Science Vs - Reparations: How Could It Work?

Episode Date: October 30, 2020

The idea of paying Black Americans reparations for slavery has been around for a long time, but it’s starting to get more support than ever. So we ask: If the country does agree to pay up, how do you calculate the bill? And how could the U.S. come up with that kind of cash? To find out, we talk to historian and farmer Leah Penniman, economist Prof. William Darity Jr., public policy scholar Assistant Prof. Naomi Zewde, and Ebony Pickett.  UPDATE 10/30/20: An earlier version of this episode said that the average White person who didn't finish high school makes more money than the average Black person who graduated from college. The actual statistic is about net worth, rather than income, so we removed this reference. We’ve updated the episode. Check out the transcript here: https://bit.ly/3kSFe3q Selected resources: Leah’s book, Farming While Black Sandy’s book, From Here to Equality This Time article about Rosewood This episode was produced by Rose Rimler and Anoa Changa with help from Wendy Zukerman, Hannah Harris Green, Michelle Dang, and Nick DelRose. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Sam Bair. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Bobby Lord and Marcus Bagala. Baby sounds provided by Hunter and Lyric. Thanks to everyone we got in touch with for this episode including Sophia Clark, Dr. Dania Francis, Dr. Dionissi Alliprantis, Prof. Kristen Broady, Prof. Rashawn Ray, Dr. Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, Prof. Henry Thompson, Prof. Richard Edwards, and Prof. Steve Greenlaw. A special thanks to the Zukerman family, Walter Rimler, and Joseph Lavelle Wilson.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi, I'm Wendy Zuckerman and you're listening to Science Versus from Gimlet. This is the show that pits facts against 40 acres and a mule. On today's show, reparations. Okay, well, my name is Ebony Pickett. I am a wife and a mother of seven and four bonus children. So that's a total of 11. You'll hear some of those kids in the background. And Ebony is one of the few black folks in the country who's actually been given reparations.

It was because decades ago, her family was the victim of a horrible massacre. It happened in a small town where a lot of Black people lived, called Rosewood in Florida. And it all started on New Year's Eve in 1922. So it was a happy time. It was a time when they were celebrating and they were cooking and they had fireworks, little sparklers. You know, they were just enjoying one another.

A group of white people in a nearby town had become convinced that a black man attacked a white woman. And over the next few days, hundreds of them poured into Rosewood in a frenzy. Nobody really was expecting it. From what we know, they just started shooting up the house from outside. And that's what they did for seven whole days. And they didn't stop until everything in the town was burned down. Every house was burned down to the ground. Some of our family members were lynched. One of my cousins, Sam Carter, his ear was cut off.

They would keep it in the jar. The white mob killed him and then kept this man's ear in a jar. I like those souvenirs, but it was very brutal. The local police just let all of this happen. And many Rosewood residents ran and hid in nearby forests and swamps. There was no one coming to help or rescue. And, you know, that was in the dead of winter. So they were in the cold swamp, you know, that was in the dead of winter. So they were in this cold swamp,

you know, for seven whole days. Hundreds of people were forced to leave their homes and at least six Black residents were killed. None of the Black families went back. They had to start their lives over. And today, basically nothing is left of this town. No one was ever charged for the murders or the destruction of homes and businesses. Ebony said it was so traumatic that for years the families were afraid to even talk about what had happened. But in the 1980s, the younger generation decided to speak up. Ebony's family took the story to the media, to politicians, to whoever would listen, and they hired a law firm who took their case to the state legislature, asking the Florida government to acknowledge what happened and to pay restitution for both the survivors and their descendants.

In other words, they asked for reparations. And they got it. Producer Rose Rimler talked to Ebony about this. Yeah, I read about it being passed as a bipartisan effort, which now seems like a miracle. Yeah, I know, right? That doesn't really happen much anymore. In 1994, when this bill was passed,

there were just nine survivors still alive and the state gave each of them up to $150,000. What did it mean for the survivors, the direct survivors, when the bill was passed? Full of emotion. A lot of them were crying. Some of them were still afraid. Really? Even then? Even then. And for descendants like Ebony, they set up a scholarship fund. It paid for her college education. I was able to actually get a Bachelor of Science degree in occupational therapy. Kind of gave me, you know, kind of like a new life, a new hope. I was able to actually go into a major that I could actually excel in and do well in.

So, yeah, so it was great. It's worked out great for me. While this reparations plan wasn't perfect and some of Ebony's relatives couldn't benefit from the program, this story shows us that it is possible for the US to recognise when it's done something wrong and pay up. So what would happen if this played out on a much larger scale? Because we're not just talking about one horrible attack in one small town.

The idea here is that reparations would make amends for something much bigger. Slavery. More than 200 years of enslaving people and using their free labor to build the U.S. economy. And while this idea might feel like a political non-starter, it's starting to get some real attention. Almost a third of Americans polled last year said that they were in favour of reparations.

And a bill to study this has more than 150 signatures in Congress right now. So for us, we're wondering how on earth do academics calculate how much reparations would be? Like how do you put a number on that kind of suffering?

And how would the U.S. actually pay for it? When it comes to reparations, there's not a lot of... It's worked out great for me. But then there's science. Science vs. Reparations is coming up just after the break. How do stop losses work on Kraken? Let's say I have a birthday party on Wednesday night, but an important meeting Thursday morning. So sensible me pre-books a taxi for 10 p.m. with alerts.

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entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide Welcome back. Today we're talking about reparations. And even though the US government has screwed over lots of groups, like Native Americans, we're focusing on reparations to Black Americans today. After the Civil War, the US government promised formerly enslaved people 40 acres and a mule, but they never paid up. So what would it look like today if they did?

When we look around the world, one of the biggest reparations programs ever was what Germany did after the Holocaust. They gave money to survivors. And for entire families who were killed, they gave billions of dollars to the new state of Israel. All in all, it was around $90 billion in today's money. If reparations were to happen today in the US, though, a big difference is that all the money would have to go to the descendants of enslaved people. Say, their great-grandchildren or great-great-grandchildren. But when academics think about the case for reparations here in the US, many of them are arguing that this makes sense. And to tell us why is Leah Penniman. She's written a book that talks about the history

of Black farmers in the U.S. It's called Farming While Black. And Leah has been thinking about reparations for a long time. You know, I'm not sure how old I was when I first heard the word reparations, but this concept of making right what has gone wrong historically, I would say as long as I can remember, I've been thinking about that. For Leah, a lot of this comes back to the fact that many white people in the U.S. today are better off thanks to the U.S. government giving them a leg up, which they've been doing

for centuries, particularly helping them get land. But yet Black folks have been consistently held back. White Americans generally assume that this country was founded on principles of egalitarianism, democracy and inclusion, and not the truth. So, for example, at the same time that the government was taking away the promise of 40 acres and a mule for Black folks, it was giving out tons of free land under the Homestead Act, and the vast majority of that went to white folks. More than a million white

families profited from this land bonanza. And one scholar estimates that a quarter of the US adult population in the year 2000 could trace some of their money to this act. And that is just one way that the federal government ultimately helped a lot of white people get land and get wealth and didn't help a lot of black people. And even when folks of colour were able to purchase their own land through no help of the government, they would be violently attacked. With a nod from officials over and over again, white mobs would be allowed to attack Black farm owners.

So they burned down Black farmers' homes, pushed them off their lands. So literally just burning down... They literally burned down people's houses and killed them. Like the story of David Walker, a Black farmer in Kentucky. Late one night in 1908, a group of hooded white men came to his farm. They ordered him to come out for a whipping and he refused to come out. So they shot at the house.

They lit the house on fire. They killed the family. By killing David and his wife, the family couldn't pay taxes on the property and eventually they lost it. And no one was ever tried for these killings. And this, it wasn't a one-off. Killing people, lynching people, and scaring Black owners off their land was actually pretty

common across the U.S., even until relatively recently. Even when desegregation was the law of the lands and folks were then technically allowed to move into the suburbs. My mom and her siblings and my grandparents had petitions circulated to get them to leave. They were the first Black family on the block. They had a brick thrown through their window. So it's like many, many obstacles related to being Black and trying to access lands and homeownership. Obstacles like redlining, where banks and the federal government essentially work together to block a lot of Black Americans from getting mortgages. And so you put it all together, and a lot of researchers who study reparations say, you know, the shadow of slavery and discrimination is so long that it reaches right into today.

Like, it should be no surprise that right now home ownership is much lower for Black folks than it is for white folks. And that is still a dream deferred. It is still a dream deferred. And it's not because folks don't know how to run businesses or don't have their act together or don't have the desire. It's really that, you know, the land was taken, given to other people and they haven't given it back. So part of reparations is looking at how we're going to make it right. We've only created this mess for the past four or 500 years. So anything that people can create, we can fix. But the big question is, how do we fix it? How do you even start to work out how much money the government should pay to make things right?

For this, we turn to one of the top people working on this question. I would have to confess that I was a reparations sceptic. This is William Darity Jr. He also goes by Sandy. He's a professor at Duke University. And it wasn't that Sandy didn't think reparations were justified. He did think they were justified. It was just that he didn't think they'd ever happen.

But Sandy got sucked into the nerdiest part of this conversation, which is just, how do you calculate it? And he started mulling it over about three decades ago. In the 90s, how did, when you went to conferences, how did the white people in the room tend to react when you would talk about reparations? Well, I think the reaction in the room was very mixed, but generally very s also. And occasionally there were comments which I would describe as being out and out racist, something to the effect of,

well, Black Americans should be grateful for the fact that slavery took place because otherwise they'd still be back in horrible Africa. Despite this kind of response from some people, Sandy has stuck with it. And he had a very tricky job on his hands, coming up with a sum that would capture not just the horrors of slavery, but then the decades of crap that followed. And several years ago, he came up with an idea.

The racial wealth gap in the United States. That's the gap between how much money white people in America have and how much money black people have. And this gap is huge. For every dollar the average white family has, the average black family has 15 cents. So Sandy's like, this wealth gap? That should be the target for a reparations plan.

And if, and I'm sure this has happened to you, but if, say, a bigwig politician takes you aside, buys you a whiskey and says, you know, why is this a good idea? What would you tell them? Well, I'm roughly a teetotaler, so... They better buy me a soda. But no, you know, we make the argument that the racial wealth gap in the United States is not a product of Black misbehavior. It's a product of American social policy.

To Sandy, the racial wealth gap is kind of like a proxy for all the horrible things that Black folks have faced since the beginning of this country, much of it directly coming from government policies or government inaction. And other academics we reached out to who study the racial wealth gap agree that it was the government who's largely responsible for it. And so Sandy used this gap to calculate how much reparations should be. And here's how he did it. If you take everyone's wealth in the US and you put it in a basket, you'd have just over $100 trillion. Black people make up a little more than 13% of the US population. And so Sandy's like, all things being equal, they should have 13% of the wealth. But they don't. It's way less,

less than 3%. To bump it up, it would take... Between 10 to 12 trillion dollars. 10 to 12 trillion trillion. $10 to $12 trillion? Yes. He figures that would come down to about a quarter of a million dollars for each descendant of slavery. So, some $10 to $12 trillion in total. And that might sound like a lot of money. I mean, it is a lot of money. But at the time of the Civil War,

slavery was such a big industry for the U.S. that it was actually more valuable than railroads, factories, and banks combined. And even at the time, people recognized this. Like, one Confederacy bigwig valued slavery at $4 billion back then, which would now be trillions of dollars. So no matter how you slice this, America owes a big debt to enslaved people. So let's say the government does decide to pay it to their descendants. Where exactly would that money come from? Can the U.S. afford it? Can the U.S. just keep printing money and cutting checks? Yes, the U.S. government can do that. There is a constraint, however, and the constraint is the inflationary effects. Inflation. Printing, say, $12 trillion

all at once would more than triple the supply of money in circulation, meaning that suddenly there's a lot more money to buy the same amount of stuff. And that could make the value of the dollar drop and the economy nosedive. This has happened in other countries like Zimbabwe, where they printed a lot of money really quickly. We reached out to a bunch of economists and asked them what did they think would happen if the government printed this money and cut these checks? Most said that inflation was a possibility, if not an outright certainty.

So to avoid this, the money could be given out slowly, like over a decade. Or it could come from other places, like taxing Jeff Bezos. But ultimately, Sandy says that if the government really wants to pull money out of its arse, then it can. Just look at the coronavirus stimulus checks.

The government dropped $2 trillion to help businesses and people in the early days of the pandemic. And they gave a ton of money to banks in the Great Recession. It's become transparently obvious that the federal government has the capacity to fund almost anything it pleases without necessarily raising taxes. And so that makes it very clear to me that the possibility of funding a full-scale reparations program also is realistic. So, Sandy reckons the government, it could figure this out. But although academics don't heckle Sandy at conferences anymore, and in fact he says more and more scholars are taking this seriously, politically, it does seem like we're still a long way from getting this over the line. So enter a new idea.

It's not reparations, but it's a plan that some are saying is more politically feasible. And it's been getting a lot of attention. Baby bonds. Baby bonds. Baby bonds. Baby bonds. Baby bonds.

What is that? And could it really help fix America? Coming up. Welcome back. Today, we're talking about reparations. We've talked about the ways that you might calculate how much is owed. But now, we want to talk about a different idea that's out there. Rather than saying sorry, this is about making the U.S. more equal. It's called baby bonds.

Producer Rose Rimler talked to Naomi Zody about this. She's an assistant professor at the City University of New York. So are these babies loaning money to the government? No. So baby bonds, it just sounds good, baby bond. But it's really like a trust fund. And this idea of little trust funds for little babies, it intrigues her. Here's how it would work. So every newborn baby in the United States would get this trust fund set up in their name. So the government gives a pot of money to every baby in the whole country. Yeah. So there's about 4 million babies born every year in the United States. So there would be 4 million new bank accounts opened up.

No one can touch this money until the child becomes a young adult. And at that point, they would get control over that money. Now, this is different from reparations, because reparations would probably only go to the descendants of enslaved people. This money, it would go to everyone, literally all the babies. But not every baby gets the same amount of money. Kids born into families with less money would get a bigger trust fund. Everybody would get something,

but the most amount would go to people who have the least wealth. Because it's universal, it's like also poor and low-wealth white people will also get access. But since we know that Black families in general have less money, these babies would, on the average, get more cash than white babies. So it happens to be very anti-racist, but it's just not specifically designed around race. And so Naomi wondered what would happen if the U.S. actually did this.

So she played it out and asked, what if we gave babies born to the wealthiest families $500 at birth and those born to the poorest families were given $50,000 at birth? I looked at people who were young adults in like 2015 and matched them to their households when they were born in the late 80s, early 90s to see what would inequality look like today for them now that they would be getting control over this asset. So these are like real-life people, but you kind of, you invented like a fantasy world,

like an alternate reality for them. Yeah. Naomi modeled how much the money would grow over time with interest and how much it would add to the wealth of the average baby once they grew up. And she found that, maybe unsurprisingly, giving everyone money meant that everyone had more money. But where things would really start to change

is with that gaping hole between black and white wealth. So in the real world, the median young black adult in 2015 had about $3,000 to their name. But in Naomi's alternative reality, they would have had about $60,000. Did you find that the Baby Bond program eliminated the racial wealth gap? Almost. I mean, almost. It gets extremely close. Without Baby Bonds, she found that young white Americans had around 16 times the wealth of young Black Americans.

But baby bonds dropped that difference down by a ton. Now, young whites were only 1.4 times wealthier. Everybody improves from the policy, but the dramatic improvement for young Black people could mean just an unimaginable amount for what their lives could be like. Just having that money means that like just the world would open up to you in these different ways. And when you talk about giving people cash, sometimes folks worry that people will waste their money on stuff like booze and cigarettes. But studies show that this actually isn't the case. While we don't have research

that's giving huge chunks of money to people, studies on cash programs show that when people who need it are given money, they don't tend to spend it on stuff like alcohol and tobacco. And they don't stop working either. In fact, in some cases, people started working more after they were given money because they were able to start their own small businesses. So, so far, so good. But Naomi says the thing with baby bonds is you couldn't just do it as a one-off and expect, ta-da, America is all good now. I mean, if you think about this one group of baby bonds kids,

they would have a leg up, but they're still going out into a very unequal world. And so Naomi says that to really turn things around, you'd probably have to keep this program up for years and years and years, basically until you start seeing real change in things like more black-owned banks and other businesses. And this baby bond plan, it would cost $80 billion a year,

year after year after year. And if the US did this, nothing even close has ever been tried anywhere else in the world. About two decades ago, the UK started a baby bonds program with tiny amounts of cash, and it was dismantled after several years. And that means we don't know what would happen to the economy if we had a baby bonds program.

Maybe we'd save money on other stuff, like the food stamps program. Maybe we'd increase the spending of a new group of people and boost the GDP, as some have estimated. Or maybe this would balloon the US debt and have some unintended consequences. Despite these unknowns, though, the experts that we spoke to were excited about the possibilities of baby bonds i think that the u.s should most definitely do this even with all of the uncertainties everything is uncertain we're never gonna if we keep waiting for the perfect

policy before we make any real headway, like directly addressing racial wealth inequality, then we'll just sit on our hands forever. And then, just finally, sometimes there's this idea that instead of cash for reparations, we should be doing other stuff, like creating college scholarships. That's what Ebony Pickett at the beginning of the show got, as reparations for what happened to her family in Rosewood. And this was great for her. It helped her get her career as an occupational therapist. But Ebony also told us that the plan wasn't great for everyone.

The money had all these strings attached to it, making it hard for some people to benefit. And so she's like, if we really want to do this, reparations for slavery and everything that came after it, then just give people money so they can decide what they need to use it for. You know, it shouldn't be any strings attached. There was no strings attached when you brought us over here from Africa on those slave ships.

We worked from sunup to sundown. We were whipped. We were beat. There was no strings attached to any of their free labor, none. So for anybody to try to put some labels or strings to me, that sounds like you're still just trying to control the puppet. You still want to tell us what to do. So no, there has to be a moment that you just take your foot off our neck. You know what I mean? Just let us breathe. What would it mean to you if the U.S. in a real way gave reparations? If the U.S. in a real way gave reparations, it would mean that that nagging fear

that I brought children into a world that's crumbling would finally be put to rest and I could sleep at night. That's what Versus. Hello? Hey. How you doing? Okay. Why do I refer to you as Wendy Zuckerman?

Well, for our listeners,, shake it up a little. So I didn't just go like, hey, where's Rimla, producer at Science Faces. You're going to try something different. Yeah. What did you think? Okay, let's hear it. Well, I did it. That was it.

It was just. But I was what you said. You just didn't say my name. Yeah. That's a big change. Yeah. How many citations in this week's episode? 104 citations this week, Wendy Zuckerman. Wow. 104. If people want to see these citations, where should they go? There's a link to our transcript. It's in the show notes. And while they're there, they should check out a bunch of other resources in our show notes, which give a lot more information, like a lot more. Yeah. Tell us more. As you've been researching this episode, what's been really helpful for you?

Probably the most helpful was Sandy's book. It's called From Here to Equality, and I really recommend it. From Here to Equality. Yeah. We'll put a link in the show notes. Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Wendy. This episode was produced by Rose Rimler and Anoa Changa, with help from me, Wendy Zuckerman, Hannah Harris-Green, Michelle Dang, and Nick Delrose. We're edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact-checking by Erica Akiko Howard. Mix and sound design by Sam Baer. Music written by Peter Leonard, Emma Munger, Bobby Lord and Marcus Begala. Baby sounds provided by Hunter and Lyric.

And thanks to everyone we got in touch with for this episode, including Sophia Clark, Dr. Dania Francis, Dr. Dionysi Alaprantis, Professor Kristen Brodie, Professor Rashaun Ray, Dr. Rhonda Von Shea-Sharp, Professor Henry Thompson, Professor Richard Edwards and Professor Steve Greenlaw. A special thanks to the Zuckerman family, Walter Rimler and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. I'll back to you next time.