Reparations Daily (ish) Vol. 4
Happy Hump Day! It’s been one week since we started Reparations Daily (ish) and we’re already a squad of 67 people. There’s clearly an appetite to learn more about this topic, so please keep sharing (especially on Linkedin), I’d love to get this in front of some DEI experts and reach our goal of 100 by Friday!
I’ve decided that on slower news days I’ll post old articles about reparations or the racial wealth gap that I’ve been curating over the years. On these slower days, I’ll also include good pieces that may not focus on reparations, wealth, or the wealth gap, but touch on the economy, taxes, economic policy, workers, businesses, or capitalism generally and employ a racial lens. Today is one of those days.
Below under the National News section, you’ll find a 2019 Wall Street Journal article spotlighting the OG’s of ‘stratification economics,’ and two personal mentors of mine, Dr. William ‘Sandy’ Darity and Dr. Darrick Hamilton. A lot of the news you’ll find in this newsletter will likely be quoting their work or citing them directly. If you really want to dive into this stuff, check out some of their papers, I’ve included perhaps their most famous one, ‘What We Get Wrong About Closing the Racial Wealth Gap,’ below.
We did two Hot Takes today. One on the new ProPublica exclusive that reports on leaked IRS data of some of the country’s wealthiest people, and the other on a podcast from UPenn’s Wharton Social Impact Initiative featuring John Rogers of Ariel Investments, the country’s oldest Black-owned investment firm.
We didn’t give a Hot Take on it, but the NPR article about the reopening of the former home of Robert E. Lee is a super insightful piece on the ways we should preserve the ugly parts of our history.
Our Hot Takes section on Friday will be mostly dedicated to the right-wing’s obsession with critical race theory, even though they have no clue what it is, and their dedication to white-washing history and obstructing the truth from being taught in schools.
With that, here’s volume 4 of Reparations Daily (ish).
National News
Washington Post: Plantations aren’t paying reparations, but have started programs to give back to descendants
ProPublica: The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax
Wall Street Journal: Two Economists Fuel Democratic Debate Over How Far Left to Go (2019)
Samuel DuBois Cook Center: What we get Wrong about Closing the Racial Wealth Gap (2018)
Marketplace: Racial gap in appraisals devalues homes owned by people of color
Newsweek: What Is the 1836 Project? Texas To Promote 'Patriotic Education'
WBUR: What's Missing In Biden's Plan To Address The Racial Wealth Gap
Yahoo: 'We are facing a student loan time bomb,' Senator Warren says amid $50,000 forgiveness push
New York Times: Employers Are Begging for Workers. Maybe That’s A Good Thing.
Impact Alpha: Corporates emerge as a new source of capital for community investment
Roosevelt Institute: Student Debt Cancellation IS Progressive: Correcting Empirical and Conceptual Errors
Regional News
NPR: Arlington House, The Robert E. Lee Memorial, Reckons With Its History Of Slavery
KPBS: California Task Force Convenes To Study Reparations For African Americans
CT News Junkie: State Treasurer’s ‘Baby Bonds’ Proposal Is An Investment in Connecticut’s Future
Black Perspectives: Sport as a Place of Violence in the Tulsa Race Massacre
Hot Takes
Wharton Dollars and Change Podcast: What Will It Take to Close the Wealth Gap?
U Penn’s Wharton School has a podcast called Dollars and Change hosted by Katherine Klein who is the vice dean for the Wharton Social Impact Initiative. She recently interviewed John W. Rogers, chairman, and CEO of Ariel Investments, the country’s oldest Black-owned asset management firm, who also sits on the boards of McDonald’s, Nike, and the New York Times.
In their conversation, Rogers discussed how he prodded President Obama to “encourage corporate America to partner with urban public schools, and in particular financial service companies to expose kids to this great industry.” Rogers simplifies it even further by saying, “you’ll have more entrepreneurs, kids are more financially literate, and you’ll have more kids going into financial services, becoming financial advisors, and helping their parents and extended family.” I recently had a conversation with a good friend of mine (Justin Morgan, look up some of his work at the Urban Institute), and we touched on this topic.
As a country, we teach Black kids that they have to build wealth in different ways than their white counterparts have historically built it. Wealth amongst white households is often transferred from generation to generation, but for Black people, we must earn it through ‘entrepreneurship’ and ‘business ownership.’ As a kid, you could’ve had every type of Black financial advisor, fund manager, or corporate executive come and talk to me, and it would not have swayed me one bit — I wanted to be an author or reporter for the New York Times. Not every Black kid wants to go into the investing world, and that’s ok.
I understand Rogers’ background is in investment banking and that the audience of the Wharton podcast is targeted at business executives and Wharton students. It’s still baffling to me that an entire conversation about closing the racial wealth gap can be had solely within the context of Black entrepreneurship. Below is an excerpt from the Trymaine Lee article on the wealth gap from the 1619 Project:
“The post-Reconstruction plundering of Black wealth was not just a product of spontaneous violence but etched into law and public policy. Through the first half of the 20th century, the federal government actively excluded black people from government wealth-building programs. In the 1930s, President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal helped build a solid middle class through sweeping social programs, including Social Security and minimum wage. But a majority of Black people at the time were agricultural laborers or domestic workers, occupations that were ineligible for these benefits. The establishment of the Home Owners Loan Corporation in 1933 helped save the collapsing housing market, but it largely excluded Black neighborhoods from government-insured loans. Those neighborhoods were deemed “hazardous” and colored in with red maps, a practice that came to be known as “redlining.” The G.I. bill is often hailed as one of Roosevelt’s most enduring legacies. It helped usher millions of working-class veterans through college and into new homes and the middle class. But it discriminatorily benefited white people. While the bill didn’t explicitly exclude black veterans, the way it was administered often did.”
While increasing access to social and financial capital and increasing the number of Black business owners is vitally important in increasing Black wealth, we cannot have a conversation about closing the racial wealth gap without discussing policy solutions.
As Darity puts it, “the major way in which people have an opportunity to accumulate wealth is contingent on the wealth positions of their parents and their grandparents.” Many white Boomers and Generation X’ers have benefited from federal policies in achieving the “American Dream,” but Rogers, unfortunately, did not touch much about economic policy, which brings us to our next hot take.
ProPublica: The Secret IRS Files: Trove of Never-Before-Seen Records Reveal How the Wealthiest Avoid Income Tax
The contents of this piece are not surprising, but we’ve never seen this level of detail on the tax returns of some of the country’s famous and richest people (all white men). As ProPublica describes it, they “compared how much in taxes the 25 richest Americans paid each year to how much Forbes estimated their wealth grew in the same time period.”
As you can see, Warren Buffet and Jeff Bezos paid less than 1 percent in taxes compared to the wealth they grew in a four-year period.
This article clearly makes the case for the Warren-Sanders wealth tax proposal, which would tax 2 cents on every dollar of people’s wealth above $50 million and 3 cents on every dollar of people's wealth’s worth above $1 billion, which they claim would raise $3 trillion over 10 years. According to research, I’ve published alongside Professor Darity and other experts, a reparations package would cost $12-13 trillion in 2018 dollars, a quarter of which could be raised through the Warren-Sanders wealth tax plan.
I listened to a webinar today that included the acclaimed writer Richard Rothstein, author of ‘The Color of Law,’ where he said reparations were “politically unfeasible.” I think this sentiment is rooted in the idea that Black people are undeserving of prosperity, and a sentiment we must reject.
There was a time when electing a Black President was “politically unfeasible,” or electing a Black woman as Vice President was “politically unfeasible,” or sending numerous checks within the span of a year to the majority of Americans was “politically unfeasible.” No policy is politically unfeasible if there is enough power and support behind it, which is the beauty of the United States. We must all use the power we contain in our personal and professional lives to make reparations for Black Americans a reality.
With radical love,
Trevor