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What’s the Best Way to Give Reparations?
Democrats are finally grappling with the country’s ugly racial history
In 2014, Ta-Nehisi Coates published a historic essay in The Atlantic making, as the headline of the piece suggests, the case for reparations. Coates was clear in his conviction that reparations have not been paid to African Americans because of a function of the country’s lingering racism — a bigotry that was often masked in claims of impracticality. “Broach the topic of reparations today,” Coates wrote, “and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay?”
Coates’ piece, which went on to win the George Polk Award for commentary, acted as a cultural catalyst, spurring rigorous debate around the subject. That discussion has finally crossed over into the mainstream political realm. Earlier this month, Senator Cory Booker, one of the Democratic party’s presidential hopefuls, introduced a companion bill to H.R. 40 on the Senate floor that calls for a commission to research and create reparation proposals. The legislation has earned the support of most other Democratic candidates in the 2020 field. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren, and Julián Castro have all voiced their outright support for reparations. (That’s not to say reparations are a widely accepted proposition: According to a 2018 poll from the left-leaning Data for Progress, just 26% of Americans supported some form of compensation for the descendants of slaves.)
An actual reparations program is still a long way off. Even if Democrats were to win the White House, hold the House, and take back the Senate in 2020, Booker’s bill proposes only a study on the topic; an actual program would require further, no doubt highly controversial, legislation. But pretend for a moment that Booker’s bill passes and reparations become a subject of government-sanctioned study: What could — and should — such a program look like?
Before we can evaluate potential models for reparations, we need to establish the goals of such a policy. William “Sandy” Darity, a professor of Public Policy at Duke University and one of the foremost experts on reparations, argues that a comprehensive reparations program must include three elements: acknowledgement, restitution, and…
