Monetary payments aren’t sufficient to solve — checks can’t transform structures and they strip black communities of autonomy in their own liberation

That might look like enacting a basic income policy with a tiered structure that corresponds to wealth status and historic disadvantage. Bhattacharya cites an idea conceived by Community Change president Dorian Warren (who’s also one of the cofounders of the Economic Security Project, which advocates for and enacts poverty-alleviating programs), called universal + basic income. The model calls for an additional payment to be given to black families on top of a standard stipend distributed to all families that qualify for the program. “The ‘plus model’ acknowledges that the wealth created in the U.S. is inextricably linked to black labor, sweat, and tears, and this community has never received the benefits created from that labor,” Bhattacharya writes. The additional payment could be determined by looking at the gap between white and black wealth and applying a proportional extra stipend to the lump sum. A similar approach could be taken to address gender wealth inequities, Bhattacharya says. Reparations are often discussed as a one-and-done project: a single payment dispersed to black families to account for the cascading disadvantages of slavery. “But there’s no silver bullet for reparations,” Bhattacharya says. “Money is important, but if every black person gets a million-dollar check, at the end of the day that’s not going to transform our economy.” Building a racial justice element into a program like a basic income would force a sustained engagement with inequality in the U.S., and allow for the way we address it to evolve over time. It’s also important, she adds, that programs like this be designed with the communities they’re designed to reach. How the money is distributed, whether it be an annual lump sum or monthly payments, should be a choice, Bhattacharya says. The idea behind a “plus model” of a basic income is to equip women and people of color with enough money to lift them out of poverty—that’s covered in the basic stipend that would go to all families struggling economically. But the additional payment on top of the basic income would enable people long disadvantaged in the economy to start building up wealth through savings and assets like homeownership. “Wealth is always the north star,” Bhattacharya says. “We have to get folks to the same space so they have wealth, so they have agency, they have choice and self-determination—that’s the exciting conversation.” But, she adds, if a program like a targeted basic income is to be successful in the U.S., the country has to dramatically reform the systems that keep people of color and women disadvantaged today. Giving single mothers additional cash resources, Bhattacharya says, won’t go too far if paid leave and supported childcare remain so lacking in the U.S. And if the criminal justice system continues incarcerating black and brown people at the rate it does today—which poses a significant barrier to wealth accumulation—the additional money to those communities will not make the intended difference. “Putting money into people’s pockets through government interventions won’t mean anything if that money is taken by the government with the other hand,” Bhattacharya says.