Little more than three years after the publication of «The Project 1619» in The New York Times MagazinePresenting a provocative examination of the American slave trade and its legacy, Nikole Hannah-Jones will debut her Pulitzer Prize-winning work in hulu Thursday with a specific purpose in mind: to strengthen the case for reparations.
“We are going to have to fight for equality, whether we get reparations or not,” he said. “But I would rather we were fighting for equality having gotten some semblance of financial justice for the financial and other crimes that black people have experienced.”
The Hulu series, produced under the onyx collective brand, carefully builds a case for reparation by providing a historical and contemporary analysis of the impact of slavery. However, Hannah-Jones’s argument for reparations is not new.
The fight for reparations has been going on for centuries in the federal and state governments. During each session of Congress from 1989 until he retired in 2017, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., introduced a bill to create a commission to report on the impact of slavery and offer recommendations for reparations known as HR 40.
The bill eventually passed a House committee vote in 2021., with Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas, as title sponsor. Even with that milestone, Duke University economist and professor William Darity He said a reparations bill is unlikely to pass with a Republican majority in the House. Still, he remains a strong advocate for reparations and closing the racial wealth gap.
“I don’t think anything else can be done besides a federal program, direct payments to African-Americans descended from slavery in the United States,” Darity said. “If the focus is on the racial wealth gap as the strongest economic indicator of the cumulative intergenerational effects of white supremacy in the United States, then no, there is nothing other entities can do, or no other policies besides a direct payment. strategy that would truly achieve that goal.”
On the Hulu series and on many of his published works, including a 2021 article in The Economist co-written with A. Kirsten Mullen, Darity estimated that it would cost the federal government between $12 billion and $14 billion to pay financial restitution to African-American descendants of the enslaved. He points out that blacks were excluded from full US citizenship at the founding of the nation and it would take an average of $350,000 per person to help close the wealth gap for the 40 million descendants alive today.
“The community owes a debt to the federal government that has never been paid in the 157 years since the end of the Civil War,” he said, citing various “negative policies” such as the denial of 40 acre land grants to African Americans by the government, which returned 400,000 acres of land to Confederate owners. Darity also referred massacres of black people across the country by white terrorists, and the appropriation and embargo of black property after the Civil War. Those practices, she said, translate into housing practices that discriminate against African Americans, a widening the racial wealth gap and a pattern of policies that have stunted the financial growth of African Americans.
While there have been efforts to award redress to black Americans at the state and local levels, thus far, in areas including California, Kansas City, Missouriand Evanston, Illinois, debate continues as to whether these attempts can provide an adequate substitute for federal reparations.
“I have real reservations about relying on state or city governments to do this,” Darity said. “They don’t have the ability to eliminate the racial wealth gap. And whatever they choose to do is bound to fall far short of what the eligible population deserves.”
Hannah-Jones, however, said black Americans shouldn’t turn away any potential funding, even if it’s at the state level and potentially unsuitable for providing financial redress.
“Any time there’s a state or local reparations bill moving forward, it further legitimizes the larger federal effort,” he said. «So I’m definitely a proponent of both.»
The issue of state reparations and land return are discussed in the series, along with the idea that reparations should be more than a cash payment. Hannah-Jones said the best approach would include rebuilding. It should also be a “big investment in Black communities and the Black institutions that have been divested of” such as Black public schools and Historically Black colleges and universities. “And…strong enforcement of existing law. We have pretty good civil rights laws, what we don’t have is good enforcement of them,” she noted.
If the federal government ever issued reparations, Darity surmised that black Americans might begin to feel a sense of equality. However, he asks for three specific requirements with the payment of repairs to guarantee that.
«First, recognition by the culprit,» he said. “Second, an act of reparation by the guilty party. But then the third component is closure… that no further restitution claims will be made by the community that has been victimized after adequate redress has been provided… unless there is a renewal of the atrocities.»
Hannah-Jones acknowledges the need for closure, adding that if African Americans were given reparations, fair treatment, and equality in all things, then there would be no need to continue the fight. But, she quipped, «the probability that we’ll ever reach that is very low.»
However, he said he believes the United States needs to realize that «democracy is multicultural» and that the country’s true foundation was laid not in 1776 but in 1619, when the first documented Africans were taken to the colonies in captivity. She said she hopes her new series helps cement that idea and the need for restitution for the descendants of those who were enslaved and later endured incredible discrimination and hardship.
“You can’t fully and accurately understand the country we live in today if you haven’t addressed the primacy of the legacy of slavery, that slavery is one of the oldest institutions in America,” Hannah-Jones said. «It’s fundamental. It is fundamental to our economic, political, social and medical systems and is shaping our society, whether we recognize it or not.»