The aff is key to reversing that.

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.