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In addition to financial repair, reparations may offer spiritual repair as well. Studies report that Black people tend to hold pessimistic views on the potential for racial equality in America. 43While those beliefs are well-earned by decades of empirical support, 44the hope for meaningful change that reparations might inspire could have a positive effect. Making cash reparations, along with a fulsome apology, to Japanese Americans for their displacement and internment during World War II "produced 'a wonderful feeling'" in that community, with recipients feeling as if they "were made whole again as American citizens." 45While money and expressions of regret alone will not dispel "the on-going effects of the institution of slavery and its legacy of persistent systemic structures of discrimination," 46such a gesture could be part of a process that results in a more equitable society for Black people.

FRED: I defer to what Stefano said. I don’t have that much to say about it. There’s a very important, and let’s call it righteous strain, of Afro-American and Afro-Diasporic studies that we could place under the rubric of debt collection. And it’s basically like, “we did this and we did that, and you continue not to acknowledge it. You continue to mis-name it. You continue to violently misunderstand it. And I’m going to correct the record and collect this debt.” And there’s a political component to it, too. Maybe that’s partly what the logic of reparations is about. Or even the “I have a Dream’ speech, he’s like ‘we came here today to cash a check. A promise was given. We came to collect.” Tat’s what King said. So, I don’t disavow that rhetoric or even that project. And, in many ways, I’m a beneficiary of that project, in ways that are totally undeniable and I don’t want to deny. I also think that that project is not the project of black radicalism – which is not about debt collection or reparation. It’s about a complete overturning – again, as Fanon would say, and others have said. If that’s your concern, if that’s your project, the mechanisms of debt collection become less urgent. Or they become something that one is concerned about, but in a different way. Like, “I will note the debt, and I will note the brutal and venal and vicious way in which the debt is unacknowledged.” When we talk about debt, to talk about the unpayability of debt is not to fail to acknowledge the debt. But, certain mugs just refuse even to acknowledge the debt. And I think a whole lot of what people want when they want reparations is in fact an acknowledgment, and they want an acknowledgement of the debt because it constitutes something like a form of recognition, and that becomes very problematic because the form of recognition that they want is within an already existing system. They want to be recognized by sovereignty as sovereign, in a certain sense. So, basically, I can read a big old book on the history of Western Marxism, and I can be alternatively pissed of about the way that its author can write that history without writing about CLR James. I’m alternatively pissed of, bemused, feel pity for his ignorant ass, whatever. You start to feel pity for his ignorant butt, but then you also understand the deep structural connections between ignorance and arrogance. And you can’t feel sorry for an ignorant motherfucker if he’s also an arrogant motherfucker, so then you get mad again. You stay mad, actually. But this is not a personal injury. You have to step to it in a different way. So, basically, I’m with Stefano on this, which is that I feel like I want to be part of another project. Which is to say I’m not acceding to the fact; it’s not like I’m just trying to turn my eye from it. I don’t want to accept in silence without protest all the different forms of inequality and exploitation that emerge as a function of the theft and of the failure to acknowledge the debt. It’s not just that I’m pissed of that Willie Dixon never got paid the way he was supposed to get paid for all them songs that Plant and Jimmy Page stole, but also that I want him or his locked-up grandson to get the damn money. I’m not sitting here saying, “I’m above them getting the money.” I don’t believe that what has happened in general is reparable, but if the United States finally decided to write me a check, I would cash the check and put it in the bank or go buy something stupid with it, a Rolls Royce or a Bentley, something that will really make George Stephanopoulos mad. I would accept the check, and be pissed of that it ain’t as much as it should be. But I also know that what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new.

Conceptual Framework In this section, we trace the broad contours of racial capital and how it shifts understandings of race and economics in fundamental ways. By focusing on how these processes played out over time, we explore how racial difference is a constituent logic of capitalism (Robinson 2000) and building through Pulido’s (2016:1) work advance an “intersectional conception of capitalism in which its deeply racialized nature is fully recognized”. We then outline an understanding of reparations within a geographical framework before turning to our analysis of the rise and fall of Lehman Brothers to ground understandings of racial capitalism in specific geographies of accumulation by dispossession and abandonment. Racial Capital Troubling traditional understandings of capital, Robinson argues that ethnic and racial difference predates the development of modern economies. Racism was not just a convenient ordering system for Europeans to categorise non-Europeans, but instead, its “genesis is in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples” themselves (Robinson 2000:2). Capitalism and its attendant identity positions are not a radical departure from feudalism as traditional Marxists would understand it, but instead, capitalism emerged from feudalism and in a context already and everywhere infused with racialism (Bledsoe and Wright 2019; Kelley 2017). As a result, capitalism produced a world economic system “dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism and genocide” (Kelley 2017). European society was rife with difference, and these differences grafted onto changes in the political economy as feudalism gave way to mercantilism and colonialism. Thus, it becomes necessary to see race not epiphenomenally or as something outside of capital, but as central to the very making and unfolding of capital relations themselves. Robinson’s perspective is essential for understanding how and in what ways capital unfolds and for tracing its socio-spatial trajectories (Pulido 2017). First, by challenging the idea that racism can be reduced to class, racial capitalism opens space to understand a range of revolutionary movements and moments that Robinson identifies as the “Black Radical Tradition”. Defined as an “African response to an oppression emergent from the immediate determinants of European development in the modern era and framed by orders of human exploitation” (Robinson 2000:73), the Black Radical Tradition sits outside of traditional understandings of revolutionary consciousness or conceptualisation of change as driven by class solidarities or politics (Pulido 2006). The Black Radical Tradition is outside what many would understand as traditional ways of knowing (Woods 1998) and incorporates a range of practices that open space to understand various resistant traditions. Understandings of racial capitalism also challenge ideas about the emergence of racism and its connection to colonisation; conceptions of race are central to the production of differentiated human value, which is a cornerstone of capitalism and its exploitative realities (Robinson 2000). As a result, “[r]ace is and always has been foundational to our economic and geopolitical order. Abroad colonialism was made possible through racial capitalism. In America white appropriation of black labor and red land provided two of the fundamental pillars of the nation’s wealth” (Ranganathan 2016:21). As we demonstrate, the contours of racial capitalism are central to understanding the unfolding of Lehman Brothers and the growth of their fortune and, ultimately, their downfall in the 2007 financial crisis. It also lays the foundation for broader work on reparations as an inherently geographical project that, by centring resistant traditions in Black radical thought, attends to abolitionist imaginaries of freedom. Third, racial difference is a cornerstone in making the “variegated landscapes that cultures and capital can exploit to create enhanced power and profits” (Puldio 2017:7). Perhaps Melamed (2015:77) has captured this imperative best when she writes, “[c]apital can only be capital when it is accumulating, and it can only accumulate by producing and moving through relations of severe inequality among human groups”. These inequalities are manifest in a range of socio-spatial practices and realities, and as a result, geography is central to the way racial capitalism unfolds. Focusing on how the current political economy comes to see deep poverty as a profit centre (Wilson et al. 2009) means seeing these realities not as accidental to the system, but instead central to the reproduction and expansion of the system itself. Understandings of racial capital necessarily shift discussions about what constitutes justice and equity and the limits and possibilities of traditional reparation claims. Understanding Reparations within a Geographic Framework Beginning from the starting point that “freedom is a place” (Gilmore 2017:227), we argue geography is central to projects related to reparations for the enslaved and their descendants. Focusing on geography, we argue, opens up space for a more sustained and potentially transformative practice around reparation debates (Gilbert and Williams 2020). Moving beyond the view that transatlantic slavery is confined to the past, or that reparations must solely focus on monetary remuneration, we outline an understanding that locates reparations within a Black Radical Tradition. Such a perspective expands the bounds of what counts as reparations, locating the debate within a broader framework focused on a set of interlocking and spatially grounded projects that seek to undermine the realities of racial capitalism and invest in Black communities in ways that strengthen and nurture Black institutions and landscapes. Arguing reparations must be, at its core, a freedom making enterprise focused on abolition practice, we contend that an expanded understanding of reparations that draws from abolition democracy is necessary (Du Bois 2004). Abolition praxis, at a basic level, is “resistance to organized abandonment” (Gilmore 2020). Abandonment, broadly defined, can refer to removing jobs, schools, institutions, factories, or communities’ benefits and can take various and distinct forms depending on the specific geographic conditions present in specific places and times (ibid.). As we outline, abandonment is not only central to the Lehman story, but is the key to understanding how capital works. As a result, we see abolition practice as the effort to “seek liberated life-ways through a commitment to radical place-making” (Heynen and Ybarra 2020). Radical place-making in relation to reparations is necessarily focused on the landscape and how abolition practice can resist abandonment and variegated landscapes of difference and posit new human-centred ways of being. To understand how abolition practice is central to reparations, we discuss what Katherine McKittrick (2014) describes as the “mathematics of black life”. Arguing the archival record of slavery is a “death sentence” and “a tomb to display a violated body, an inventory of property”, she documents the ways the archive, through ledgers, court documents, and other artifacts of dispossession, locates the “slave’s status as object-commodity, or purely economic cargo” thus foreclosing the slave subject’s humanity and reinforcing and affirming Blackness as always and everywhere dying (McKittrick 2014:17). This not only obscures the humanity of Black peoples but, in myriad ways, locates contemporary blackness within an anti-black knowledge framework that always and everywhere renders contemporary “black subjects as less than human” (McKittrick 2014:18). Saidiya Hartman (2008), in her work Lose your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, argues that processes of abandonment, what Ruth Wilson Gilmore (2002:16) describes as racism’s “death-dealing displacements”, are located within a political arithmetic begun during slavery, but that continues to impact Black communities today. In other words, the abandonment of Black humanity is not only a precondition for creating differences and naturalising the abandonment of place that is at the heart of racial capital, as we illustrate through our work on Lehman Brothers, but it is the way slavery has an afterlife, the way slavery continues to structure modern workings of racism that are central to the processes of abandonment themselves (Hartman 2008). Thus the mathematics of slavery is both “a numerical moment through which anti-blackness came to underwrite post-slave emancipation promises” and a moment that un-numerically provides “the conditions through which many Black subjectivities articulated an anti-colonial practice that did not (and cannot and does not) twin the emancipatory terms that set blackness free” (McKittrick 2014:20). The duality between the actual material realities of slavery and the cost owed to the enslaved, coupled with realities that the full cost and weight owed for slavery can never be fully calculated, sits at the heart of reparations debates. Put differently, in the years after the US Civil War, efforts to collect back wages, land redistribution schemes, and efforts to provide access to educational resources were central to debates around reparations. These efforts were grounded in a kind of mathematics of redistribution that sought to make good on centuries of stolen labour and the reality that slavery had left large swaths of African American communities devoid of financial capital. Building on the insights of Katherine McKittrick and Saidiya Hartman, respectively, we argue a limit to this kind of calculation, used to compute, understand and determine a kind of actuarial accrual of wrong that animates much of the historical and contemporary understanding of reparations for the enslaved. These accountings largely leave untouched the violences inherent in a system built through anti-Black racism. As McKittrick (2014:16) argues, the accounting that stands in for traditional understandings of reparations is “filled with bodies that can only come into being vis-avis racial-sexual violence; the documents and ledgers and logs that narrate the brutalities of this history give birth to new world blackness as they evacuate [or to use Gilmore’s term abandon] life from blackness”. Hartman (2008) argues that the end of slavery did not bring freedom, but instead brought other modes of unfreedom into being, including incarceration, new forms of colonialism, Jim Crowism as well as the continuation of processes that obscure black humanity and central to anti-Black racism. Moreover, we argue the contemporary mathematics of reparations fails to articulate, much less directly address, the continued ways that racial capital is left inscribed in the landscape, and how racial capitalism has been reiterated through processes of abandonment and the creation of variegated landscapes of difference that come to reinforce anti-Black racism and the workings of white subjectivities (Hartman 2008; Sharpe 2010). Sharpe (2010:4) notes that, within contemporary frameworks on race, Black bodies become the knowledge bearers of abandonment, whereas white bodies are marked through an “exuberant freedom”. The duality of this dilemma, the latent spatialisations of slavery, which McKittrick (2013) points out in her work on plantation futures, and the layered and ongoing spatial manifestations of racial capitalism, which rest uneasily within and amidst each other in the current political and spatial moment, pose questions for reparative geographical approaches that cannot be dealt with enumeratively. As our work on Lehman Brothers documents and as Gilmore notes, racial capitalism is always multi-scaled and multi-dimensional. Therefore the growth of racial capitalism within the US is tied to much larger global trade processes; the foundation stones of racialised inequity in the US are always and everywhere local and global. Further, the ongoing processes of racial capitalism represented so chillingly in the ongoing violence against Black bodies, the realities of Covid-19, and the concentration of deaths within communities of colour, as well as the continued practices of voter suppression and displacement, amongst other examples, point to the need for reparations to deal with the brutal systems of racism and white supremacy still at work in enumerating, marking and spatialising differences. A geographical case for reparations, therefore, we argue, is both spatial and temporal. It raises questions not only about how to identify the interlocking ways that white supremacy works at different geographical scales and times but most importantly, is focused on strengthening and supporting those knowledge systems and practices that animate Black freedom movements and which are foundational to the freedom aspirations of Black peoples within the US. Finally, enumerative approaches to reparations have failed to recognise and respond to the myriad ways that Black people within the United States had and did resist slavery and efforts to undermine and erase Black humanity. The “embodied cultural practice of resistance” (Wright 2020:1137) found within Black communities and institutions forged a politics of resistance that not only was lifeaffirming but was central to the development of radical abolition politics that helped to destroy the institution of slavery itself. We argue that this focus, the resistance to erasure, needs to be central to the creation of radical politics that centre practices of reparative justice. To illustrate the geographic imperative of reparations and abolition democracy we now turn towards a discussion of the Lehman brothers.

Reparations have been called the most important issue of our time. Why? Because receiving reparations would not only mean that African Americans are finally being financially compensated for the work our ancestors did to build this country, but also that the United States is finally publicly recognizing its atrocities and vowing to do better by us.

For a June 15 Twitter Space, Word In Black invited experts to discuss why reparations are crucial to the Black community and how folks can begin to get involved with organizations working toward reparations.

As officials in Washington gear up for partisan warfare over recent budget proposal, a remarkable  has persisted. Both sides are pledging to protect two of the nation’s most critical anti-poverty programs, Social Security and Medicare, acknowledging that these programs, , have been essential to protecting the well-being of millions of Americans. 

That’s good news, and it mirrors the way Congress has found bipartisan agreement in another area: infrastructure spending. Now, as the budget negotiations begin in earnest, Congress should come together over an opportunity to include plans for reducing long-term poverty with an infrastructure-type approach.

Booker first introduced baby bonds legislation in 2019, and for the past two years the idea has failed to take the spotlight. But hope for baby bonds has grown alongside the election of President Joe Biden, who has signed a slew of executive orders aimed at rebuilding American institutions to be more equitable. And after a year of historic protests that called for racial justice and equal opportunity, more Democrats may support the legislation.

Schumer, who is not one of the most progressive members of the Democratic Party, has become more vocal in his support. “Giving our youngest Americans and their working parents an economic opportunity like baby bonds would deliver strong economic relief and mark an investment in our collective future,” Schumer said in a February statement. “This legislation ... will help address inequality, establish the foundation of a solid financial future for our kids, and serve as a down payment on the milestones that too many families find are out of basic reach.”

In the May 21 issue of The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates re-opened the question of whether the United States government should pay reparations to African-Americans for the crimes of two and a half centuries of slavery, 60 years of Jim Crow-style segregation and decades more of racist housing policies, zoning and community development. His conclusion — that a great accounting of wrongs must take place, as well as a decision about how to make amends for them– has inevitably sparked disagreement. But set that aside. Imagine we have decided yes, as a society we must pay a price for these injustices, and it must be large. Those payments could well constitute the stimulus that the U.S. economy needs to take it into the next century.

To the economy, stimulus is stimulus, as long as it’s done right. Whether it is paid to a group of people based on where they live, their ethnicity or their religion might matter to politics, but to the economy, it doesn’t matter – as long as the money is put to work through either consumption or investment. The reparations-as-stimulus idea gets a short mention from Coates, who writes that:

Nationwide protests have cast a spotlight on racism and inequality in the United States. Now a major bank has put a price tag on how much the economy has lost as a result of discrimination against African Americans: $16 trillion.

Since 2000, U.S. gross domestic product lost that much as a result of discriminatory practices in a range of areas, including in education and access to business loans, according to a new study by Citigroup. It's not an insignificant number: By comparison, U.S. GDP totaled $19.5 trillion last year.

To help close the racial wealth gap, the U.S. government should pay $14 trillion in reparations to Black Americans, according to William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen, authors of “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.”

In an interview with CNBC, Darity, a Duke University professor, and Mullen, a folklorist and writer, said the federal government is financially responsible because it was culpable for the enslavement of Black Americans and legal segregation in the United States. Mullen said “the federal government was party” to both the suppression of the Black vote and in some cases the destruction of Black people’s property.

The United States has spent the past century expanding its economic power, and it shows in American families’ wealth. Despite income stagnation outside the circle of high earners, median family wealth grew from $83,000 in 1992 to $97,000 in 2016 (in 2016 dollars).1

Beyond the overall growth in top-line numbers, however, the growth in household wealth (defined as net worth—the net value of each family’s liquid and illiquid assets and debts) has not been inclusive. In wealth, black individuals, families, and communities tend to lag behind their white counterparts. Indeed, the median white family had more than ten times the wealth of the median black family in 2016 (Exhibit 1). In fact, the racial wealth gap between black and white families grew from about $100,000 in 1992 to $154,000 in 2016, in part because white families gained significantly more wealth (with the median increasing by $54,000), while median wealth for black families did not grow at all in real terms over that period.

Every time I hear that we as a nation cannot afford something — whether that might be assuring non-toxic water in Jackson and Flint or universal pre-K or an industrial policy with teeth — I have wondered how many dollars a national wealth tax might yield. So I looked the numbers up.

Wealth turns out to run way bigger than income. Our total U.S. wealth in 2021 sat at $150 trillion. Total income, combining personal income and company profits, amounted to about $25 trillion. A small wealth tax would clearly produce much more government revenue than a much larger income tax.

What if a single, cheap, easy-to-administer, and race-neutral policy could help close the country’s chasmic racial wealth gap in less than a generation?

Reader, it exists. It is called a baby-bond program. For something like $80 billion a year—roughly 2 percent of the annual federal budget, less than a tenth of the annual cost of Social Security—the United States could not only end its most pernicious forms of poverty, reduce wealth inequality, improve social mobility, foster self-sufficiency among poor families, and increase family net worth en masse, but also put black and white families on more equal footing.

Assembly Bill 3121, introduced by Assemblymember Shirley Weber and recently signed into law, creates a commission to study reparations for the enslavement of more than 4 million Africans and their descendants from 1619 to 1865. While the San Diego Branch of the NAACP applauds such a bill, this cannot be solely a California project. The true costs of slavery and the systematic racism that followed continue to reverberate, denying African Americans economic prosperity, educational opportunities, and the full panoply of rights guaranteed under the U.S. and California Constitutions.

Recent images of the Confederate flag being waved inside the Capitol building by insurrectionists who support President Donald Trump demonstrate that America has yet to confront its “original sin.” We urge President-elect Joe Biden’s new administration to follow California’s example and create a national commission to study reparations for slavery.

This article takes a hard look at U.S. history: the political, the social, and the legal landscape after the passage of the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments. The author wholeheartedly believes that the Reparations dialogue must continue. Many, including well-educated Americans, are solidly divided on this important issue and have taken the position that Reparations should be buried because American slaves are buried. In spite of the difficulties, we must study and question the societal norms that led to major changes in the United States and forge ahead to find a solution to the issues that adversely affect a major portion of America’s citizenry. Reparations have been used internationally as well as domestically and are not novel theories. The U.S. has not realized the great society that so many projected was possible for this nation. Like the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa1 after Apartheid, the U.S. must come to grips with its failures and shortcomings as they relate to a major sector of its population. Therefore, this article first examines the Thirteenth Amendment, its purposes, and failures.2 Next, the Fourteenth Amendment’s purposes and failures are analyzed.3 Third, the Fifteenth Amendment is analyzed.4 Finally, the article concludes5 that Reparations is the only remedy for the federal government’s egregious breach of the protections that are guaranteed by the Amendments. African slaves were subjected to extreme conditions, as well as continued acts of violence6 long after they were freed and in spite of major legal advances. Today, “when African Americans [descendants of the African slaves] say the word ‘reparations,’ you’d think they had suggested something completely outrageous.”7 To the chagrin of many, “the concept is legitimate.”8 Fifty billion dollars in restitution was paid by Germany to the Jews after WWII, and Japanese Americans received twenty thousand dollars from the U.S. government as a result of their confinement in camps during WWII.9 The request for “reparations aren’t some extralegal remedy that belongs to the past, but a process that is the usual means to resolve harms done by a nation against a people.10 The penumbras of the post slavery Amendments and the Government’s failure to enforce the Amendments support such a process.

But for some Black history scholars, calling such efforts reparations is a “detour” from true compensation to Black Americans.

“Local reparations are an impossibility, a virtual oxymoron,” write Duke University professor William A. Darity Jr. and arts consultant A. Kirsten Mullen in their new book The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice.

Bodine Smith turns 38 this year, and she has a lot to be proud of. She is working toward a doctorate in human resource management and a master’s in psychology, adding to the three related degrees she’s already earned. “I’ve taken up studies in these fields because there are lessons here that Black families can use to empower themselves and understand that their circumstances are not who they are,” she told me.

Striving for better understanding, however, hasn’t afforded Smith protection from the struggle that hinders her the most: At almost 40, the single mother has no savings or assets for either herself or her two young children. She is over $130,000 in debt. Her current degree costs $34,000, which she makes payments on every other week. She sees her predicament as a “generational struggle” that was handed down to her. Smith’s mother raised her and her five siblings alone and worked as a commercial driver for a bus company, earning less than $40,000 for much of her career and never accruing any savings.

Discourses on ‘global catastrophic risk’, ‘human extinction’, and similar large-scale threats are fundamentally apocalyptic: they see the collapse of currently-dominant power structures as the ‘end of the world’ and the extinction of ‘humanity’. This is a powerful and increasingly common way of conceptualizing the changing patterns of inter-relations between humans, ecologies, climates, and technologies addressed in this special issue, and it is a compelling narrative for many mainstream audiences. However, we have argued that what these discourses in fact worry about is not, in fact, the end of earth, but rather the collapse of whiteness as a formation of global power. The subjects whom they frame as under threat and as possible saviors reflect Euro-centric norms that have been conflated with ‘humanity’. Meanwhile, their underlying fears of reversal and decline, and the desire to ensure the smooth ‘forward’ trajectory of ‘human progress’ express their reliance on linear, Western time. What’s more, to protect the structures that sustain whiteness, and the powers and privileges it confers, these discourses seek to guard and impose stark racialized geographies and forms of control over Black and Brown bodies, which are viewed as drivers of ecological and social collapse. Since these discourses are designed to influence policy-makers and global publics through hegemonic cultural structures such as popular science and culture, they have the potential to exert profound influence on how ideas such as threat, risk, security, and survival are understood. As such, the next century of IR (and other) scholars and practitioners need to pay close attention to the assumptions they engender, the worlds they seek to protect, and those they work – intentionally or not – to preclude. Much of the power of white apocalyptic futurisms derives from their sense of urgency, and their assertion that there are no alternatives to ‘saving’ and/or regenerating existing power structures. To contest this assumption, we engaged with just a few contributions to the vast, multi-disciplinary sphere of BIPOC futurisms, focusing in particular on contributions to Afro-, Indigenous-, East Asian-, and Desi-futurisms. These narratives center diverse, plural forms of subjectivity attuned to other life forms and earth itself and work to create solidarities in the face of overlapping but distinct experiences of ongoing collective oppression. They embrace nonlinear and plural temporalities, making it possible to approach ecological crises as sources of open-ended renewal and regeneration rather than either decline and extinction, or the resurgence of whiteness. Further, many BIPOC futurisms embrace mobilities and geographies in which migration, nonlinear motion, adaptation and attachment to unique places crystallize in fluid, adaptive forms of community. In short, where white futurists foresee ‘the’ end of ‘the(ir)’ world, many BIPOC thinkers, makers and actors are already (and have long been) generating new worlds in the wake of the apocalypse of white domination. We need to be clear that we do not refer to the work of BIPOC futurists as resources for ‘saving’ or recuperating existing power structures. As mentioned above, our aim is not to instrumentalize these futures toward the project of ‘holding together’ IR or any other aspect of dominant power structures. On the contrary, we point to these works as evidence of the always-already active labor of world-building and flourishing that exceed the apocalypse predicted by white thinkers. As ecological crises intensify – and with them, radical right and ‘white nationalist’ movements – we urge the next century of IR scholars to interrogate the underlying anxieties that drive mainstream futurisms, and to consciously divest from systems of oppression affirmed by these imaginaries. We also encourage future IR scholars to work toward solidarities with the plural worlds that BIPOC are creating beyond ‘the end of the world’, without expecting or demanding to be ‘saved’ or even necessarily welcomed. And we urge the ‘next century’ of IR scholars to stop viewing the flourishing, resurgence, adaptation or even survival of BIPOC worlds as intolerable threats. Instead, white scholars working in this field need to begin imagining worlds beyond the apocalypse of whiteness – worlds not entirely ‘without us’, but in which oppressive constructs of ‘humanity’ are transcended, and in which other worlds can flourish.

The way to break up the concentration of wealth and power in the plutocracy is with a substantive redistributive wealth and/or estate tax. But alas, that would still leave unaddressed our unjust and reprehensible racial wealth gap, which is rooted in a history that afforded White families access to resources and the accompanying iterative and intergenerational accumulation and, in contrast, exposed Black families to a history of exploitation and extraction of their resources and personhood by government-complicit fraud, theft, and violence.

Here’s what needs to be done.

The Denouement In retrospect, the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers would compromise the Social Security Act and mar the New Deal. “Roosevelt’s program rested on the assumption that a just society could be secured by imposing a welfare state on a capitalist foundation,” observed William Leuchtenburg (1963, 165) on the eve of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, a social experiment that would prove problematic at best. “Without critically challenging the system of private profit, the New Deal reformers were employing the power of government not only to discipline business but to bolster unionization, pension the elderly, succor the crippled, give relief to the needy and extend a hand to the forgotten men” (Leuchtenburg 1963, 165). In this case, about one-third of workers during the Depression had been, quite literally, forgotten. The full impact of the failure to acknowledge the labor of agricultural and domestic workers in the South and Southwest contributed to the backwardness of the region. While the exclusion of these low-wage workers can be quantified, the monetization of their loss of benefits does not address what this income might have purchased for them individually or contributed to these regions economically. While workers in other parts of America were enjoying the benefits of running water, flush toilets, electric refrigerators, automobile travel, plummeting disease and infant mortality rates, and increasing longevity, those in the South and Southwest continued to rely on hauling water from the pump, using the privy, eating an unhealthy diet due to absence of refrigeration, traveling by foot or wagon, and experiencing high rates of disease, child deaths, and significantly shorter longevity. Life in the rural South and Southwest was Hobbesian compared to the industrialized regions the nation. Denied a pension, the minority poor had to resort to minimal public assistance, which, once it became too burdensome for state governments, would be conditioned on a work requirement, a blatant contradiction that escaped the scrutiny of prominent poverty analysts. For a withholding tax as little as $5.00 a year, individual workers could have been provided a public pension of $240 annually, which would have afforded them a modicum of comfort, security, and dignity. In aggregate, the amount would have been comparable to a domestic Marshall Plan, jump-starting the economy of a poverty belt that spanned the South and Southwest. The order of magnitude represented by these benefits—$771.26 billion in 2023 dollars between the inception of Social Security in 1935 and the amendments of the early 1950s—approximates for the South and Southwest what Congress appropriated as a stimulus to the entire nation to address the Great Recession. Historically, then, the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security is not just another event in an American tableau of second-class citizenship for minorities of color, although it is certainly that. Sandwiched between Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement and extended through welfare reform of 1996 and health reform of 2010, this exclusion replicated diminished citizenship for Blacks and Hispanics through education, welfare, and healthcare, which continues. Reparations The denial of a public pension for minority domestic and agricultural workers provides justification for reparations, as Ta-nehisi Coates contended, The omnibus programs passed under the Social Security Act in 1935 were crafted in such a way as to protect the southern way of life. Old-age insurance (Social Security proper) and unemployment insurance excluded farmworkers and domestics—jobs heavily occupied by blacks black people. When President Roosevelt signed Social Security into law in 1935, 65 percent of African Americans nationally and between 70 and 80 percent in the South were ineligible. The NAACP protested, calling the new American safety net “a sieve with holes just big enough for the majority of Negroes to fall through.” For skeptics, the case for reparations based on slavery, which was validated by reparations for Japanese interred during World War II, is problematic due to absence of specific information on those harmed; however, this is belied by government data on the denial of pensions to minority workers during the early years of Social Security. Subsequently, red-lining and other forms of discrimination compromised the prosperity of families of color, also providing data on which to make a moral claim. Recently, some localities and states have considered offering reparations for African Americans, but a national plan has yet to emerge. A logical point of departure would be to revisit the denial of Social Security benefits to Black agricultural and domestic workers. Local archives, charitable organizations, and heirloom photographs could identify family members who would have been eligible for benefits. Retroactively, those forfeited benefits should be indexed for inflation and paid to heirs. And those payments should also be paid to whites, Latinos, and others denied a public pension during the early years of Social Security. Many historians of Black America have observed that the issue of reparations is complex, pitting the past against the present and identity groups against one another, both compounded by different levels of government. Yet, precedent serves as a catalyst: payment to Japanese Americans interned during the Second World War. Accordingly, legislation has been introduced to assist children of African Americans denied benefits under the GI Bill. Social Security should be added to this legacy. “The arc of the moral universe is long,” observed Martin Luther King, Jr., “but it bends toward justice.” Now that the amount forfeited by predominantly Black agricultural and domestic workers has been determined, a just next step is to identify who should be compensated.

The Aftermath The millions of workers excluded from Social Security would haunt future social policy. Having struggled through the Depression, many laborers found themselves redundant due to the mechanization of agriculture. Whether in the form of the cotton picker of the Delta or the tractor powered by an internal combustion engine that became a fixture in American agriculture, millions of laborers were no longer necessary on farms that predominated in the South and Southwest. While sharecroppers were quickly dispossessed, tenant farmers, unable to access credit to purchase the equipment essential to plant and harvest crops, were similarly unnecessary. Denied Social Security benefits and finding welfare assistance minimal, if available at all, millions of rural workers sought work elsewhere, the urgency of their search in large measure by government design. Harassed by Jim Crow, Negroes fled to cities of the North—Chicago, New York City, Detroit—the Black Diaspora populating black ghettoes, while whites often moved West, chronicled by John Steinbeck’s (1939) novel The Grapes of Wrath, which won the National Book Award as well as a Pulitzer Prize. The circumstances of black families migrating North would have been intimately familiar to a lad from an Irish family in New York City during the 1940s. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s father had abandoned the family, leaving his mother to scrape together earnings from teaching at a women’s correctional institution, working as a nurse, and occasionally relying on public assistance. The family’s frequent moves included slums, even Hell’s Kitchen, until the young Moynihan took advantage of the GI Bill and became a student of public policy. Receiving a master’s degree from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and a doctorate from the London School of Economics, Moynihan’s focus was on labor policy. Inserting himself in New York City politics, Moynihan sought a position in the new Johnson administration, where he hoped to expand job opportunities through the War on Poverty. As an assistant in the Labor Department, Moynihan sought to leverage social policy in order to preempt a burgeoning Civil Rights Movement that had become associated with urban riots. At the same time Moynihan wanted to position himself for a run for President of the City Council of New York (Patterson 2010). In March 1965, one hundred copies of The Negro Family: A Case for National Action were printed, without authorship, and distributed surreptitiously within the Johnson administration. By the summer of 1965, the “Moynihan report” was provoking debate within the administration as well as academic circles due to its focus on the disorganization of African American family life as a cause of persistent poverty. Illegitimacy, crime, and alcoholism subverted normal family life; conspicuously absent was a father figure to discipline children, particularly boys. Absent discipline necessary to navigate a way out of poverty, Moynihan contended, poor black families produced irresponsible young men who had little education and limited job prospects and young women who became pregnant to sustain their families through welfare. Replicating family disorganization attributed to slavery, Moynihan worried about generational poverty distinguishing black families from the American mainstream (Moynihan 1965). The Moynihan Report generated a firestorm, inflaming liberals, while animating conservatives who had long been skeptical about welfare. Liberal critics accused Moynihan of blaming African American mothers for their impoverished families. Moreover, even though he cited contemporary data to substantiate his argument, liberals noted that Moynihan neglected to propose solutions. Conservatives found validation in Moynihan’s analysis, later configuring “behavioral poverty” subsidized by government welfare programs in perverse synergy. During the 1980s, conservative intellectuals would inveigh against government welfare, George Gilder (1981, 118) stating the poor needed “the spur of their own poverty,” and Charles Murray (1984) advocating the termination of all government supports for welfare recipients of working age. Ultimately, Lawrence Mead (1986) would propose a “new paternalism” through which government would deny benefits to poor women who refused to work and had children out of wedlock in order to integrate them into the mainstream. Together, these would be harbingers of the welfare reform debate of the mid-1990s. Conspicuously absent in Moynihan’s monograph is any recognition of the role played by excluding almost one-third of low-wage workers, particularly Black domestic and agricultural workers, from provisions of the Social Security Act during its early years.11 The third part of the Moynihan Report, “The Roots of the Problem,” focused on the matriarchal family that evolved from slavery, the emasculation of Black males with Jim Crow, then skipped forward to the disorganized black family in urban ghettoes, which was attributed to high levels of black unemployment, especially among young men. A striking omission for a labor scholar, Moynihan failed to acknowledge how government’s refusal to provide pensions to low-wage workers contributed to economic desperation, evident in family disorganization. Ultimately, ignorance of the exclusion of agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security would place liberals on the defensive, struggling to refute conservative critics of welfare, who contended that imprudent behavior was the cause of minority poverty. Had he been better informed, Moynihan could have charted a more compassionate course for public policy, recognizing that low-income, minority households, having been excluded from social program supports, included workers who were left to fend for themselves in a Darwinian labor market. Eventually, the default in welfare reform would be a disciplinary regime that not only targeted single mothers but also excluded the fathers of their children. The irony of the Moynihan Report would be that its author, elected to the U.S. Senate, would find himself disagreeing with a Democratic President about welfare reform during the 1990s. Himself a product of a low-income, disorganized home, Bill Clinton would become a Rhodes Scholar and, after losing the governorship of Arkansas in 1978, regained it in 1982 and served for a decade until his election as President in 1992. During Clinton’s governorship, Ronald Reagan had pioneered welfare reform, convincing Congress to pass the Family Support Act in 1988. While the outcomes of Reagan welfare reform would be disappointing for conservatives, the waivers granted to states induced them to experiment with alternatives to the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC), the family welfare entitlement. An ambitious politician, Clinton sought a welfare reform waiver from the Reagan administration, and subsequently established Arkansas WORKS, a mandatory welfare-towork program. An evaluation of Arkansas WORKS revealed that it cost $118 per recipient, which was recovered by reduced expenditures for AFDC of $167.67 annually for each participant during the first three years of the program. Notably, AFDC recipients benefited only $242.33 in increased earnings annually about $0.12 per hour, hardly enough to become self-sufficient (Gueron and Pauly 1991). But the savings to government, multiplied by the number of Arkansas AFDC families, 20,000 in 1988 (US Department of Health and Human Services 2004), yielded $3.5 million in savings, half of which would be credited to the State of Arkansas, a tidy sum for a small state. Compared to other state welfare-to-work programs, Arkansas WORKS performed better with respect to government benefit reductions as well as increased earnings, minimal as those would be, leading Governor Clinton to conclude that welfare reform was a winner politically. Presidential candidate Clinton would include in his platform, “ending welfare as we know it.” In the debate leading to passage of the 1996 welfare reform law, President Clinton encountered an indignant Senator Moynihan who objected to altering AFDC in line with a Republican plan, which included converting the entitlement to a discretionary program, devolving it to the states, conditioning benefits on specific behaviors, and establishing a life-time cap on receipt of benefits. Clinton, however, realized the benefits of Arkansas WORKS, and was on the cusp of a reelection campaign, so he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, effectively ending the family cash entitlement and securing reelection. By social policy standards, the consequences were profound: caseloads crashed. Between 1994 and 2002, caseloads plummeted, especially in the South: Alabama 64.2 percent, Florida 76.1 percent, Georgia 62.0 percent, Louisiana 72.7 percent, Mississippi 69.0 percent, North Carolina 62.5 percent, South Carolina 60.1 percent, Virginia 59.8 percent (US House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means 2004, table 7-7). In many states, cash assistance dwindled, dropping from $117.00 per month in 1996 for a family of three in Mississippi to $101.00 in 1998, in Alabama from $144.00 to $140.00, respectively (US House of Representatives, Committee on Ways and Means 2004, 7-36). If the War on Poverty marked a new front to assist the poor for many low-income families in the South, welfare reform represented a retreat, and a protracted retreat at that. Two decades after welfare reform 1.5 million American households, including 3 million children, were scrambling to get by on less than $2.00 per day (Edin and Shaefer 2015). Significantly, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), AFDC’s successor, declined dramatically, at inception providing benefits to 68 out of every 100 eligible families in 1996 to 27 eligible poor families in 2010 (Trisi and Pavetti 2012). Much of the caseload collapse would be attributed to increasingly punitive eligibility requirements, sanctions that ejected entire families from assistance, and the belief among low-income families that welfare was not available for them, despite their technical eligibility. Any summary of poverty in the U.S. must acknowledge the interplay between social insurance, such as Social Security, and public assistance, such as TANF. For policy analysts, this distinction accounts for an awkwardness imposed by federalism; but for the poor, the distinction has been poignant. The Social Security Act denied millions of poor households a public pension that was available to other workers, forcing them to rely on public assistance, or welfare, which was initially non-existent or minimal. When welfare uptake became too objectionable, politicians, Democrats and Republicans alike, resorted to a work regime, paradoxically the very norm that government had violated by excluding agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security. Denied a public pension, the minority poor would be effectively denied welfare, as well, ironically through the imposition of the TANF work mandate. Denied TANF, an increasing number of families cobbled together incomes by means that were illegal as regards federal welfare programs, including selling Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits, doubling-up in Section 8 apartment units, and generating unreported income through scavenging for scrap metal, selling blood plasma, engaging in prostitution, and selling drugs, their 21st century living conditions mirroring those of 20th century farm workers, debased lives then and now. As before, their numbers are disproportionately minorities.12 The sad tale of excluding agricultural and domestic workers from Social Security, which has been replicated in the denial of welfare benefits to the poor, would continue with the most recent addition to the American welfare state: the Affordable Care Act (ACA). Designed to universalize healthcare, the 2010 ACA included a mandatory expansion of Medicaid for the poor. In National Federation of Independent Business v. Sibelius, however, the Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that the Medicaid expansion would be optional; states could not be required to expand health care to the poor despite billions of dollars in federal subsidies to underwrite program expansion.13 By 2023, eleven states had rejected the expansion of Medicaid—most in the former Confederacy—effectively denying access to healthcare to their disproportionately minority poor.14