Are reparations the answer?

In 2021, the city of Evanston, Illinois, established a program to make reparations to Black residents for historic housing discrimination. The first phase of the project gave 16 residents $25,000 each for home repairs or property costs.

The Evanston program was one topic explored at the recent Center for Race, Inequality, and Social Equity Studies symposium “Are Reparations the Answer?” in which experts across disciplines explored the case for restitution to Black Americans legally, economically, and ethically.

Daniel Fryer, an assistant professor of law and philosophy at the University of Michigan and a speaker at the forum, praised the Evanston example because it targeted a specific injustice that the city was trying to repair. Fryer argued that practitioners must consider the different avenues to attain justice.

“An essential question is, what are we trying to repair?” said Fryer, who also serves as a board member for the Board of Commissioners’ Advisory Council on Reparations in Washtenaw County in Michigan. “In order to repair something, we need to know what’s broken, and it also helps to know why it’s broken.”

Christopher Lewis, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School, also called for a need to clarify the distinctions between different types of reparations — under either compensatory justice or utilitarian justice, a moral principle that considers the greater good for the greatest number of people.

Lewis, along with Assistant Professor of Sociology and of Social Studies Adaner Usmani, has conducted research on what is owed to the estates of formerly enslaved people for their forced, unpaid labor. Using historic data on government bond yields, they arrived at a “conservative” estimate of the amount due for unpaid slave labor. The number reached into the quadrillions.

“It’s more wealth than exists in the entire world. That can tell you something about the scope and size of the injustice,” he said. These results prompted Lewis to consider other ways to look at the issue of reparations, including those shared by Duke University’s William Darity Jr., and museum curator Kirsten Mullen, who gave the keynote address earlier in the conference.

Darity and Mullen, founder of Artefactual, co-authored “From Here to Equality,” which focused on how to close the racial wealth gap, suggesting an intraracial redistribution of $16 trillion, with Black American families receiving at least a million dollars each.

Raj Chetty analyzed empirical patterns in Black-white economic disparities in a panel. The William A. Ackman Professor of Economics and director of Opportunity Insights discussed his research on how income evolves across generations for Black children versus white children.

Black children who come from high-income families tend to trend downward in terms of economic mobility as adults, compared to their white counterparts, who tend to remain at the top, he said. “In my view, this is really fundamental to understanding how to close the persistence of racial disparities in the U.S.,” he said.

The economist acknowledged that when conducting this research he had expected racial disparities for communities of color would narrow if individuals had sufficient income. The data proved him wrong, he said. “Understanding what’s happening there strikes me as really crucial to make progress, and addressing those disparities is really fundamental,” Chetty said.