Trickle-down Reparations: Why Most Reparations Proposals are Impractical and Functionally Racist
I’ve been researching reparations and economic development for over a decade at this point, and I’ve yet to come across any sensible reparations program proposals. Not a one. Every single organization I’ve come across is most likely doomed to failure. Fundamentally these people (including Black people) do not trust Black people to solve their own problems, and they lack a basic understanding of political, judicial, and economic power dynamics. There’s also a deep sense of paternalism and patronizing when it comes to “helping” the Black community rather than just giving us what we’re owed in order to better help ourselves. So the purpose of this article is to explain why these programs will not work, and then to explain what is more likely to work.
I believe part of the reason we’ve reached this point is because the reparations conversation has been dominated by academics, activists, and preachers for decades. Often highly educated, but maybe lacking a balance of intellectual horsepower and common sense. They’re missing key perspectives from people with market experience. They typically don’t have much experience related to comprehensive economic development or building and executing fiscally sustainable, economically sound strategies within a corrupt capitalist system, and they typically lack basic understandings of the financial and economic concepts necessary to succeed.
They have other valuable skills to be sure, and I believe most of them are sincere and mean well, but reparations programs not centered around economic realities muddy the waters and prevent progress. A well-meaning fool is still a fool. In other words, they’re good at analysis and are good a fundraising from people who don’t know any better (or don’t actually care about success). Not so good at converting analysis into sound strategy and then implementing that strategy. I look at these 50-page presentations and 500-page reports and am dumbfounded that they still miss the most obvious points (see below).
And since these people don’t seem to be concerned with economic realities or pragmatism, the solutions they tend to come up with are overly complicated and/or nonsensical. It’s almost like someone is paying them to be wrong on purpose. All the funds they’re raising will essentially be lit on fire. Maybe that’s the point. Keep stringing us all along building bridges to nowhere. I can’t speculate on their intentions. I can only judge outcomes.
Comprehensive doesn’t have to be complicated. If the program involves a 20-point plan, it’s probably doing too much. Some folks are even still proposing studies, like HR 40. We don’t need any more studies, we have all the answers and data we need. It’s time for action.
They also tend to involve irrelevant “requirements.” For example, they usually demand some kind of apology. We have a $50T wealth gap and folks are worried about apologies? And they’ll say asinine things like “reparations isn’t about money.” What, besides money, do these people think our adversaries , who enslaved our ancestors and stole our wealth, can or should give us that will make a significant, material difference in our lives? Save the apologies, spare us the excuses for past and current behavior, and cut the check! We are capable of figuring out the rest.
Also, in addition to being unnecessary, a public apology is strategically unsound and limits options. It gives away too much information too soon by requiring our opponents to take conscious action and be fully aware of the battle being fought. There are certain paths to reparations that don’t mention reparations at all because reparations are just a means to an end. That end should be laser focused on improving the material condition of the people reparations are meant to help. Anything more is counterproductive.
To that point, they do propose solutions, but again, overly complex and lacking first-principles thinking. For example, they typically want a reparations program to address housing, jobs, healthcare, education, criminal justice reform, etc. Do you know why we need support in all of those areas? Because $50 trillion was stolen from us through slavery, Jim Crow, and various other forms of theft and terrorism that also caused immense psychological damage.
But solving all those problems is not the purpose of a reparations program. Reparations are compensation for economic damages, period. They are NOT about repairing the Black community. A government program cannot do that and should not even attempt it. That’s work for individuals and institutions within the community, not some central authority/agency/program. The last thing we need is another bloated government program to be mismanaged and corrupted by profit-seeking corporate interests. What we need are the resources to solve our own problems. A large wealth transfer to individuals will be enough to seed the local, state, and national capacity building efforts we need to address specific issues.
But this is the faulty logic of most reparations proponents. They believe in undemocratic, trickle-down reparations. They think if we fund all these programs from the top down, the benefits will eventually reach down to individual households. For example, they think funding education and housing assistance will create positive, relative economic outcomes.
First, that is not equitable and removes agency from reparations recipients. Resources spent on those programs would be resources that don’t go to people who don’t need or want those programs, but still may need other forms of support and are still owed recompense. This is an indirect form of means testing and is overly prescriptive.
Second, the more layers you add onto a program, the more intermediaries there are, and the more rent-seeking behavior develops. If you set up a program to administer scholarships, someone will have to staff and manage that program. That all costs money. Money that could have just gone directly to the people reparations are supposed to benefit.
Third, education, home ownership, income assistance, and jobs programs DO NOT close the wealth gap. They are not things that build wealth, they are things that existing wealth is used to acquire. Fortunately for me, I don’t need to prove this because Sandy Darity and others have already done that work, which you can read in the book he co-authored, From Here to Equality.
In other words, not only are these programs resource inefficient, they are also ineffective.
The problem is the wealth gap because of the power imbalance it helps support and maintain. The majority of our problems stem from this relative power imbalance and are exacerbated by our lack of institutional capacity and misallocation of resources. Rebuilding institutional capacity and the means to effectively allocate capital takes financial resources. Even psychological damage can be addressed with financial resources.
That long preamble was just to say that trickle-down reparations won’t work. The problem isn’t housing, education, healthcare, etc. Those are symptoms. The problem is the lack of resources (which were stolen from us) and the resulting wealth gap. The best way to close the wealth gap is to give people their wealth back. Doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.
Then the question becomes, how do you address the wealth gap without causing inflation, losing it all to taxation, and ensure that the effects are persistent. In other words, how do you close the gap and make sure it doesn’t open right back up?
What will work is a reparations platform that:
Does not rely on a government agency to administer other than dispersing funds
Requires little administrative overhead
Gives agency to reparations recipients
Does not include means testing
Can be applied equally to all qualified recipients
Reduces bureaucratic barriers for qualified applicants to go from application to enrollment
Mitigates the risk of causing inflation
After initial funding, is capable of funding itself in perpetuity
Includes a mechanism for wealth to be transferred to future generations
Any reparations program that doesn’t address these issues will fail in the best case scenario. Worst case, and most likely case, it actually does more harm.
The harm that has already been done by these nonsensical plans and the people who lead them has caused the biggest bottleneck to reparations in my opinion; the reason why we haven’t achieved reparations to date….because Black people themselves don’t believe it’s possible. If you don’t believe something is possible, you don’t earnestly try.
Black people aren’t stupid. They don’t believe it’s possible, because they haven’t heard a believable plan with specific calls to action they can get behind and not feel like it’s a waste of their time. They need someone to make it make sense.
I lay out a framework for such a program within In The Black 2050 [Second Edition] and American Freedmen Foundation is the nonprofit set up to implement said program. Learn more at freedmen.foundation/plan.
For all those who are interested in a specific, feasible, and achievable plan, check out the rest of the information on this site to see how you can support.
This shirt is for those who understand that history isn't behind us—it’s still being balanced. Wear it as a statement, a demand, and a refusal to let the debt go unpaid.
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