persists.
Endnote
1 The economists actually compare Black wealth to non-Black wealth—that is, the average wealth among all groups except Black Americans—because the data does not allow them to separate out the wealth of other racial/ethnic groups. As a check, they compare their estimate of non-Black wealth to an estimate of White wealth in the periods 1860–1880 and 1960–2020; the estimates are very similar. Racial/ethnic groups other than White and Black were quite small in the United States prior to 1950. And because White Americans are the wealthiest racial/ethnic group in the United States, using “non-Black wealth” likely underestimates White wealth and therefore underestimates the Black-White wealth gap.
www.minneapolisfed.org
New dataset identifies the causes of today’s wealth gap
Article Highlights
- New dataset tracks evolution of racial wealth gap from 1860 to 2020
- Racial wealth gap today is legacy of vastly unequal wealth for Black and White Americans following Civil War
- Racial wealth gap has been stagnant for last 40 years due to differences in Black and White households’ wealth portfolios
“He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
The dawn of emancipation in the United States saw 4 million former slaves, 90 percent of the Black American population, gain their freedom. But they did so in poverty, as Du Bois describes: A few years prior, they had been counted as wealth, earning and owning nothing in their own name.
After emancipation, proposals to provide former slaves with land so they could survive economically were largely defeated. Thus in 1870, the wealth gap between Black and White Americans was a staggering 23 to 1. That's equivalent to just $4 of wealth for Black Americans for every $100 for White Americans.
“We wanted to see if there was something to be learned for policy: Do we see that certain periods were particularly good, particularly bad in terms of convergence? What conclusions can we draw from that?”
—MORITZ KUHN
Fast forward 150 years and that gap has narrowed to about 6 to 1—and yet, a significant gap remains: average per capita wealth of White Americans was $338,093 in 2019 but only $60,126 for Black Americans.
In the new Institute working paper “Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860–2020,” former Institute visiting scholar Ellora Derenoncourt and colleagues Chi Hyun Kim, Moritz Kuhn, and Moritz Schularick study the evolution of the Black-White racial wealth gap to understand how it has changed and what forces drove those changes.
“We wanted to see if there was something to be learned for policy: Do we see that certain periods were particularly good, particularly bad in terms of convergence? What conclusions can we draw from that?” Kuhn said about one motivation the author team had for undertaking the research.
Drawing on numerous historical resources, the economists construct a new dataset that fills in around 100 years of missing wealth data, from the 1880s to the 1980s, when modern surveys of wealth began. They then use a model of wealth accumulation to investigate the sources of the wealth gap.
So where does wealth come from? Yesterday’s wealth, mostly. Unlike income, which can change quickly—lose a job, take a new job—wealth builds slowly from interest on previous wealth and new savings from income. For that reason, “it takes a lot of time to build wealth and to close an existing wealth gap, especially if the world around you is not stopping to accumulate wealth,” Kuhn said.
The economists’ analysis suggests that, more than 150 years after the end of slavery, today’s racial wealth gap is the legacy of very different wealth conditions after emancipation. While the White-Black income gap has narrowed over time, differences in Black and White Americans’ capital gains rates and savings rates throughout history have slowed the convergence (closing the gap) between Black and White wealth.
The result: An enduring wealth gap that shows no sign of resolving. “It was interesting for us to see how extremely persistent the racial wealth gap is. We saw a lot of things changing in the U.S. economy in the last 70 years, but the racial wealth gap seems to be pretty ignorant of all that,” Kuhn observed.
Evolution of the racial wealth gap
Tracing 150 years of the racial wealth gap1 reveals rapid early progress followed by frustrating stagnation (Figure 1).
1
White-Black wealth gap, 1860-2020
Dawn of emancipation: 1870 to 1900
The thirty years following emancipation saw rapid narrowing of the racial wealth gap, falling from a ratio of 56 to 1 in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War to 23 to 1 in 1870 following emancipation and 11 to 1 in 1900. (In 2019 dollars, that comes to average wealth of $34,000 for a White American and $3,100 for a Black American.) White slaveholders’ loss of slaves as “wealth” explains about a quarter of this convergence. The rest was due to a higher wealth accumulation rate for Black Americans than White Americans.
This convergence, however, is more a matter of statistics than reflection of meaningful economic or political change. Because Black Americans’ wealth was so low in 1870, even small gains translated to big percent increases in wealth and thus large reductions in the wealth gap, even though the difference in the amount of average wealth held by Black Americans and White Americans remained large.
Unfortunately, an early period of rapid wealth convergence was relatively short lived. Proposals to redistribute property to former slaves ultimately failed, and early enforcement of Black Americans’ rights were similarly reversed.
Unfortunately, this period of rapid convergence was relatively short-lived. Proposals to redistribute property to former slaves, such as General William Sherman’s field order allowing freed slaves to establish 40-acre farms on federal land, ultimately failed to garner sufficient political support, and early enforcement of Black Americans’ rights were similarly reversed. By 1900, a racist economic and social order was largely restored.
Racist resurgence: 1900 to 1930
Between 1900 and 1930, the racial wealth gap narrowed tepidly, at a rate around 0.3 percent a year. During this period, Black Americans’ share of national wealth stayed fairly constant, at 1 percent (Figure 2).
“Barriers to Black economic progress were pervasive in the post-Reconstruction era,” the economists observe. For instance, Black Americans had limited access to financial institutions or credit; they had little opportunity to purchase land; they experienced the violent destruction of their property; they faced widespread discrimination in education and the labor market. In the South, the vast majority of Black farmers were renters or sharecroppers in an economic system that hindered Black workers’ economic progress because White landlords were able to capture their tenants’ improvements to the land simply by not renewing the lease.
2
Black share of U.S. population and national wealth
Global upheaval: 1930 to 1960
Wealth convergence picked back up modestly during this period, and by 1960 the gap was 8 to 1. (In 2019 dollars, that translates to average wealth of $76,000 for White Americans and $9,000 for Black Americans.) A closer look at the timing reveals this does not appear to be the result of New Deal economic relief or new social insurance policies, which tended to exclude sectors with large representations of Black workers. Rather, labor market dynamics around the time of World War II led to Black workers moving into higher-paying occupations, notably related to war production and defense, which reduced the racial income gap and led to greater gains in Black Americans’ wealth. This movement was facilitated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, which banned “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”
Civil rights: 1960 to 1980
The civil rights movement was responsible for the fastest period of racial wealth convergence since 1900. Tireless efforts by Black activists to demand equal rights and protections led to the passage of numerous laws that reduced social, political, and economic discrimination, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and expansions to the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets federal minimum wage policies.
These legislations helped narrow the racial income gap, which in turn narrowed the wealth gap; it fell from 8 to 1 in 1960 to 5 to 1 in 1980. Figure 2 shows that Black Americans’ share of national wealth started increasing more rapidly in 1960 even as the total U.S. population of Black Americans was also increasing.
Stagnation: 1980 to 2020
And then—convergence stopped. In the 40 years between 1980 and 2020, the racial wealth gap actually increased by the equivalent of 0.1 percent a year. The reasons for this stagnation are discussed in the section “A widening gap: The role of capital gains” below.
Unequal initial wealth, unequal wealth accumulation
The next step in the economists' research is to analyze the causes of the racial wealth gap. To do this, they engage in a thought experiment: What if Black and White Americans started with the radically different levels of wealth in 1870 that they did in real life, but their wealth accumulation rates were identical after that? The resulting wealth gap in 2020 would be about 3 to 1 ($100 dollars of White wealth for every $33 dollars of Black wealth). That’s about half of what the actual wealth gap is today, suggesting that unequal levels of wealth in 1870 are a major source of today’s racial wealth gap.
The fact that today’s racial wealth gap is larger than it would be under this optimistic scenario is due to unequal wealth accumulation rates, which of course haven’t been identical for White and Black Americans, as the brief history above of political and economic exclusion makes plain.
Wealth accumulation can be described as a fairly straightforward equation. It starts with yesterday’s wealth and the interest earned on that wealth (capital gains rate). Add to that new savings from income, which is the product of yesterday’s income level, how much income has changed (income growth rate), and how much of that income is saved (savings rate).
While historical data on these rates is difficult to come by, since at least 1950, White Americans have enjoyed a higher average savings rate and capital gains rate than Black Americans (see Table 1).
Table 1. White and Black Americans' savings and capital gains rates
Source: Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, and Schularick, “Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020.”
| White Americans (%) | Black Americans (%) | |
|---|---|---|
| Average savings rate | 5.0 | 3.9 |
| Average capital gains rate | 1.0 | 0.8 |
What drove wealth convergence, then? The income growth rate. The economists estimate that the average annual income growth rate for Black Americans was larger than that of White Americans from 1870 to about 1980. At that point, income convergence stalled; over the last 40 years, the annual income growth rates for Black and White Americans have been essentially the same.
A widening gap: The role of capital gains
Now that income convergence has stalled, the difference in the capital gains rate experienced by Black and White households is the main factor pushing their wealth apart.
The role of capital gains is particularly important here. The high rate of return to capital holdings over the last 40 years—economic parlance for “stocks have really gone up a lot”—is a leading cause of the wealth dispersion in the United States today. According to analysis by economist Emmanuel Saez and others, wealth has become significantly more concentrated during this period: In 1980, the richest 0.1 percent of Americans—about 160,000 households—owned 7.7 percent of national wealth. In 2020, they owned 18.5 percent.
“Given that there are so few Black households at the top of the wealth distribution,” Derenoncourt and co-authors write, “faster growth in wealth at the top will lead to further increases in racial wealth inequality.”
And that’s what’s happening now. On average between 1950 and 2010, Black households held about 7 percent of their wealth in stock equity; among White households, it was 18 percent (Table 2). The portfolios of White households are also more diversified than Black households, which are concentrated in housing wealth. Housing has appreciated since the 1950s, but stock equity has appreciated five times as much.
Table 2. White and Black households' wealth portfolio composition
Note: Equity refers to wealth in stocks and mutual funds. Liquid assets include cash, checking accounts, and savings accounts. Other nonfinancial assets include household items like cars or boats.
Source: Survey of Consumer Finances 2019 and calculations by Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, and Schularick.
| White households (%) | Black households (%) | |
|---|---|---|
| Housing | 38 | 59 |
| Business | 24 | 13 |
| Equity | 18 | 7 |
| Liquid assets | 17 | 13 |
| Other nonfinancial assets | 3 | 8 |
Why wealth matters
The distribution of wealth in the United States comes under frequent scrutiny because of how skewed it is—and because wealth is a determinant of social and economic outcomes far beyond what someone can buy.
“Wealthier families are far better positioned to finance elite independent school and college education, access capital to start a business, finance expensive medical procedures, reside in higher amenity neighborhoods, lower health hazards, etc.; exert political influence through campaign financing; purchase better counsel if confronted with the legal system, leave a bequest, and/or withstand financial hardship resulting from any number of emergencies,” Institute advisor William Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton wrote in a 2010 article analyzing policies to address the wealth gap.
Now that income convergence has stalled, the difference in the capital gains rate experienced by Black and White households is the main factor pushing their wealth apart.
It matters a great deal, then, that White Americans hold 84 percent of total U.S. wealth but make up only 60 percent of the population—while Black Americans hold 4 percent of the wealth and make up 13 percent of the population. Put another way: The wealth of the richest 400 Americans is approximately equal to that of 43 million Black Americans.
The historical analysis and counterfactual simulations by Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, and Schularick provide useful context for thinking about policies to address the racial wealth gap. Without redistribution, the wealth gap will likely persist for centuries. But redistribution alone, without attending to disparities in wealth accumulation, will see the gap reemerge. These approaches, the economists argue, are complimentary.
They are also necessary if the wealth gap is to meaningfully narrow before another 150 years slip by.
Suggested citation: Lisa Camner McKay, “How the Racial Wealth Gap Has Evolved—And Why It Persists,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, October 3, 2022, https://www.minneapolisfed.org/arti...al-wealth-gap-has-evolved-and-why-it-persists.
Endnote
1 The economists actually compare Black wealth to non-Black wealth—that is, the average wealth among all groups except Black Americans—because the data does not allow them to separate out the wealth of other racial/ethnic groups. As a check, they compare their estimate of non-Black wealth to an estimate of White wealth in the periods 1860–1880 and 1960–2020; the estimates are very similar. Racial/ethnic groups other than White and Black were quite small in the United States prior to 1950. And because White Americans are the wealthiest racial/ethnic group in the United States, using “non-Black wealth” likely underestimates White wealth and therefore underestimates the Black-White wealth gap.
How the racial wealth gap has evolved—and why it persists | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
New dataset identifies the causes of today’s wealth gap
www.minneapolisfed.org
You sound ridiculous......and weak minded.
We've known all this since before the 1968 Kerner Commission report. They talked about the cost of addressing the issue and the powers that be (most notably Ronald Reagan and Richard Nixon) said "F" that. And the same GOP would say the same thing right now.How the racial wealth gap has evolved—and why it persists
New dataset identifies the causes of today’s wealth gap
Article Highlights
How the racial wealth gap has evolved—and why it persists
- New dataset tracks evolution of racial wealth gap from 1860 to 2020
- Racial wealth gap today is legacy of vastly unequal wealth for Black and White Americans following Civil War
- Racial wealth gap has been stagnant for last 40 years due to differences in Black and White households’ wealth portfolios
“He felt his poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, he had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a poor man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of hardships.”
—W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk
The dawn of emancipation in the United States saw 4 million former slaves, 90 percent of the Black American population, gain their freedom. But they did so in poverty, as Du Bois describes: A few years prior, they had been counted as wealth, earning and owning nothing in their own name.
After emancipation, proposals to provide former slaves with land so they could survive economically were largely defeated. Thus in 1870, the wealth gap between Black and White Americans was a staggering 23 to 1. That's equivalent to just $4 of wealth for Black Americans for every $100 for White Americans.
“We wanted to see if there was something to be learned for policy: Do we see that certain periods were particularly good, particularly bad in terms of convergence? What conclusions can we draw from that?”
—MORITZ KUHN
Fast forward 150 years and that gap has narrowed to about 6 to 1—and yet, a significant gap remains: average per capita wealth of White Americans was $338,093 in 2019 but only $60,126 for Black Americans.
In the new Institute working paper “Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860–2020,” former Institute visiting scholar Ellora Derenoncourt and colleagues Chi Hyun Kim, Moritz Kuhn, and Moritz Schularick study the evolution of the Black-White racial wealth gap to understand how it has changed and what forces drove those changes.
“We wanted to see if there was something to be learned for policy: Do we see that certain periods were particularly good, particularly bad in terms of convergence? What conclusions can we draw from that?” Kuhn said about one motivation the author team had for undertaking the research.
Drawing on numerous historical resources, the economists construct a new dataset that fills in around 100 years of missing wealth data, from the 1880s to the 1980s, when modern surveys of wealth began. They then use a model of wealth accumulation to investigate the sources of the wealth gap.
So where does wealth come from? Yesterday’s wealth, mostly. Unlike income, which can change quickly—lose a job, take a new job—wealth builds slowly from interest on previous wealth and new savings from income. For that reason, “it takes a lot of time to build wealth and to close an existing wealth gap, especially if the world around you is not stopping to accumulate wealth,” Kuhn said.
The economists’ analysis suggests that, more than 150 years after the end of slavery, today’s racial wealth gap is the legacy of very different wealth conditions after emancipation. While the White-Black income gap has narrowed over time, differences in Black and White Americans’ capital gains rates and savings rates throughout history have slowed the convergence (closing the gap) between Black and White wealth.
The result: An enduring wealth gap that shows no sign of resolving. “It was interesting for us to see how extremely persistent the racial wealth gap is. We saw a lot of things changing in the U.S. economy in the last 70 years, but the racial wealth gap seems to be pretty ignorant of all that,” Kuhn observed.
Evolution of the racial wealth gap
Tracing 150 years of the racial wealth gap1 reveals rapid early progress followed by frustrating stagnation (Figure 1).
1
White-Black wealth gap, 1860-2020
Dawn of emancipation: 1870 to 1900
The thirty years following emancipation saw rapid narrowing of the racial wealth gap, falling from a ratio of 56 to 1 in 1860 on the eve of the Civil War to 23 to 1 in 1870 following emancipation and 11 to 1 in 1900. (In 2019 dollars, that comes to average wealth of $34,000 for a White American and $3,100 for a Black American.) White slaveholders’ loss of slaves as “wealth” explains about a quarter of this convergence. The rest was due to a higher wealth accumulation rate for Black Americans than White Americans.
This convergence, however, is more a matter of statistics than reflection of meaningful economic or political change. Because Black Americans’ wealth was so low in 1870, even small gains translated to big percent increases in wealth and thus large reductions in the wealth gap, even though the difference in the amount of average wealth held by Black Americans and White Americans remained large.
Unfortunately, an early period of rapid wealth convergence was relatively short lived. Proposals to redistribute property to former slaves ultimately failed, and early enforcement of Black Americans’ rights were similarly reversed.
Unfortunately, this period of rapid convergence was relatively short-lived. Proposals to redistribute property to former slaves, such as General William Sherman’s field order allowing freed slaves to establish 40-acre farms on federal land, ultimately failed to garner sufficient political support, and early enforcement of Black Americans’ rights were similarly reversed. By 1900, a racist economic and social order was largely restored.
Racist resurgence: 1900 to 1930
Between 1900 and 1930, the racial wealth gap narrowed tepidly, at a rate around 0.3 percent a year. During this period, Black Americans’ share of national wealth stayed fairly constant, at 1 percent (Figure 2).
“Barriers to Black economic progress were pervasive in the post-Reconstruction era,” the economists observe. For instance, Black Americans had limited access to financial institutions or credit; they had little opportunity to purchase land; they experienced the violent destruction of their property; they faced widespread discrimination in education and the labor market. In the South, the vast majority of Black farmers were renters or sharecroppers in an economic system that hindered Black workers’ economic progress because White landlords were able to capture their tenants’ improvements to the land simply by not renewing the lease.
2
Black share of U.S. population and national wealth
Global upheaval: 1930 to 1960
Wealth convergence picked back up modestly during this period, and by 1960 the gap was 8 to 1. (In 2019 dollars, that translates to average wealth of $76,000 for White Americans and $9,000 for Black Americans.) A closer look at the timing reveals this does not appear to be the result of New Deal economic relief or new social insurance policies, which tended to exclude sectors with large representations of Black workers. Rather, labor market dynamics around the time of World War II led to Black workers moving into higher-paying occupations, notably related to war production and defense, which reduced the racial income gap and led to greater gains in Black Americans’ wealth. This movement was facilitated by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Executive Order 8802, which banned “discrimination in the employment of workers in defense industries or government because of race, creed, color, or national origin.”
Civil rights: 1960 to 1980
The civil rights movement was responsible for the fastest period of racial wealth convergence since 1900. Tireless efforts by Black activists to demand equal rights and protections led to the passage of numerous laws that reduced social, political, and economic discrimination, including the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and expansions to the Fair Labor Standards Act, which sets federal minimum wage policies.
These legislations helped narrow the racial income gap, which in turn narrowed the wealth gap; it fell from 8 to 1 in 1960 to 5 to 1 in 1980. Figure 2 shows that Black Americans’ share of national wealth started increasing more rapidly in 1960 even as the total U.S. population of Black Americans was also increasing.
Stagnation: 1980 to 2020
And then—convergence stopped. In the 40 years between 1980 and 2020, the racial wealth gap actually increased by the equivalent of 0.1 percent a year. The reasons for this stagnation are discussed in the section “A widening gap: The role of capital gains” below.
Unequal initial wealth, unequal wealth accumulation
The next step in the economists' research is to analyze the causes of the racial wealth gap. To do this, they engage in a thought experiment: What if Black and White Americans started with the radically different levels of wealth in 1870 that they did in real life, but their wealth accumulation rates were identical after that? The resulting wealth gap in 2020 would be about 3 to 1 ($100 dollars of White wealth for every $33 dollars of Black wealth). That’s about half of what the actual wealth gap is today, suggesting that unequal levels of wealth in 1870 are a major source of today’s racial wealth gap.
The fact that today’s racial wealth gap is larger than it would be under this optimistic scenario is due to unequal wealth accumulation rates, which of course haven’t been identical for White and Black Americans, as the brief history above of political and economic exclusion makes plain.
Wealth accumulation can be described as a fairly straightforward equation. It starts with yesterday’s wealth and the interest earned on that wealth (capital gains rate). Add to that new savings from income, which is the product of yesterday’s income level, how much income has changed (income growth rate), and how much of that income is saved (savings rate).
While historical data on these rates is difficult to come by, since at least 1950, White Americans have enjoyed a higher average savings rate and capital gains rate than Black Americans (see Table 1).
Table 1. White and Black Americans' savings and capital gains rates
Source: Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, and Schularick, “Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020.”
What drove wealth convergence, then? The income growth rate. The economists estimate that the average annual income growth rate for Black Americans was larger than that of White Americans from 1870 to about 1980. At that point, income convergence stalled; over the last 40 years, the annual income growth rates for Black and White Americans have been essentially the same.
White Americans (%) Black Americans (%) Average savings rate 5.0 3.9 Average capital gains rate 1.0 0.8
A widening gap: The role of capital gains
Now that income convergence has stalled, the difference in the capital gains rate experienced by Black and White households is the main factor pushing their wealth apart.
The role of capital gains is particularly important here. The high rate of return to capital holdings over the last 40 years—economic parlance for “stocks have really gone up a lot”—is a leading cause of the wealth dispersion in the United States today. According to analysis by economist Emmanuel Saez and others, wealth has become significantly more concentrated during this period: In 1980, the richest 0.1 percent of Americans—about 160,000 households—owned 7.7 percent of national wealth. In 2020, they owned 18.5 percent.
“Given that there are so few Black households at the top of the wealth distribution,” Derenoncourt and co-authors write, “faster growth in wealth at the top will lead to further increases in racial wealth inequality.”
And that’s what’s happening now. On average between 1950 and 2010, Black households held about 7 percent of their wealth in stock equity; among White households, it was 18 percent (Table 2). The portfolios of White households are also more diversified than Black households, which are concentrated in housing wealth. Housing has appreciated since the 1950s, but stock equity has appreciated five times as much.
Table 2. White and Black households' wealth portfolio composition
Note: Equity refers to wealth in stocks and mutual funds. Liquid assets include cash, checking accounts, and savings accounts. Other nonfinancial assets include household items like cars or boats.
Source: Survey of Consumer Finances 2019 and calculations by Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, and Schularick.
“At a more general level,” Kuhn stated, “this research emphasizes how important portfolio choice and investment behavior is. It’s not only about putting money aside, but where you put it.”
White households (%) Black households (%) Housing 38 59 Business 24 13 Equity 18 7 Liquid assets 17 13 Other nonfinancial assets 3 8
Why wealth matters
The distribution of wealth in the United States comes under frequent scrutiny because of how skewed it is—and because wealth is a determinant of social and economic outcomes far beyond what someone can buy.
“Wealthier families are far better positioned to finance elite independent school and college education, access capital to start a business, finance expensive medical procedures, reside in higher amenity neighborhoods, lower health hazards, etc.; exert political influence through campaign financing; purchase better counsel if confronted with the legal system, leave a bequest, and/or withstand financial hardship resulting from any number of emergencies,” Institute advisor William Darity Jr. and Darrick Hamilton wrote in a 2010 article analyzing policies to address the wealth gap.
Now that income convergence has stalled, the difference in the capital gains rate experienced by Black and White households is the main factor pushing their wealth apart.
It matters a great deal, then, that White Americans hold 84 percent of total U.S. wealth but make up only 60 percent of the population—while Black Americans hold 4 percent of the wealth and make up 13 percent of the population. Put another way: The wealth of the richest 400 Americans is approximately equal to that of 43 million Black Americans.
The historical analysis and counterfactual simulations by Derenoncourt, Kim, Kuhn, and Schularick provide useful context for thinking about policies to address the racial wealth gap. Without redistribution, the wealth gap will likely persist for centuries. But redistribution alone, without attending to disparities in wealth accumulation, will see the gap reemerge. These approaches, the economists argue, are complimentary.
They are also necessary if the wealth gap is to meaningfully narrow before another 150 years slip by.
Suggested citation: Lisa Camner McKay, “How the Racial Wealth Gap Has Evolved—And Why It Persists,” Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, October 3, 2022, https://www.minneapolisfed.org/arti...al-wealth-gap-has-evolved-and-why-it-persists.
Endnote
1 The economists actually compare Black wealth to non-Black wealth—that is, the average wealth among all groups except Black Americans—because the data does not allow them to separate out the wealth of other racial/ethnic groups. As a check, they compare their estimate of non-Black wealth to an estimate of White wealth in the periods 1860–1880 and 1960–2020; the estimates are very similar. Racial/ethnic groups other than White and Black were quite small in the United States prior to 1950. And because White Americans are the wealthiest racial/ethnic group in the United States, using “non-Black wealth” likely underestimates White wealth and therefore underestimates the Black-White wealth gap.
How the racial wealth gap has evolved—and why it persists | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
New dataset identifies the causes of today’s wealth gap
Who would support to get reparations? Assuming you want the US government to pay, you'll have to support some kind of political party.
That is always their go to reply fam.
"Sure the dems are bad, but the reps wantz uS'z bACk n chAInz".
That is always their go to reply fam.
"Sure the dems are bad, but the reps wantz uS'z bACk n chAInz".
whats the alternative party to the dems and reps???
Just hold your party accountable, make them work for your support, and punish them when they don't .
That's all I want you demobots to do bro.
that cant happen if theyre not in office... you hold them accountable by developing and supporting BETTER candidates and you primary their ass every election. Thats all I want you don't-vote morons to understand bro.
If I understand you, its your belief that the party of the "demobots" has not delivered for black people, has not been held accountable, and should now be punished. If that is correct, what punishment do you recommend. Should the "demobots" not vote, or vote for the repubs. Those seem like the only two viable parties so those are the only two I referenced.
No, I'm simply implying that currently the GOP is a much larger impediment to civil rights and economic justice for black people, not to mention reparations.That is always their go to reply fam.
"Sure the dems are bad, but the reps wantz uS'z bACk n chAInz".
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Yes. They haven't done shit for us since the 60s.
Punishment is taking away things that we give them. As the country's poorest people we don't contribute money through donations, all we do is deliver 90% of our vote to them.
Take our vote away if they aren't doing things for us. Why would we vote for anyone who does not want to do shit for us, that goes for Republicans too.
How old are you again sir?
So because of they are "an impediment'l" on those things we should vote for them no matter what and never question nor demand they do better from the Dems?
Please clarify your "they" and "them"s, because its not really clear what you're saying. However, as its written I'd say NO. We should NOT vote for them (the repubs) because they are an impediment on those things. In my opinion, the dems are much less an impediment on those things and many openly support them.
So you're not going to answer the second part of my question huh? Ok bet
If I understood it correctly I did answer your question, and the answer was NO.
Thanks for actually adding to the conversation and eloquently stating your opinion on the topic at hand..
"Those who are quick to name call (throw insults)..."
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Thanks for actually adding to the conversation and eloquently staying your opinion on the topic at hand..
"Those who are quick to name call (throw insults)..."
No you sound ridiculous because even after he's been out of office people like you are still coming up with the most asinine excuses for him.
This was a very good discussion tonight.
They said they expect Reparations by 5-7 years
I tried to send a superchat to ask them how have they planned to deal with these Trump appointed judges that's going to block anything that eventually [if] it gets passed.
They said they expect Reparations by 5-7 years
I tried to send a superchat to ask them how have they planned to deal with these Trump appointed judges that's going to block anything that eventually [if] it gets passed.
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This was a very good discussion tonight.
They said they expect Reparations by 5-7 years
I tried to send a superchat to ask them how have they planned to deal with these Trump appointed judges that's going to block anything that eventually [if] it gets passed.
Who is “they”?
California Panel Sizes Up Reparations for Black Citizens
The state is undertaking the nation’s most ambitious effort so far to compensate for the economic legacy of slavery and racism.
By Kurtis Lee
Dec. 1, 2022
In the two years since nationwide social justice protests followed the murder of George Floyd, California has undertaken the nation’s most sweeping effort yet to explore some concrete restitution to Black citizens to address the enduring economic effects of slavery and racism.
A nine-member Reparations Task Force has spent months traveling across California to learn about the generational effects of racist policies and actions. The group, formed by legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020, is scheduled to release a report to lawmakers in Sacramento next year outlining recommendations for state-level reparations.
“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” said Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a member of the task force.
While the creation of the task force is a bold first step, much remains unclear about whether lawmakers will ultimately throw their political weight behind reparations proposals that will require vast financial resources from the state.
“That is why we must put forward a robust plan, with plenty of options,” Dr. Lewis said.
The effort parallels others on a local level, in California and elsewhere, to address the nation’s stark racial disparities and a persistent wealth gap. The median wealth of Black households in the United States is $24,100, compared with $188,200 for white households, according to the most recent Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances.
In a preliminary report this year, the task force outlined how enslaved Black people were forced to California during the Gold Rush era and how, in the 1950s and 1960s, racially restrictive covenants and redlining segregated Black Californians in many of the state’s largest cities.
Californians eligible for reparations, the task force decided in March, would be descendants of enslaved African Americans or of a “free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.” Nearly 6.5 percent of California residents, roughly 2.5 million, identify as Black or African American. The panel is now considering how reparations should be distributed — some favor tuition and housing grants while others want direct cash payments.
The task force has identified five areas — housing discrimination, mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses and health care — in discussions for compensation. For example, from 1933 to 1977, when it comes to housing discrimination, the task force estimates compensation of around $569 billion, with $223,200 per person.
Final figures will be released in the report next year; it would then be up to the Legislature to act upon the recommendations and determine how to fund them.
The state and local efforts have faced opposition over the potentially steep cost to taxpayers and, in one case, derided as an ill-conceived campaign to impose an “era of social justice.”
A two-day public meeting of the state task force this fall, in a makeshift hearing room tucked inside a Los Angeles museum, included a mix of comments from local residents on how they had been personally affected and how the disparities should be addressed, along with testimony from experts who have studied reparations.
While even broad-scale reparations would be unlikely to eliminate the racial wealth gap, they could narrow it significantly, and proponents hope California’s effort will influence other states and federal legislators to follow suit.
“Calling these local projects reparations is to some degree creating a detour from the central task of compelling the federal government to do its job,” said William A. Darity Jr., a professor at Duke University and a leading scholar on reparations. Even so, Dr. Darity, who is advising the California task force, said “there is an increasing recognition” that the lasting effects of slavery must be addressed.
Every year for almost three decades, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan introduced legislation that would have created a commission to explore reparations, but the measure consistently stalled in Congress. After Mr. Conyers retired in 2017, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas began championing the measure, which passed a House committee for the first time last year, but stalled on the floor.
Underscoring the political hurdles, opinions on reparations are sharply divided by race. Last year, an online survey by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that 86 percent of African Americans supported compensating the descendants of slaves, compared with 28 percent of white people. Other polls have also shown wide splits.
Still, several efforts have gotten off the ground recently.
In 2021, officials in Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb, approved $10 million in reparations in the form of housing grants. Three months later, officials in Asheville, N.C., committed $2.1 million to reparations. And over the summer, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a plan to transfer ownership of Bruce’s Beach — a parcel in Manhattan Beach that was seized with scant compensation from a Black couple in 1924 — to the couple’s great-grandsons and great-great-grandsons.
“We want to see the land and economic wealth stolen from Black families all across this country returned,” said Kavon Ward, an activist who advocated on behalf of the Bruces’ descendants and has since started a group, Where Is My Land, that seeks to help Black Americans secure restitution.“We are in a moment that we cannot let pass.”
A so-called blight law from 1945, the task force’s interim report explains, paved the way for officials to use eminent domain to destroy Black communities, including shuttering more than 800 businesses and displacing 4,700 households in San Francisco’s Western Addition beginning in the 1950s.
After work on Interstate 210 began later that decade, the report goes on, the freeway was eventually built in the path of a Black business district in Pasadena, where city officials offered residents $75,000 — less than the minimum cost to buy a new home in the city — for their old homes.
And there is Russell City, an unincorporated parcel of Alameda County near the San Francisco Bay shoreline where many Black families fleeing racial terror in the Deep South built lives during the Great Migration. Testimony to the task force by Russell City residents recounts the community’s rise and ultimate bulldozing.
Unlike neighboring Hayward and San Leandro, Russell City didn’t have racist housing covenants stipulating that only white families could own certain homes. After World War II, it grew into a small but tight community of Black and Latino families that once included seven churches.
On weekends, children played on the unpaved streets as their parents, many of whom worked in the shipyards, sat on porches, and on some foggy nights, Ray Charles and Big Mama Thornton played shows at one of the town’s music venues, called the Country Club.
“It was vibrant,” said Monique Henderson-Ford, who grew up hearing stories about Russell City from her mother, grandmother and cousins.
After leaving Louisiana in the 1950s, her grandparents lived briefly in San Francisco but were displaced by an urban renewal project. Using savings from years of work at Pacific Gas & Electric, her grandfather paid $7,500 for their property and home in Russell City, and the family soon added three small houses to the homestead for their sons.
“This was their American dream,” Ms. Henderson-Ford said in an interview.
But it didn’t last long.
Lacking sewer lines and reliable electricity, the area was designated as a blight, and officials called for its destruction and the area to be turned into an industrial park. Russell City was annexed into Hayward, and the city and county bought up some properties and seized others through eminent domain. Residents, including Ms. Henderson-Ford’s grandmother, pleaded with officials to be allowed to remain in their homes.
“I got a nice place,” she told the Alameda County Board of Supervisors during a public meeting in 1963, according to a transcript. “Allow me a break.”
In exchange for their property and homes, county officials gave the family roughly $2,200, less than a third of what it had originally paid, according to Ms. Henderson-Ford.
On a recent morning, Ms. Henderson-Ford and her cousin joined a reporter on a walk through what was once Russell City but is now an industrial park.
They passed the spot where their grandfather used to fish, yanking up striped bass from the bay as he peered northwest and watched San Francisco’s skyline take its distinctive shape.
“Imagine if the houses were still here,” Ms. Henderson-Ford said. “We would all be sitting on a fortune.”
Amid the uproar in 2020 over the murder of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, in police custody in Minneapolis, Artavia Berry, who lives in Hayward, knew she had to do something.
“We could not look away from what happened right here,” said Ms. Berry, who learned the history of Russell City after moving to the region from Chicago a decade ago.
Ms. Berry, who leads the Community Services Commission, a municipal advisory body, composed what would become a formal apology from the City of Hayward to onetime residents of Russell City. Last November, the City Council approved the resolution, as well as several follow-up steps.
But in a public letter to city officials, Hayward Concerned Citizens, the group that railed against an “era of social justice,” said the apology was misguided, arguing that Alameda County, not the City of Hayward, had pushed residents out.
“We are strongly opposed to any direct financial reparations,” the group wrote.
For Gloria Moore, who grew up in Russell City, the words stung.
Now 79, she was 3 when her parents arrived in Russell City from Texarkana, Ark. Her mother worked as a cook at a local elementary school and her father worked for Todd Shipyards in the Bay Area. She still has vivid memories of walking to school in the mud when it rained, because the streets weren’t paved and there was no public transportation.
After their home was taken for about $2,200, the family members struggled to regain the financial stability and community they had built in Russell City.
By the 1970s, Ms. Moore had moved to Los Angeles to begin a career in city government, and she remembered noticing how many of her co-workers owned their own homes. She was renting.
Over the years, she and other former residents of Russell City have gathered at a park in Hayward for a Labor Day reunion, where they share stories and often tears.
“Sometimes things were suppressed because it was too painful,” she recalled. “But no one ever forgot.”
Kurtis Lee is an economics correspondent based in Los Angeles. Before joining The Times in 2022, he was a national correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, writing about gun violence, income inequality and race in America. @kurtisalee
www.nytimes.com
The state is undertaking the nation’s most ambitious effort so far to compensate for the economic legacy of slavery and racism.
By Kurtis Lee
Dec. 1, 2022
In the two years since nationwide social justice protests followed the murder of George Floyd, California has undertaken the nation’s most sweeping effort yet to explore some concrete restitution to Black citizens to address the enduring economic effects of slavery and racism.
A nine-member Reparations Task Force has spent months traveling across California to learn about the generational effects of racist policies and actions. The group, formed by legislation signed by Gov. Gavin Newsom in 2020, is scheduled to release a report to lawmakers in Sacramento next year outlining recommendations for state-level reparations.
“We are looking at reparations on a scale that is the largest since Reconstruction,” said Jovan Scott Lewis, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who is a member of the task force.
While the creation of the task force is a bold first step, much remains unclear about whether lawmakers will ultimately throw their political weight behind reparations proposals that will require vast financial resources from the state.
“That is why we must put forward a robust plan, with plenty of options,” Dr. Lewis said.
The effort parallels others on a local level, in California and elsewhere, to address the nation’s stark racial disparities and a persistent wealth gap. The median wealth of Black households in the United States is $24,100, compared with $188,200 for white households, according to the most recent Federal Reserve Board Survey of Consumer Finances.
In a preliminary report this year, the task force outlined how enslaved Black people were forced to California during the Gold Rush era and how, in the 1950s and 1960s, racially restrictive covenants and redlining segregated Black Californians in many of the state’s largest cities.
Californians eligible for reparations, the task force decided in March, would be descendants of enslaved African Americans or of a “free Black person living in the United States prior to the end of the 19th century.” Nearly 6.5 percent of California residents, roughly 2.5 million, identify as Black or African American. The panel is now considering how reparations should be distributed — some favor tuition and housing grants while others want direct cash payments.
The task force has identified five areas — housing discrimination, mass incarceration, unjust property seizures, devaluation of Black businesses and health care — in discussions for compensation. For example, from 1933 to 1977, when it comes to housing discrimination, the task force estimates compensation of around $569 billion, with $223,200 per person.
Final figures will be released in the report next year; it would then be up to the Legislature to act upon the recommendations and determine how to fund them.
The state and local efforts have faced opposition over the potentially steep cost to taxpayers and, in one case, derided as an ill-conceived campaign to impose an “era of social justice.”
A two-day public meeting of the state task force this fall, in a makeshift hearing room tucked inside a Los Angeles museum, included a mix of comments from local residents on how they had been personally affected and how the disparities should be addressed, along with testimony from experts who have studied reparations.
While even broad-scale reparations would be unlikely to eliminate the racial wealth gap, they could narrow it significantly, and proponents hope California’s effort will influence other states and federal legislators to follow suit.
“Calling these local projects reparations is to some degree creating a detour from the central task of compelling the federal government to do its job,” said William A. Darity Jr., a professor at Duke University and a leading scholar on reparations. Even so, Dr. Darity, who is advising the California task force, said “there is an increasing recognition” that the lasting effects of slavery must be addressed.
Every year for almost three decades, Representative John Conyers Jr. of Michigan introduced legislation that would have created a commission to explore reparations, but the measure consistently stalled in Congress. After Mr. Conyers retired in 2017, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas began championing the measure, which passed a House committee for the first time last year, but stalled on the floor.
Underscoring the political hurdles, opinions on reparations are sharply divided by race. Last year, an online survey by the University of Massachusetts Amherst found that 86 percent of African Americans supported compensating the descendants of slaves, compared with 28 percent of white people. Other polls have also shown wide splits.
Still, several efforts have gotten off the ground recently.
In 2021, officials in Evanston, Ill., a Chicago suburb, approved $10 million in reparations in the form of housing grants. Three months later, officials in Asheville, N.C., committed $2.1 million to reparations. And over the summer, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors approved a plan to transfer ownership of Bruce’s Beach — a parcel in Manhattan Beach that was seized with scant compensation from a Black couple in 1924 — to the couple’s great-grandsons and great-great-grandsons.
“We want to see the land and economic wealth stolen from Black families all across this country returned,” said Kavon Ward, an activist who advocated on behalf of the Bruces’ descendants and has since started a group, Where Is My Land, that seeks to help Black Americans secure restitution.“We are in a moment that we cannot let pass.”
A so-called blight law from 1945, the task force’s interim report explains, paved the way for officials to use eminent domain to destroy Black communities, including shuttering more than 800 businesses and displacing 4,700 households in San Francisco’s Western Addition beginning in the 1950s.
After work on Interstate 210 began later that decade, the report goes on, the freeway was eventually built in the path of a Black business district in Pasadena, where city officials offered residents $75,000 — less than the minimum cost to buy a new home in the city — for their old homes.
And there is Russell City, an unincorporated parcel of Alameda County near the San Francisco Bay shoreline where many Black families fleeing racial terror in the Deep South built lives during the Great Migration. Testimony to the task force by Russell City residents recounts the community’s rise and ultimate bulldozing.
Unlike neighboring Hayward and San Leandro, Russell City didn’t have racist housing covenants stipulating that only white families could own certain homes. After World War II, it grew into a small but tight community of Black and Latino families that once included seven churches.
On weekends, children played on the unpaved streets as their parents, many of whom worked in the shipyards, sat on porches, and on some foggy nights, Ray Charles and Big Mama Thornton played shows at one of the town’s music venues, called the Country Club.
“It was vibrant,” said Monique Henderson-Ford, who grew up hearing stories about Russell City from her mother, grandmother and cousins.
After leaving Louisiana in the 1950s, her grandparents lived briefly in San Francisco but were displaced by an urban renewal project. Using savings from years of work at Pacific Gas & Electric, her grandfather paid $7,500 for their property and home in Russell City, and the family soon added three small houses to the homestead for their sons.
“This was their American dream,” Ms. Henderson-Ford said in an interview.
But it didn’t last long.
Lacking sewer lines and reliable electricity, the area was designated as a blight, and officials called for its destruction and the area to be turned into an industrial park. Russell City was annexed into Hayward, and the city and county bought up some properties and seized others through eminent domain. Residents, including Ms. Henderson-Ford’s grandmother, pleaded with officials to be allowed to remain in their homes.
“I got a nice place,” she told the Alameda County Board of Supervisors during a public meeting in 1963, according to a transcript. “Allow me a break.”
In exchange for their property and homes, county officials gave the family roughly $2,200, less than a third of what it had originally paid, according to Ms. Henderson-Ford.
On a recent morning, Ms. Henderson-Ford and her cousin joined a reporter on a walk through what was once Russell City but is now an industrial park.
They passed the spot where their grandfather used to fish, yanking up striped bass from the bay as he peered northwest and watched San Francisco’s skyline take its distinctive shape.
“Imagine if the houses were still here,” Ms. Henderson-Ford said. “We would all be sitting on a fortune.”
Amid the uproar in 2020 over the murder of Mr. Floyd, a Black man, in police custody in Minneapolis, Artavia Berry, who lives in Hayward, knew she had to do something.
“We could not look away from what happened right here,” said Ms. Berry, who learned the history of Russell City after moving to the region from Chicago a decade ago.
Ms. Berry, who leads the Community Services Commission, a municipal advisory body, composed what would become a formal apology from the City of Hayward to onetime residents of Russell City. Last November, the City Council approved the resolution, as well as several follow-up steps.
But in a public letter to city officials, Hayward Concerned Citizens, the group that railed against an “era of social justice,” said the apology was misguided, arguing that Alameda County, not the City of Hayward, had pushed residents out.
“We are strongly opposed to any direct financial reparations,” the group wrote.
For Gloria Moore, who grew up in Russell City, the words stung.
Now 79, she was 3 when her parents arrived in Russell City from Texarkana, Ark. Her mother worked as a cook at a local elementary school and her father worked for Todd Shipyards in the Bay Area. She still has vivid memories of walking to school in the mud when it rained, because the streets weren’t paved and there was no public transportation.
After their home was taken for about $2,200, the family members struggled to regain the financial stability and community they had built in Russell City.
By the 1970s, Ms. Moore had moved to Los Angeles to begin a career in city government, and she remembered noticing how many of her co-workers owned their own homes. She was renting.
Over the years, she and other former residents of Russell City have gathered at a park in Hayward for a Labor Day reunion, where they share stories and often tears.
“Sometimes things were suppressed because it was too painful,” she recalled. “But no one ever forgot.”
Kurtis Lee is an economics correspondent based in Los Angeles. Before joining The Times in 2022, he was a national correspondent for The Los Angeles Times, writing about gun violence, income inequality and race in America. @kurtisalee
California Panel Sizes Up Reparations for Black Citizens (Published 2022)
The state is undertaking the nation’s most ambitious effort so far to compensate for the economic legacy of slavery and racism.
California Reparations Could See Newsom Give Black Americans $223k Each
Believe it when I see it
NY lawmakers push for slavery reparations for black residents
December 5, 2022 6:38pm
Some New York lawmakers are renewing the push for a state law that would lay the groundwork to pay reparations to black residents whose ancestors were enslaved.
Proponents gained steam after a task force in California last week recommended that the Golden State shell out $569 billion in reparations to slaves’ descendents there, or $223,200 apiece, because of lingering housing discrimination practices.
A previously proposed New York measure called for creating a commission to study the impact of slavery and providing reparations but failed to pass the legislature. It is now being revised, backers said.
“We saw what happened in California. We want to pass a bill that starts a conversation about reparations,” said Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages (D-Nassau), chairwoman of the New York Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, to The Post.
Assemblywoman Taylor Darling (D-Nassau) said it would be a “slap in the face” if Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature don’t green-light a reparations study commission.
Darling also scoffed that the $223,000 figure that California’s task force recommended for each black descendant there was too low.
Some New York lawmakers are pushing for a state law that would pay reparations to New Yorkers whose ancestors were enslaved.
“This country was built on the backs of enslaved people. It has impacted everything — housing, economic development, education.,” she said.
The previously proposed New York bill — which called for the creation of an 11-member commission to study the issue — passed the assembly June 3 in a 104-45 vote but stalled in the senate.
Solages said she and other supporters want the revised bill addressed by Hochul and the legislature before the state budget is approved next year, so that any costs associated with the reparations commission can be included in the financial plan.
Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages said the proposed bill would start the “conversation” about reparations in New York.Stefan JeremiahAssemblywoman Taylor Darling said it would be a “slap in the face” if Gov. Kathy Hochul did not approve a commission to study reperations.
She said she is mindful that Hochul recently vetoed 39 measures that would have created task forces and commissions, including one to fight fentanyl abuse.
“We want to push this legislation early. We want to do something that is meaningful — not ceremonial,” Solages said.
But former three-term Republican Gov. George Pataki said reparations are the wrong way to go.
“I don’t think it’s right to write checks on the basis of race. It’s probably illegal,” Pataki told The Post.
Former New York Gov. George Pataki said reperations based on race might be illegal.AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez
Sen. George Borrello (R-Jamestown) said reparations will hurt race relations.
“It’s nothing but a taxpayer-funded giveaway to buy more votes for Democrats,” Borrello said.
He said his descendants and other New Yorkers of recent generations are not responsible for the sins of slavery and that the United States was one of the first countries to abolish it.
“Slavery was evil. We fought a bloody war to end it,” the senator said, referring to the Civil War.
“We need to focus more on everyone having an opportunity.’’
Hochul previously established the 400 Years of African American History Commission, but did not mention reperations in the order.Dennis A. Clark
His conservative colleagues in the Assembly outlined their own qualms with the move.
“It avoids the thorny issues, such as how to determine if a person is actually related to a former slave, how much should be paid, whether payment is pro-rated based on percent related to a slave, whether those who came to the US decades later should pay, etc,” said Andy Goodell (R-Jamestown).
There are five types of reparations that will be discussed, according to Solages: direct compensation; restitution of a victims’ rights and property; psychological or mental health rehabilitation; reforming laws to prevent or stop discrimination and a government apology or acknowledgement of guilt for the sin of slavery.
Hochul spokesman Avi Small told The Post, “Gov. Hochul will review the legislation if it passes both houses of the legislature.”
Hochul in March issued an executive order establishing the 400 Years of African American History Commission.
The executive order makes no mention of reparations.
But Hochul said at the time, “For every reminder of the pivotal role New York has played in the fight for civil rights, there is another, more painful reminder of why that fight was necessary in the first place.
“We must recognize and acknowledge shameful chapters in our state’s past, ensure New Yorkers have a better understanding of our history, and fight racism and bigotry in all forms,” she said.
nypost.com
December 5, 2022 6:38pm
Some New York lawmakers are renewing the push for a state law that would lay the groundwork to pay reparations to black residents whose ancestors were enslaved.
Proponents gained steam after a task force in California last week recommended that the Golden State shell out $569 billion in reparations to slaves’ descendents there, or $223,200 apiece, because of lingering housing discrimination practices.
A previously proposed New York measure called for creating a commission to study the impact of slavery and providing reparations but failed to pass the legislature. It is now being revised, backers said.
“We saw what happened in California. We want to pass a bill that starts a conversation about reparations,” said Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages (D-Nassau), chairwoman of the New York Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, to The Post.
Assemblywoman Taylor Darling (D-Nassau) said it would be a “slap in the face” if Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature don’t green-light a reparations study commission.
Darling also scoffed that the $223,000 figure that California’s task force recommended for each black descendant there was too low.
Some New York lawmakers are pushing for a state law that would pay reparations to New Yorkers whose ancestors were enslaved.
“This country was built on the backs of enslaved people. It has impacted everything — housing, economic development, education.,” she said.
The previously proposed New York bill — which called for the creation of an 11-member commission to study the issue — passed the assembly June 3 in a 104-45 vote but stalled in the senate.
Solages said she and other supporters want the revised bill addressed by Hochul and the legislature before the state budget is approved next year, so that any costs associated with the reparations commission can be included in the financial plan.
Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages said the proposed bill would start the “conversation” about reparations in New York.Stefan JeremiahAssemblywoman Taylor Darling said it would be a “slap in the face” if Gov. Kathy Hochul did not approve a commission to study reperations.
She said she is mindful that Hochul recently vetoed 39 measures that would have created task forces and commissions, including one to fight fentanyl abuse.
“We want to push this legislation early. We want to do something that is meaningful — not ceremonial,” Solages said.
But former three-term Republican Gov. George Pataki said reparations are the wrong way to go.
“I don’t think it’s right to write checks on the basis of race. It’s probably illegal,” Pataki told The Post.
Former New York Gov. George Pataki said reperations based on race might be illegal.AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez
Sen. George Borrello (R-Jamestown) said reparations will hurt race relations.
“It’s nothing but a taxpayer-funded giveaway to buy more votes for Democrats,” Borrello said.
He said his descendants and other New Yorkers of recent generations are not responsible for the sins of slavery and that the United States was one of the first countries to abolish it.
“Slavery was evil. We fought a bloody war to end it,” the senator said, referring to the Civil War.
“We need to focus more on everyone having an opportunity.’’
Hochul previously established the 400 Years of African American History Commission, but did not mention reperations in the order.Dennis A. Clark
His conservative colleagues in the Assembly outlined their own qualms with the move.
“It avoids the thorny issues, such as how to determine if a person is actually related to a former slave, how much should be paid, whether payment is pro-rated based on percent related to a slave, whether those who came to the US decades later should pay, etc,” said Andy Goodell (R-Jamestown).
There are five types of reparations that will be discussed, according to Solages: direct compensation; restitution of a victims’ rights and property; psychological or mental health rehabilitation; reforming laws to prevent or stop discrimination and a government apology or acknowledgement of guilt for the sin of slavery.
Hochul spokesman Avi Small told The Post, “Gov. Hochul will review the legislation if it passes both houses of the legislature.”
Hochul in March issued an executive order establishing the 400 Years of African American History Commission.
The executive order makes no mention of reparations.
But Hochul said at the time, “For every reminder of the pivotal role New York has played in the fight for civil rights, there is another, more painful reminder of why that fight was necessary in the first place.
“We must recognize and acknowledge shameful chapters in our state’s past, ensure New Yorkers have a better understanding of our history, and fight racism and bigotry in all forms,” she said.
NY lawmakers push for slavery reparations for black residents
Lawmakers in New York are pushing to approve a state law that would lay the groundwork to provide reparations to African-American residents impacted by the enslavement of black descendants.
nypost.com
what party is making this push??NY lawmakers push for slavery reparations for black residents
December 5, 2022 6:38pm
Some New York lawmakers are renewing the push for a state law that would lay the groundwork to pay reparations to black residents whose ancestors were enslaved.
Proponents gained steam after a task force in California last week recommended that the Golden State shell out $569 billion in reparations to slaves’ descendents there, or $223,200 apiece, because of lingering housing discrimination practices.
A previously proposed New York measure called for creating a commission to study the impact of slavery and providing reparations but failed to pass the legislature. It is now being revised, backers said.
“We saw what happened in California. We want to pass a bill that starts a conversation about reparations,” said Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages (D-Nassau), chairwoman of the New York Black, Puerto Rican, Hispanic and Asian Legislative Caucus, to The Post.
Assemblywoman Taylor Darling (D-Nassau) said it would be a “slap in the face” if Gov. Kathy Hochul and the legislature don’t green-light a reparations study commission.
Darling also scoffed that the $223,000 figure that California’s task force recommended for each black descendant there was too low.
Some New York lawmakers are pushing for a state law that would pay reparations to New Yorkers whose ancestors were enslaved.
“This country was built on the backs of enslaved people. It has impacted everything — housing, economic development, education.,” she said.
The previously proposed New York bill — which called for the creation of an 11-member commission to study the issue — passed the assembly June 3 in a 104-45 vote but stalled in the senate.
Solages said she and other supporters want the revised bill addressed by Hochul and the legislature before the state budget is approved next year, so that any costs associated with the reparations commission can be included in the financial plan.
Assemblywoman Michaelle Solages said the proposed bill would start the “conversation” about reparations in New York.Stefan JeremiahAssemblywoman Taylor Darling said it would be a “slap in the face” if Gov. Kathy Hochul did not approve a commission to study reperations.
She said she is mindful that Hochul recently vetoed 39 measures that would have created task forces and commissions, including one to fight fentanyl abuse.
“We want to push this legislation early. We want to do something that is meaningful — not ceremonial,” Solages said.
But former three-term Republican Gov. George Pataki said reparations are the wrong way to go.
“I don’t think it’s right to write checks on the basis of race. It’s probably illegal,” Pataki told The Post.
Former New York Gov. George Pataki said reperations based on race might be illegal.AP Photo/Eduardo Munoz Alvarez
Sen. George Borrello (R-Jamestown) said reparations will hurt race relations.
“It’s nothing but a taxpayer-funded giveaway to buy more votes for Democrats,” Borrello said.
He said his descendants and other New Yorkers of recent generations are not responsible for the sins of slavery and that the United States was one of the first countries to abolish it.
“Slavery was evil. We fought a bloody war to end it,” the senator said, referring to the Civil War.
“We need to focus more on everyone having an opportunity.’’
Hochul previously established the 400 Years of African American History Commission, but did not mention reperations in the order.Dennis A. Clark
His conservative colleagues in the Assembly outlined their own qualms with the move.
“It avoids the thorny issues, such as how to determine if a person is actually related to a former slave, how much should be paid, whether payment is pro-rated based on percent related to a slave, whether those who came to the US decades later should pay, etc,” said Andy Goodell (R-Jamestown).
There are five types of reparations that will be discussed, according to Solages: direct compensation; restitution of a victims’ rights and property; psychological or mental health rehabilitation; reforming laws to prevent or stop discrimination and a government apology or acknowledgement of guilt for the sin of slavery.
Hochul spokesman Avi Small told The Post, “Gov. Hochul will review the legislation if it passes both houses of the legislature.”
Hochul in March issued an executive order establishing the 400 Years of African American History Commission.
The executive order makes no mention of reparations.
But Hochul said at the time, “For every reminder of the pivotal role New York has played in the fight for civil rights, there is another, more painful reminder of why that fight was necessary in the first place.
“We must recognize and acknowledge shameful chapters in our state’s past, ensure New Yorkers have a better understanding of our history, and fight racism and bigotry in all forms,” she said.
NY lawmakers push for slavery reparations for black residents
Lawmakers in New York are pushing to approve a state law that would lay the groundwork to provide reparations to African-American residents impacted by the enslavement of black descendants.
Let me preface this by saying FUCK THE GOP. Let me get that out the way clear as fucking day.
But here is the problem. Back in the 60s, how many Hispanics and Asians were in the U.S.? Yeah, Hispanics were under 4 percent and Asians were under 1 percent. So while (insert GOP boogeyman) said 'fuck that', how in the hell was flooding this country with Hispanics and Asians helped the black wealth gap?
I'll answer that. It has made it worse.
Asians now do better than whites. Is that a white supremacy fail or are we being trolled? Whites, Hispanics, and Asians are all doing better than the black community. And seeing 2 out of the 3 didn't have a significant presence in the 1960s, we can say this all can't be the fault of the GOP.
But hey, when a community lets white hippies call the shots, this is what happens. When a community lets sellout tokens call the shots, this is what happens. It's funny back when that report was done they were doing the 'first black (insert position)' game on us. Damn near 60 years later and it's still the same game. Shit is shameful.
And it isn't like Hispanics or Asians will support reparations. Why should they? They going to use the white excuse of 'my people weren't even here". And yeah, I'm talking generally. I ain't going to count the gender fluid Hispanics/Asians that leftists trot out to support their kumbaya narrative. Real life don't work like that.
This is a no-brainer. Of course it made it worse, instead of paying blacks a fair wage, the titans of industry (dominated by GOP members) imported labor from third world countries and or relocated better paying manufacturing work to those same countries and thus pay much much lower wages for that exact work.
We (the black community) didn't LET white hippies call the shots. Whites were, and still are, the largest part of the Dems party, so they held the majority of leadership roles, dictated most of the platform, and controlled the legislative agenda for the most part when Dems held power. We all acknowledge that white privilege is alive and well in the Dems party. So, it shouldn't surprise anyone that things have changed very slowly. But there has been some change for the better in spite of the GOP's obstruction of civil and voting rights. In my mind it boils down to supporting the party that hasn't done enough quick enough, or the party that has opposed any and all gains at every opportunity.
In conclusion, FUCK the GOP.
See. That's the problem. You got partisan blinders on. Titans of industry use both the GOP and democrats to protect AND expand their respective industries. Do I have to pull up the receipts on Biden? He been a big dog dem for how many years. And his receipts are damn near identical to a big dog GOPer who been a career politician.
Is big tech dominated by the GOP?
No, right? But they brought in all those H1B asians for decades, right? They been petitioning to bring in more going back years. Fuck all the black college grads is what they say. But hey, 'muh GOP'. The same virtue signaling woke pieces of shit with Ukraine flags and pronouns in their bios import labor that shits on black college grads and have done so for decades. Meanwhile, black students going into 6 figure debt for soft degrees then we wonder why there is a wealth gap.Wait. Who helped created the student loan crisis that affects black wealth? Was it just the GOP or did some democrat from Deleware help make the student loan crisis? Damn. Receipts all over this bitch.
Shall we talk about how majority of the grad students for hard sciences are imported, but 'muh GOP'. Acadamia is about as left as we get.
Democrats right the fuck now keep wanting to import Hispanics and every other fucking refugee. But hey, 'muh GOP'. Or are sanctuary cities made for black people. I forget.
And yeah, whites are the largest part of the Dems, but without the black vote, they lose. And for decades black voters have played the fools. Could have checked immigration in the 70s. Well hell, they could have checked the prison industrial complex but the fools begged for it.
Ain't been no change for the better. How in theeeee fuck is moving from 2nd place to 4th place(behind Asians and Hispanics) a change for the better?
Make it make sense.Yeah fuck the GOP, but also fuck all the bootlickers who helped the black community move from 2nd to 4th place. Like folks like the say around here, why can't it be both.
I won't point by point your arguments. However I will ask this, again. Should we support the party that hasn't done enough quick enough, or the party that has opposed any and all gains at every opportunity? I disagree with you that there has been no change for the better since the 60's or 70's. In general you are only restricted in where you live by what you can afford, and the same goes for where you can dine, shop, etc.See. That's the problem. You got partisan blinders on. Titans of industry use both the GOP and democrats to protect AND expand their respective industries. Do I have to pull up the receipts on Biden? He been a big dog dem for how many years. And his receipts are damn near identical to a big dog GOPer who been a career politician.
Is big tech dominated by the GOP?
Wait. Who helped created the student loan crisis that affects black wealth? Was it just the GOP or did some democrat from Deleware help make the student loan crisis? Damn. Receipts all over this bitch.
Shall we talk about how majority of the grad students for hard sciences are imported, but 'muh GOP'. Acadamia is about as left as we get.
Democrats right the fuck now keep wanting to import Hispanics and every other fucking refugee. But hey, 'muh GOP'. Or are sanctuary cities made for black people. I forget.
And yeah, whites are the largest part of the Dems, but without the black vote, they lose. And for decades black voters have played the fools. Could have checked immigration in the 70s. Well hell, they could have checked the prison industrial complex but the fools begged for it.
Ain't been no change for the better. How in theeeee fuck is moving from 2nd place to 4th place(behind Asians and Hispanics) a change for the better?
Yeah fuck the GOP, but also fuck all the bootlickers who helped the black community move from 2nd to 4th place. Like folks like the say around here, why can't it be both.
Even assuming things haven't change, what about the future? Which party appears more inclined to make change now if they can overcome the opposition of the other side. I choose to live with hope, and to work with those that share my hope. Does the GOP share your hope that black and white people can one day be equal in the eyes of the law and society at large? Have they done anything or even proposed anything to move that hope closer to fruition.
P.S.: Fuck the GOP.