Founding Director William A. Darity Jr. and Kirsten Mullen gave comments in conversation on the Marketplace Morning Report with host David Brancaccio and Marketplace’s Mitchell Hartman on the state of reparations after Tulsa’s mayor recently announced a $105 million reparations plan.
Hartman has been reporting on the racial wealth gap through the lens of Tulsa, Oklahoma. Tulsa was once home to Black Wall Street, one of the most prosperous Black communities in America, until it was devastated by an armed white mob in the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921.
Brancaccio: And, Mitchell, from your interviews and conversations, how do advocates of reparations think about how much is owed to Black Americans today?
Hartman: So, calculations of this often start with the moment of emancipation. Most enslaved people were sent into freedom without any resources or compensation. Reconstruction was eventually abandoned. Jim Crow segregation, lynchings and massacres like the one in Tulsa just kept on destroying Black intergenerational wealth. Meanwhile, as Mullins’ co-author, Duke public policy professor William Darity, points out, white Americans get to homestead out on the prairie, they get free land, they put down roots, and they build wealth.
William Darity: And so whites are given an enormous largesse as the nation completes its colonial settler project in the West, while Blacks who are newly emancipated are not even given the land that they formally tilled for their slave masters.
Hartman: And you know, Darity says it continues right through the 20th Century. You know, federal housing assistance for white veterans after World War II — that mostly excludes Black veterans and redlines Black neighborhoods. The list just goes on. All told, Darity estimates redressing the racial wealth gap now through reparations would cost the federal government $16 trillion.
Listen to the conversation here: Where the fight for reparations stands