Racial wealth inequality is baked into US history. Slavery, segregation, and mass incarceration have stripped wealth from African American communities. A UBI+ begins to address this by recognizing that unequal wealth is based on racist hoarding and building coalitions to address it.

Why? More importantly, today’s wealthiest Americans benefit either directly from African Americans’ disadvantaged position in our political economy, or indirectly as a result of the cumulative benefits to our nation from centuries of exploiting black bodies. For the first 25 decades of this country, we relied on racially-based slave labor to build the wealth of this country. For the next 10 decades after the Civil War, we relied on “slavery by another name”: Jim Crow. It’s been only 5 decades since the Civil Rights Movement in the long sweep of American history. 25–10–5: we can all do the math. Black Americans helped build the co-owned wealth of our nation (our infrastructure and banking, legal, and patent systems) and were denied access to our share of it (land, sky, and other natural resources). Even if African Americans receive an equal income with whites, tapping wealth hoarded by racist means and distributing it universally effectively amounts to targeted redistribution. Most importantly, a campaign around a racially inclusive UBI is a potential opportunity for creating the political will within Black communities and across racial and ethnic divides in American politics to win. Public opinion around economic redistribution has always been higher among black Americans relative to the rest of the population, and initial polling and focus groups around support for a UBI in the U.S. suggests this pattern still holds. Thus, a UBI+ proposal could become a bridge to the increasingly salient demand for reparations and reinvestment emerging from the Movement for Black Lives. And, if nothing else, it serves as a stronger starting progressive bargaining position in political fights over UBI.