welcome to the racial foundations of public policy speaker series hosted by the center for racial justice at the ford school of public policy at the university of michigan i am celeste watkins hayes director of the center associate dean for academic affairs at the ford school and a professor of public policy and sociology at the ford school we seek a world in which people are able to achieve their full human potential regardless of race ethnicity gender sexuality class and other categories that have been used to divide and systematically marginalize people we train leaders here who understand the critical role of public policy in improving our world we recognize the power of public policy to bolster or to undercut our life opportunities and experiences and we see public policy as a critically important tool for us to measure reflect historically examine and help us define the way forward at the center for racial justice we seek to eliminate evidence-based solutions to address deep challenges around racial inequity and to support the change-makers who advocate for sound just and fair public policies we take an intersectional approach seeking to expand knowledge and highlight strategies and tools that address the complex intersections between public policy and racism sexism homophobia transphobia classism xenophobia and other societal problems as we examine the fraught histories and consequences of some of our policies and the transformative power of others we learn a valuable lesson effective and just public policy can only be achieved if we bring diverse perspectives to the table this fall the center is featuring a cadre of scholars to participate in virtual conversations on the historical roots and contemporary currents of race in economic criminal justice education and immigration policy we encourage you to review our website at the center for racial justice for the dates of those events our next racial foundations of public policy event will be on tuesday october 26th at 4 pm and will feature education scholar dr rucker johnson from uc berkeley but now i'm delighted and honored to introduce you to the third speaker for our inaugural center for racial justice racial foundations series dr william sandy darity jr dr darity is the samuel du bois cook professor of public policy african and african american studies and economics and the director of the samuel du bois cook center on social equity at duke university he served as the chair of the department of african and african american studies and was the founding director of the research network on racial and ethnic inequality at duke dr darity's research focuses on inequality by race class and ethnicity stratification economics schooling and the racial achievement gap north south theories of trade and development skin shade and labor market outcomes the economics of reparations the atlantic slave trade and the industrial revolution the history of economics and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment his most recent book co-authored with a kirsten mullen is from here to eternity equality from here to equality reparations for black americans in the 21st century from here to equality is the recipient of the inaugural 2021 book prize from the association of america african-american life and history and the 2020 reagan old north state award for non-fiction from the north carolina literary and historical association dr darity you have an illustrious career we are so so honored to have you here i could not imagine launching a racial foundation is a public policy series without you and i mean that sincerely so it is my honor to be in conversation with you today well you're extremely generous but this is a mutual admiration society i've been a tremendous fan of the work that you have done for many many years thank you so much i appreciate that so as an economist you focus on the historical roots and contemporary disparities related to income and wealth inequality and one of the hallmarks of your work is as an economist you nevertheless have a deeply historical perspective to understand contemporary issues why is such a lens important well i i frequently say that the most important field of study is history and and the reason i i think that is because it informs everything that we do not only in the academic world but also in terms of our real lives uh and so i guess some people would say our academic lives are real lives but there is a difference [Music] and and i think it's particularly important in a society where there has been such an extensive degree of dishonesty about what the historical record actually is we've had a severe degree of domination of the american narrative by organizations like the united daughters of the confederacy and the daughters of the american revolution and this results in the long term in a set of beliefs and attitudes that can uh can cause people to invade the nation's capital and to try to execute a coup d'etat as what happened on january 6th and so i think that the contestation over the field of history is absolutely critical and it's it's vital that we design and develop the most accurate story that we can tell about what has happened in the generations that came before us and i think that a serious economist can't really do useful work about public policy about social change unless they attempt to develop a very serious understanding of the accurate historical record and so much of that historical framework is so useful in policy analysis when i think about my own work on the welfare system i couldn't understand what was happening with welfare reform as under the personal responsibility and work opportunity reconciliation act unless i looked at that long history of the system i couldn't understand the building of an hiv safety net infrastructure without understanding the history of that system and you have done so much work trying to understand income and wealth from a historical perspective and to try to understand what have been some of the major policies that have been critical when we look at income and wealth disparities today walk us through that we i use the term policy genealogy walk us through that policy genealogy when we think about income and wealth inequality what are the key policies so so i think that you know historically until until the period of the new deal uh american public policy largely focused on what i would like to refer to as asset building strategies uh from the new deal onward there is a much greater emphasis on what i'd like to refer to as income supplements and i think it's important uh in in the context of of uh of thinking about this idea that you just mentioned of policy genealogy uh to recognize the points at which different types of changes took place in in the nature of the policies that the the federal government in the united states has pursued so if we go back to the 19th century to the period of the end of the civil war the federal government was primarily in an asset building mode and the central asset that was being provided to americans and to recent immigrants who were not yet necessarily americans these are white immigrants from from from europe primarily was land land was the central asset that the federal government was essentially handing out and it was handing out land that had been appropriated from the native population in the united states a population that was displaced from their own uh their own territories and uh and removed to other locations um in fact uh it it's it's the period in which uh week in the early part of the of the 19th century it's a period in which so-called indian territory is created in what is now modern-day oklahoma but but in that process the federal government in 1862 introduces a homestead act and the homestead act created provisions for 160 acres land grants to be given to to families and approximately one and a half million white families receive those those land grants [Music] you know your colleague trina william shanks has done a substantial amount of work on the homestead act and probably the foremost expert on the long-term impact of the homestead act and i think she estimates that at least 45 million living white americans are beneficiaries of the homestead act across the generations so so the first the first asset that's being provided to americans for the purposes of giving them wealth is is land uh but unfortunately uh the promise of 40 acre land grants one-quarter of the size of the allocations that were provided to white americans the promise of 40-acre land grants to the formerly enslaved as restitution for their years of bondage was never met now uh in the 20th century uh for a substantial period of time the the government's asset building focus was on home ownership instead of on land and there were a number of policies including those that were introduced during the course of the new deal uh that were intended to promote uh to promote home buying or opportunities for home buying and and this is the way in which the nation created a substantial degree of upward mobility for many of its citizens and created a middle class but it did so in such a way that it disproportionately benefited white americans in in a very stark and dramatic way the new deal legislation that's relevant perhaps the most important piece of new deal legislation is associated with the creation of the federal housing administration the federal housing administration in conjunction with local banks uh crafted a public-private partnership that engaged in a process of what i'd like to refer to as credit starvation towards black americans and credit generation for white americans that facilitated the white american communities capacity to become home buyers on an extensive scale in homes that were likely to appreciate significantly over time while the black community had restricted access to that credit and consequently to the extent that folks were able to purchase homes they had to buy homes and in neighborhoods uh where appreciation was was less likely and then the final significant phase of this asset building orientation is the gi bill which is enacted in the aftermath of of world war ii which had provisions to support returning veterans in going to college uh getting vocational training uh purchasing a farm investing in a business and then perhaps most significantly from the standpoint of 20th century asset building policies purchasing homes and again this was done on a highly discriminatory basis i've seen estimates that indicate that out of some 65 000 veterans that received benefits in the states of new york and new jersey only a hundred or so were black with respect to the home buying benefits and then in mississippi out of about 3 500 returning veterans who received home buying benefits only two were black and so there was a real asymmetry in the execution of this program that led to or contributed to the kinds of wealth disparities we observed today and i guess my final comment in this this genealogy is to say that in the aftermath of the 1950s much of federal policy has shifted away from a focus on asset building towards exclusively towards income supplements and as a consequence there has been uh a perpetuation of this divide and wealth because uh income supplement initiatives don't have much to do in terms of affecting uh the levels of wealth in in families and in households and what would you what are examples of income supplement programs are you thinking about are you defining those as safety net programs or is that something else no i i'm thinking of safety net programs and there's a wide range of the welfare et cetera et cetera yeah i mean you you mentioned uh you mentioned the change in welfare from what we once knew it as uh so it went from afdc to uh to the program that you mentioned uh but both in both cases those are income supplements unemployment insurance is a form of an income supplement uh food stamps uh are are a form of uh of of an income supplement an in-kind supplement effectively so uh we we have a set of programs that are in place and and as you describe them they're safety net programs uh that are intended to assist people who fall into poverty but uh but the key thing is that these are programs that respond only after you have fallen into poverty we do not have a social apparatus a social policy apparatus to prevent people from experiencing poverty in the first place in the sense that in in many of our social welfare programs the fire has to be raging before we install the fire extinguisher right there their means tested and that means that you have to demonstrate that your income has fallen below a certain level before you're eligible to receive the benefits of those programs right would you imagine adding a fourth phase in this conversation about land and housing the gi bill including income supplements i guess i would say a fifth phase and that is the role of say tax policy um that's that's that's that's very very important yeah and what and what would you say about that in terms of how that reproduces inequity in terms of who's paying what but also how people are able to navigate that system based on the kinds of resources that they have well as you know uh the the law professor dorothy brown has an excellent book that is on precisely this topic in terms of addressing the racial impact of tax policy and the book is called the whiteness of wealth and i encourage uh folks to take a look at it uh but uh you know i my thinking is uh it's only in the context of tax policy that we still have a substantial set of initiatives that the federal government is utilizing to promote asset building but it's promoting asset building for folks who are already wealthy and whereas the idea behind the homestead act of 1862 the idea behind the gi bill was to promote wealth accumulation among those who did not necessarily have it already and so that that's a very different set of policies but there's a number of mechanisms in the tax system that actually enhance the wealth position of the already affluent and and one of the the the classic examples is the sacred cow in the tax system which is the home mortgage deduction hmm okay okay i mean uh the the the greater the value of your home the more you benefit from the home mortgage deduction right right which is already kind of perpetuating wealth in a lot of ways in terms of who gets rewarded for having resources so when we go back in time and i want to go back to um what you call kind of a golden age a mystic age and i i i try to think about when have policies been proactive about responding to wealth and income disparities when have they held the greatest promise um even if the implementation met challenges when were the moments that we were truly imaginative in terms of income and wealth um any responding to income and wealth inequality and you write in your book from here to equality about i think you called the mystic era um it's actually it's actually borrowed from w.e.b du bois and it is uh the seven mystic years seven mystic years and it always comes back to divorce doesn't it that's a couple i think weeks ago about her rather double consciousness or the third eye it always goes so many of her core concepts and understanding of of criminal justice policy in the understanding of du bois so talk to us about du bois conception of the seven mystic years what what was that era tell us about it and do you see that as the era of the uh when we had the most promise and had done the most in terms of proactively addressing wealth and income if if you're talking about inequality between blacks and whites okay yes absolutely that that is the only period in which the prospect for true democracy in the united states was actually pursued okay and when i say true democracy i mean including or incorporating uh the formerly enslaved or what we now refer to as the freedmen um into the national polity as full citizens right and otherwise known as reconstruction reconstruction error yeah tell us what the reconstruction era meant for wealth and income equality we've talked about in previous uh master class i mean racial foundations conversations about its impact for political participation for black law makers but so much of reconstruction was about economic incorporation can you tell us about that yeah and and that was the other side of reconstruction that was uh was was was a failed aspect of reconstruction which was the the whole issue of the provision of land the the the vaunted 40 acres yeah you know which which was promised to the friedman uh there was an expectation that the friedman held based upon what they were told what policymakers were saying that uh that every uh every family would receive or or household of four would receive the equivalent of 40 acre land grants and so since there were four million uh newly emancipated persons in the united states uh at minimum there was an expectation of an allocation of 40 million acres and uh what differentiates the potential allocations to to the freedmen from the allocations that were made under the homestead act is that the immediate previous owners of the land or possessors of the land that was supposed to go to the friedman were the former slaveholders whereas the land that was allocated under the homestead act was land from which the indigenous americans had just shortly before been displaced but there was a sense of justice that was associated with the notion that the land that folks had worked under coercion should revert to them as their property as their as their source of wealth and and that didn't occur the process was begun with general sherman's special field orders number 15 which provided for initially an allocation of 5.3 million acres of land stretching from the sea islands of south carolina to northern florida bounded by the saint john's river and that was an initial allocation that was specified in in in general sherman's special field order number 15.
People frequently say that mistakenly think that the allocation was 400 000 acres uh but it was actually 5.3 million what what what of the 400 000 acres was the amount of land that actually was settled by 40 000 of the freedmen before president andrew johnson uh abrogated the program altogether and so uh so so that's the loss promise of of the reconstruction error but the other side of the lost promise as you mentioned is the failure to maintain and sustain full participation by the friedman in the electoral process and that's a consequence of outright violence and terror and terror on the part of uh the former confederates uh and you know one might even say that they really weren't former confederates because they were still pursuing the confederate project and then i think it's also when we talk about conversations around income and wealth we also have to talk about debt and the kind of systematic debt creation that happens after this era through systems of share cropping and other economic practices that render uh black folks in particular constantly in debt to um to white landowners can can you talk about what the legacy of that is uh it's it's interesting because you know i've actually heard people say things like if you could eliminate student loan debt you would eliminate the racial wealth gap and this this is absolutely inaccurate uh certainly the question of debt disparities is an important one but we have to recognize that actually the average level of debt that's held by white americans is higher than the average level of debt that's held by black americans what's the critical difference is black americans have considerably fewer assets so that if we were just to do a simple accounting exercise on the nature of the racial wealth gap in the united states we would find that this the greater differential in wealth is attributable to an asset gap rather than to a debt gap and so if you were to reduce or eliminate certain significant categories of debt and student loan debt is only one category of debt uh you certainly could make some progress towards eliminating or reducing the racial wealth gap but unless you address the asset differential you're really not going to be able to to close that gap in any significant way and how have scholars improved the ways in which they understand the racial wealth gap you know there was a time where we it was it was easier to be able to discern the income gap and therefore it was really the focus of so many of our policy conversations of our research it was all about income inequality and people had an awareness that there was wealth inequality but there was always a question of measurement how do you measure can you talk to us about how we have improved the techniques by which we're able to make these claims around the the racial wealth gap yeah so the the there are data sets now that are available and i think uh the first point at which uh micro data on wealth uh was was was initially generated in the united states on a national scale was uh was was through the survey of consumer finances and i believe the first round of the survey of consumer finances occurs either in the late 50s or the early 1960s we also have the panel study of income dynamics which provides us with excellent data about about wealth inequality as well as other aspects of of of uh intergenerational uh intergenerational transmission effects which are extremely extremely important but you know interestingly enough i think it's a couple of scholars in your field who played an important role in shifting attention to wealth in such a way that people finally began to recognize that it was something that was different from income and that it had uh very very different uh consequences for the quality of people's lives and their opportunity and i'm thinking of the work of melvin oliver and tom shapiro in their book black wealth white wealth i think that was somewhat of a landmark in terms of establishing that paying attention to wealth had a different set of implications from paying attention to income right right and one of the things that is so important for many of our um students who are watching this is when we talk about wealth and equality so often there are things that we don't necessarily recognize as replicators of inequity right our parents may pay for our college tuition and leave us debt free they may help for a down payment in for a house they may give you a car exactly exactly so they may send you to a summer enrichment camp that gives you a jump on doing chemistry or doing physics as a high school student and then that gives you access to a a more tony college or university and then if your parents have the resources they can make sure that you emerge from college without any of the student debt that we've been talking about so yeah those are all ways that i think we we tend to overlook or underestimate as factors that contribute to the perpetuation of these types of differences in wealth across racial lines but also across individuals and one of the things that you've been very active in is to think about solutions to this and from here to equality really puts forth a argument a proposal for how we begin to systematically address these inequities because i can imagine a student who's watching this to say well should i refuse the down payment should i refuse the assistance of my parents and all of that if i want to make a difference and what you're arguing is that these dynamics are systemic and therefore we need systemic solutions so can you talk to us about the the premise and i i don't think individuals should be plagued by the equivalent of survivors guilt this is not a question of guilt this is how the society has operated for multiple generations and so there needs to be a societal intervention to try to address the kinds of inequalities that have been produced and they've been produced in large measure by public policy so if they're a product of public policy whether it's the homestead act or the practices of the federal housing administration or the gi bill uh then it suggests that we need uh we need we need public policy to come into come into play to try to address those kinds of inequalities uh so i think there are two tiers of inequality and wealth that need to be tackled one tier is what we might refer to as overall or general inequality and wealth and in that context i've worked uh with uh with with with some other scholars to try to design a plan that we refer to now as the baby bonds proposal as a as a way of trying to uh address uh overall wealth inequality and and the idea there is that every newborn infant would be provided with a trust account that they could access when they reach young adulthood but the amount of the trust account would vary depending upon the wealth position of the child's family and so you know if if if it was bill gates who had another child then we'd give them a token trust account of 50 but for children born in the lowest end of the wealth distribution then their trust accounts would be in the vicinity of 50 to 60 thousand dollars and so this would be a way of of creating greater equality and wealth if you measure the wealth gap at the median at the middle of the wealth distribution and that's the premise behind the baby bonds proposal but in in the pages of from here to equality we are concerned with the racial wealth gap [Music] and we argue that if you're going to be concerned about the racial wealth gap you have to focus on the differential in wealth at the mean or what people customarily think about in intuitively as the average rather than the median now and why do i say that you know recognizing that if you're looking at the middle of the distribution it's it's not contaminated by the outlying values either at the upper end or the lower end which is which is what motivates people to think about the median rather than the mean but in this context i think we have to consider the mean rather than the median we have to take into account the outlying values and here's why first 97 of the wealth that is held by white american households is held by those households that have a net worth above the white media so if you were to take the middle household in the white distribution of wealth 50 of the households above them the half that's above them have 97 of the white wealth wow so if you were to look only at the median household you would be ignoring a vast amount of the wealth that is held in white households now folks frequently say well you know that's only because there's a handful of extraordinarily rich white billionaires well it's true that there's only a handful there there there is a handful of extraordinarily rich white billionaires but that doesn't fully explain the the the discrepancy that i just mentioned it it it runs deeper than just the billionaires or millionaires one-quarter one-quarter of white households has a net worth in excess of one million dollars it's only one quarter and it's only four percent of black households so uh so the disparity is not exclusively due to the fact that there's just a few extraordinarily rich white billionaires right that's throwing off the whole distribution yeah yeah yeah so your uh solution or proposal in here to um equality has to do with reparations we're going to talk about that in a minute but i want to go back to the baby bonds idea because i think it's very intriguing and part of what you're suggesting is an approach of what we might call targeting by a universalism the idea of imagining a public policy that targets all and a pro and is in a universal public policy for all but but targets marginalized communities within it um why do you think that approach of targeting within a universal policy approach the idea that everybody gets the baby bond even you know bill gates child get gets the baby body even if it's not the same amount why do you think that that is important from a kind of i imagine i imagine you're thinking about positive policy feasibility and i would love for you to talk about that i think there's also a statement of principle that the society is saying that every child has a right to some initial endowment of resources to launch them okay and uh so it's a universal program but it's not uniform in the sense that not every child that's born will need the same amount of resources to give them a jump start in the wealth accumulation process when they become young adults uh and so the the the idea is that this this is a component of a package of what we might actually call an economic bill of rights for the 21st century and that's why it's treated as something that is universal that it's applicable to all children but but the important dimension of it is not not all children would receive exactly the same amount and have you seen a policy that have you seen proposals where people have taken this up do you have you seen policies that begin to move in that direction do we have anything to be optimistic about in terms of people moving in the direction of that kind of conversation yeah um you know in a way it's unfortunate but much more so than talking about a substantive program of reparations and and i want to emphasize the premise in my my thinking is that these are not substitute policies they are complementary so one policy the baby bonds policy is one that's intended to reduce the stress and strain of wealth disparities for all americans whereas the reparations project is one that is intended to correct for the immense imbalance of wealth that exists between blacks and whites and you need to introduce both of them but clearly there's been more interest that's been expressed in pursuing the baby bonds proposal and one illustration is is legislation that senator corey booker has in congress now for uh for something that he refers to as opportunity accounts which is modeled on the baby bonds approach maybe one of the central differences is that his plan calibrates the amount of the trust account on the basis of family income rather than family wealth okay and i think that that's a decision that was made out of convenience because we have better access to income information than we do to wealth information and we would need to begin to introduce different different approaches to gathering data about families resources to be able to correctly measure their wealth position but another example is the state of connecticut which has adopted something that is roughly the equivalent of a baby bonds proposal uh it it's out there and uh and is has has been adopted so in our political environment do you have more optimism for this to be adopted at the federal level or at the state level in particular kinds of states and can you talk about the role of the federal government this this is the case unlike my thinking about reparations this is a case where i think that the adoption of baby bonds at the state level creates a useful uh model for the federal government and so uh you know i i anticipate that at some point the federal government will have a program like this and it will be informed by some of the programs that have been adopted at the at the state level but uh but i want to contrast that with my attitude about state and local so-called reparations which are very popular right now like evanston yeah it's fascinating because people used to run away from the idea of reparations and now uh many towns and communities are declaring enthusiastically that they're setting up for reparations plans let me say why i have reservations about that so first of all it's important to establish what a reparations plan should look like right that would be designed to eliminate the racial wealth gap right and what do we mean by reparations yeah if you could define that please so so there are four components of what i think of as a reparations plan the first is establishing who's eligible and the eligibility criteria that we describe in from here to equality is that an individual would have to demonstrate two things first that they have at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the united states so essentially they would be demonstrating that they are descendants of the persons who were denied the 40 acre land grants that were promised so that they are the descendants of the persons for whom the debt was initially uh incurred okay then uh the second condition is that they would have to uh they would have to establish that they self-identified as black negro african-american or afro-american for at least 12 years before the adoption of a reparations plan or the adoption of a study commission for reparations so those are the two eligibility criteria the second one because before you move on is that because we know the fluidity of race right and we know that there are people who identify as white who are actually descendants of um slaves but if nevertheless because they occupy the the understood category of whiteness have nevertheless been able to benefit economically that's right um in some of them and they should not they should not be able to come across and say oh well i have an enslaved ancestor so i should be eligible for operations not if they've been living as white right okay so that's why those kind of um that's the second that's the reason for the second criteria yeah okay yeah uh and then the second feature of a reparations plan must be a structure that would eliminate the racial wealth gap and what would that require well uh we estimate that uh black americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the united states are about 12 percent of the nation's population but possess less than two percent of the nation's wealth uh and and correspondingly this means that the average black household has a net worth that is eight hundred and forty thousand dollars less than the average white household uh and so uh if we were to bring the black share of wealth into consistency with the black share of population it would require an expenditure of at least 11 trillion dollars now here's why i i get really really frustrated with people making the claim that they're producing reparations at the state or local level the combined budgets of all state and local governments in the united states inclusive of everyone is less than three and a half trillion dollars so for them to get to the 11 trillion dollar mark they would have to devote their full budgets to a reparations fund for upwards of four years and and not provide any of the services to their constituencies that they are normally obligated to provide so this is sheer insanity it has to be the federal government that does this and uh and that's the third attribute of the program and the fourth and final is the distribution of the resources from a reparations fund should take the form of direct payments to eligible recipients and the premise here is that that's how it has typically been done for victimized communities whether it's the german government making payments to the victims of the holocaust or it's the u.s government making payments to japanese americans who were unjustly subjected to mass incarceration during world war ii that's how we normally do it and there should be there's no reason why it shouldn't be done in the same way uh for for black american descendants of persons enslaved in the united states so you therefore have concerns i would imagine about programs that are reparations conversations that are more programmatically focused in terms of increasing education skills etc as reparations programs you would have a fundamental critique of that because your argument is that's not how it has typically been done it's typically been done to cash payments and it is not at all clear that those types of approaches will eliminate the racial wealth gap okay okay that's that's the target and so the question is do you have a policy package that would truly do that and uh let me take education as one illustration of uh you know people frequently revert to education as the panacea for all dimensions of racial racial inequality but here's a statistic that i think is really compelling that um black heads of household with a college degree have two-thirds of the net worth of white heads of household who never finished high school and so uh you know additional educational attainment however desirable and of course i think it's desirable i'd be a hypocrite otherwise however desirable it is is not going to eliminate the racial wealth gap it's not going to approximate doing that because the major factor influencing black white differences in wealth is the capacity the different capacities of black and white households to transfer resources to the next generation and it's that intergenerational transmission effect that is critical and that's what needs to be interrupted in some substantial way by public policy and the policy that can interrupt it to such a degree that you eliminate those disparities is a program of reparations going back to your point about that significant gap between black college educated individuals and white you said high school diploma brazil no no no high school dropouts high school dropouts that despair which is just stunning every time i hear that statistic it's just amazing to me and part of what you're arguing causes that and the data show it is the asset differential um which is really important and i wonder if you could comment on another dynamic that people talk about which is um black households sharing wealth with family members who don't have access to well so that the wealth transfer isn't happening intergenerationally it's happening kind of horizontally within one generation as you know being a black college educated person you're less likely than whites to have other black colleagues college educated family members can you talk about that kind of sociological dimension of well there's there's actually a couple of economists who have investigated that sociological dimension uh and i'm thinking of the work that derrick hamilton and angina chittagi have done on ken networks and and the obligations that uh comparatively more affluent members of black families have to support their uh their their their relatives who have considerably fewer resources and so it's actually quite striking that despite the fact that black individuals who we might identify as being in the black middle class have greater ken obligations that there's no significant difference in savings rates between blacks and whites at comparable levels of income interesting okay yeah so somehow folks are providing assistance to their relatives but also engaging in a sufficient amount of savings so that their rate of savings out of a given amount of income is similar to the rate of savings that white households are are engaging in without having the same degree of ken obligations hmm interesting and there's another uh really good article about this by mary pattillo and i think colleen has hefflin called poverty in the family that looks at this dynamic um talk can you talk about other racial groups as we think about wealth inequality we often um think about wealth and income vis-a-vis the asian-american community i wonder if you can comment on that um we are thinking about the latinx community indigenous populations um what are some of the things that we need to think about take into account where do we need more information more data if you could just you know kind of expand and talk about um racial wealth and income gaps across other racial groups and what we see there well i'm going to focus on wealth differentials and what we know um so it's important to say that the commitment to closing the racial wealth gap on uh kirsten mullen and my part is really a focus on what we see as the material conditions that would be required for black americans to finally have full citizenship in the united states if we start thinking about the position of the native american population uh it's it's somewhat difficult to get adequate data at the national level but if we were to look at uh for example the city of tulsa where we conducted a survey under the national asset scorecard for communities of color project uh we find that there are differences in the wealth position of specific tribal communities and there are also differences in the wealth position of individuals who uh identify with a particular tribe but do not have formal tribal affiliation so there are a couple of tribes in uh in in um in tulsa oklahoma and and i'm talking now about individuals who have formal tribal affiliation whose wealth level is actually higher than that of the individuals who self-identify as being a member of that tribe but do not have a formal tribal affiliation and i suspect that this is attributable to historical conditions that can concern access to land and also uh to casino rights [Music] and so there's there's a very complicated issue in thinking about native american wealth as to whether or not individuals are on reservations they're out of reservations whether they have a formal tribal affiliation or they do not and whether or not they're in a tribal community that has access to casino rights or not uh so all of these things come into play uh on average asian americans uh appear in these metropolitan level studies generally to have much higher levels of wealth than than other groups and sometimes including whites i think that there's some strong evidence that asian american wealth fell more drastically during the course of the great recession and during that period of time the overall level of wealth that was experienced by asian americans actually fell slightly below the level of wealth of whites but prior to the great recession asian americans had the highest level of wealth but this is a bit misleading because there's tremendous heterogeneity within the asian-american population and the heterogeneity also is spatial so so for example the vietnamese population in los angeles actually does not have a particularly high level of wealth but the vietnamese population based in washington dc does and and if you were to look at say the uh the hmong population or the cambodian population they actually are not a particularly high wealth community but in contrast there are significant levels of wealth that are held by by japanese americans in particular and and uh and east indians as well so so if we start talking about asians collectively uh i think it's a bit misleading to not disaggregate and similarly we need to disaggregate the latinx community as well but i would say overall the wealth position of the latinx community looks very similar to that of of of native black americans however even though the numbers are very much the same the historical processes maybe what you would want to call the historical genealogy yeah of the wealth positions of each community are quite quite different the latinx community does not emerge from slavery and receive a promise of 40 acre land grants that's never fulfilled [Music] the latinx community was not subject to it was not subject subjected to uh the the degree of redlining or gi bill discrimination that uh occurred with blacks now of course there are uh afro-latinos who are confronted with the same types of discriminatory practices that so-called non-hispanic blacks face but uh if we recognize that the phenotypical variation in the latino community provides significant insulation from that type of discrimination for a large segment of that population then uh then then then we we have to recognize that the conditions shaping the wealth differentials for uh for for blacks in the latinx population are different so that brings me to two questions one therefore how do you respond to wealth deferentials experienced by say the latin x community with its diversity and second your response reminds me of the work that you've done on skin color and the relationship between skin color and um economic resources so they're different questions and i'm i'm going to ask you to respond to both of them so uh you know as i said i'm an advocate of a baby bonds proposal which would be applicable to all americans uh the notion of reparations is specific to the black american community that has ancestors who were enslaved in the united states and that's because of the specificity of the case that we attempt to build in from here to equality if there are other communities that feel that they have a claim for reparations i would definitely encourage them to you know write a book like from here to equality but that's not the case that we're making in our book and so i can't speak to the claims for reparations that other communities might have but the baby bonds proposal would be applicable to everyone and so it would also be inclusive of of the latinx community um yeah i'm i'm i'm not sure there's more i can say on that that i hear what you're saying yeah well with respect to colorism you know it's interesting there's strong evidence that color differences within the black community are connected to differences in earnings and income but there's not strong evidence that we found in uh now i have to say it's only a single location what we did is we did a study in los angeles where we looked at uh we interviewed people but we did it in a face-to-face manner and so the interviewers were able to code the individual's skin shade and uh and then we asked folks if we could take their photograph and about half of the respondents out of about 600 gave us permission to do that but we were then able to try to investigate what the relationship is between skin shade and earnings and what the relationship is between skin shade and wealth and we actually did not find a significant relationship among individuals who self-identified as black we didn't find a significant relationship between skin shade and wealth we did find a significant relationship between skin shade and earnings interesting and can you say a little bit more about that because as i interpret that that means that the the physical phenotypical proximity to whiteness is actually a driver of greater access to income resources it it has an implication for what you're able to earn in terms of your phenotypical even if your black um but have that phenotypical look then it has implications for income yeah i mean it's consistent with other research that that we have done previously that suggests that the degree of discrimination faced by uh lighter skinned black men is less than the degree of discrimination that's faced by darker complexion black men so there is variation in that sense we don't find any significant variation with respect to wealth in the los angeles case which is the only location in which we've done such a study and and that's interesting uh because it would suggest that the problem of intergenerational transmission of resources applies to virtually all black people regardless of their phenotype right yeah right so there's also another piece of evidence that suggests that there is a a disjuncture between income accumulation and wealth accumulation can you help me answer some of the questions from the audience so one question we have and i may um we have a number of questions here how have recent stimulus policies over the last excuse me 19 months since from here to equality was published along with the deep inequities further exposed by covid19 and widespread response to the murder of george floyd influenced and aided in the discussions about and promotion of reparations for black americans would you consider the pandemic our newest crossroads moment well that's interesting given the crossroads that we talk about in the book uh i i'll have to say maybe you know the crossroads that we identify in the book are all retrospective and you know we'll have to see if uh if there are some opportunities that are lost in this particular moment because the moment is still ongoing right but i i will say that there there have been two dimensions of the pandemic and the international outcry over uh george floyd's murder that have appeared to be uh supportive of the reparations effort the first is the uh the huge expenditures that the federal government has undertaken to address uh the economic problems and crises that have been associated with the pandemic demonstrates that the federal government certainly could finance a reparations plan so the the experience with the pandemic is an experience that permits us to begin to tell people that they can take the how will you pay for it question off the table all together in terms of the stimulus conversations that's right even with the current um debates happening now and the kind of you know last couple of holdouts on the democratic side who have really been pushing arguments about costs and et cetera yeah but they're they're wedded to a vision of fiscal finance that they find politically useful but it has no connection to reality okay okay i mean the federal government basically has has spent six trillion dollars within the course of the past year and they did so without raising taxes okay so you know we we should we should really rethink right it's opened up the idea of what's possible yeah it's really it's opened up the idea of what's possible yeah yeah okay uh and then the second thing is that i think that the these tragedies have actually created a greater receptiveness to uh to reparations uh so i'm thinking first of the uh the fact that in uh in the year 2000 when michael dawson and ravana pop off did a survey of americans uh concerning their attitudes about reparations that only four percent of white americans endorsed monetary payments to black americans uh as as an act of reparative justice in 2018 that percentage was up to 16.
still not spectacularly high but substantially higher than four percent and then today the percentage appears to be about 30. okay so uh you know i don't know if it's a sustainable momentum but uh things are moving in the right direction and so uh you know it gives me some sense of optimism about the future whether or not this is something that actually occurs in my own lifetime it seems like uh the direction is is quite different from what it was say only uh four or five years ago okay interesting our next question dr darity discussed the land provision as a social provision given to mostly white individuals can he talk more about how policy has prevented black people and other people of color from ownership generational wealth building through similar tactics does he anticipate a growth and success of shared ownership cooperative ownership development and community land trusts as a mechanism to build wealth for low-income people of color well now i i'm i'm thinking that you get rid of the wealth gap by getting rid of the wealth gap so you're going to increase the wealth position of all black americans by giving them an allocation that would create a situation in which the average level of black wealth would be equivalent to the average level of white wealth in the united states so you know other kinds of strategies are indirect now if individuals want to form land trust or cooperative arrangements and make use of the funds that they receive from reparations payments then by all means do so uh you know we've got we've got some folks who are who are saying that they want to uh repatriate the continent uh well if they want to use their reparations funds to do that then they should be able to do that but i think it it has to be a matter of discretion for each of the eligible recipients what's done with the funds so if this if this particular individual wants to organize a cooperative with a group of similarly resourced black americans you know a reparations program would give people the opportunity to do that because they would have a very different set of options uh with a significantly higher level of wealth and you know what i read also into this question what it made me think about is we've talked about places where public policy has been active and bolstering the wealth of whites proactively and restricting that access to blacks um and and in some cases other people of color but we also have to note the ways in which the federal government has not provided legal protections when wealth was built um by blacks and i wonder if you can talk about instances in which public policy did not respond to the detriment of wealth building um and i'm thinking you know we know the the the very well-known example now of of of oklahoma right kind of black wall street but i wonder if you can talk about how public policy has at some point you know removed itself or refused to enforce equal justice under the law or um refuse to create remedies when massive wealth stealing has happened can you talk a little bit about that role for public policy well you know the federal government has effectively sanctioned upwards of 100 massacres that took place from the end of the civil war into world war ii uh white massacres that took black lives and either destroyed or resulted in the seizure of black-owned property by the white terrorists and so tulsa oklahoma in 1921 is is a single illustration of a pattern of of white violence that was intended to prevent blacks from participating in the political process but also uh intended to uh to make it possible for whites to uh to to take possession of of of their of the property that they had had won in a hard-earned fashion so um so yes i mean there is an issue of uh whether or not property would be protected if we go back to the aftermath of the civil war and the whole issue surrounding the land reform and 40 acres had that land actually been allocated it would have been essential for the union army to remain in the south for at least a full generation and or arm blacks so that they could protect themselves from the predations of the white terrorists in effect if you had made that land allocation it would have been essential to protect that land allocation and i would say similarly if we had a reparations plan in the united states in the modern era um we would have to be prepared for the fact that there's going to be 30 of the population that will be so resistant to any policy that substantially improves the condition of black americans that they may resort to violence and so preparations would have to be made to anticipate that type of behavior you know it it is interesting that there was a tremendous amount of information out there that signaled that there was going to be an attempted coup d'etat in in in washington on january 6 but uh but it was largely ignored uh and and similarly we have evidence that there was extensive preparation for the tulsa massacre there was extensive preparation underway for the wilmington massacre in north carolina of 1898 uh in the wilmington case according to david zucchino efforts were made to get the state's governor as well as as the uh as as the president president mckinley to take steps to prevent that event from taking place and and no one bothered so there was a sanction by inaction mm-hmm ultimately by an action that's key that's key for policy discussions and it's it's an important concept to kind of lift up okay next question to what extent are reparations to black americans a global issue or to blacks i would say a global issue are there other examples of successful restitutions across the globe or could the u.s set an example for other previously slave owning countries to follow and we might we might argue colonizing countries as well um why hasn't the u.n intervened in american affairs since becoming aware of this issue so to me this argument is also about you know think about responding to colonialism as well so talk to us about kind of the global case or your ideas about the global case for reparations well the un actually has had a a task force that has uh has recommended reparations in the united states so uh but but that's all they can do i mean they don't have the capacity to compel any individual government to do anything uh but uh but they they they are attempting to use the force of moral suasion and in support of reparations so uh so that's that's the most the un can actually do um but it's it's been done uh with respect to the question of uh diaspora wide reparations in the work that kirsten and i have done we've focused on the notion that individual communities within the diaspora should make claims on the appropriate uh perpetrator and so in the context of the united states we think that the the debt that is owed is embodied in the failure to provide the 40 acres and that creates the foundation for the case for reparations that black americans who are descendants of u.s slavery have with the u.s government but in parallel fashion uh the congo has uh a compelling case to be made against belgium the countries of the caribbean or particularly the former british colonies like trinidad and tobago or jamaica have a case against the united kingdom uh the haitians have a case against france they have a powerful case against france because france compelled haiti to pay reparations to them right you know which is is just incredible okay and so i know of no instance where uh countries where slavery was practiced have received reparations from the nations that perpetrated their enslavement okay now we do have this peculiar instance where after more than a century uh despite the fact that this country paid reparations to victims of the holocaust finally for more than a s after more than a century germany says it's going to do something on behalf of the nama and the herrera people in southern africa who were subjected to genocidal violence by the germans now i think that the the herrera people are not satisfied with the offer that germany is putting forward but if that were to occur i think that would be the very first instance of reparations of some form inadequate though it may be being made for colonial oppression what what made the the cases that were successfully executed for reparations distinct from the case for black americans nazi germany um the reparations paid to japanese americans what made those cases distinct such that those groups that their victims did receive the internment of japanese americans and then um what happened in nazi germany what made those cases successful in terms of the case for reparations so it's interesting to know that in the case of germany and now we're specifically talking about west germany that i think less than 20 percent of the german population actually was in favor of reparations for the victims of the holocaust but it happened anyway and i think one of the major reasons that happened was because the the german government agreed to engage in negotiations with israel because they recognize that taking this step would permit them to re-enter the community of nations as a legitimate part partner that they they were in a position of ostracization and they wanted to get past that it's also interesting to note that they did make monetary payments but they have never made a formal apology so it's fairly clear that this was a reparations plan that was adopted without passion and enthusiasm on the part of most germans [Music] so the why i think is simply because of the practicalities of international politics from the standpoint of germany's leadership in the immediate aftermath of the war what about japanese americans receiving reparations payments from the u.s government well the japanese american case is an interesting one both in terms of certain dimensions of uh of serendipity uh but also in terms of uh uh in terms of the effort that the japanese american community themselves made they undertook a powerful lobbying effort to receive some form of reparative justice and they had to come to an agreement that was not uniformly held that a component or a part of the reparations agreement would have to include monetary payments there was a there was a dispute within the japanese-american community over that just as uh there was a dispute in the jewish-american community over whether or not they were going to to seek monetary payments but but in the case of the japanese americans they received an apology and they received monetary payments and so but i i think this was a consequence of of uh the intensity of the uh lobbying effort that they undertook and also the fact that uh there was a a a a republican senator and a democratic party representative who was japanese who were strong friends uh while the uh the the the japanese american representative was in uh in incarcerated with his family [Music] he became close friends with the republican senator through a boy scout jamboree and so they collaborated across party lines to support the the japanese american reparations project um so uh that that's serendipity from the standpoint of what made it possible um your proposal for reparations is very much about the role of government and it goes back to that original broken policy promise around 40 acres but i wonder when you think about the role of the private sector when you think about the the wealth that was gained by corporations when you know you've seen conversations among colleges and universities georgetown being won around universities that were built on the labor of slaves and thinking about some form of reparations through um tuition benefits etc do you not would you not call those reparations that's something else that are also trying to respond to some economic inequities but you would not call that reparations it sounds like you reserve that term for uh you have a very clear specificity around your use of that term yeah i i think that we have to be proprietary about the term and we have to uh limit it in the context of of uh reparations for black american descendants of u.s slavery to elimination of the racial wealth gap which is a product of historical policies that produce that type of disparity and uh you know college scholarships are not going to eliminate the racial wealth gap but that's that's somewhat different from the question as to whether or not private individuals or organizations or or state and local governments for that matter should be involved in financing reparations or funding reparations and uh i certainly don't have any aversion to them supplementing a federal reparations fund with additional resources uh but uh it's it it would be very difficult to compel them to do so and the reason why it would be very difficult to compel them to do so is that most of the actions and practices they undertook especially during the period of enslavement uh were legal right yeah within that context right highly immoral but they were legal and so if we were going to address the question of who is responsible for the legality of those immoral practices we have to turn back to the federal government again and that's why we say that the federal government is the culpable party but it's also the capable party because only the federal government has the capacity to amass the types of resources that can really uh penetrate and eliminate the racial wealth gap [Music] so um sandy at the fourth school we've been engaged in conversations as a faculty just to switch gears a little bit towards our last question about what anti-racist teaching looks like and diversifying what we teach and how we teach broadly um particularly within a school of public policy because what our conversation has so clearly demonstrated is the enormous role of public policy in um setting the terms by which we all operate for not just our generation but generations to come so we've been having a conversation around what is anti-racist teaching look like particularly in the policy school context how do we diversify what and how we teach how can we better educate our students to be thinking about these ideas as we craft our syllabi and introduce core frameworks and ideas facilitate discussion in the classroom what advice would you give us um as we think about these issues what does it mean to offer policy education in a context with a lens towards anti-racism wow that's a tough one i'm not sure um i mean one of the big issues always when we think about this pedagogically is is is the question of whether or not the emphasis should be on designing new courses that have not been available previously that have a focus on say race and policy or something along those lines versus and and and these are not mutually exclusive strategies but people tend to think about them as as somewhat separate versus uh how you integrate the analysis of race and policy into your existing classes and i i think it's it's probably good to try to do both but i think it's maybe it may be a richer experience for the students to have new class opportunities that are taught by people who are deeply experts in that area i think it's really really hard for faculty members who have not really studied this issue to just inject a module into their class and expect that to be something that's effective and and sufficient so uh you know unless they undergo not sensitivity training but research experience in the area so that they'll truly be knowledgeable about the subject matter so so i guess i lean more in the direction of you know developing new curricular offerings and and hiring new faculty members who have expertise in those areas uh to the extent that you you may not already have an adequate complement of faculty members who can do that dr sandy darity thank you so much this was such an informative discussion so rich in terms of its historical context and discussion of policy genealogies and the current state of the data and how we can bring all that together um to grapple with some really important ideas thank you so much for your research career your authorship of so many different important ideas in the fields of policy studies and um econ but i should also add sociology former president of the association of black sociologists you've been everywhere so thank you so much for contributing to this racial foundations of public policy series thank you so much to our audience for joining us today in this conversation and we encourage you to join us next time with dr uh rucker johnson who will be with us on october 26th sandy dr darity thank you so much thank you so much i've been honored to join you it's a great series thank you for having me you are welcome thank you good evening everyone take care bye