Aff - SSI Reparations - Michigan 7 2023 CFMP

AFF---Reparations---CFMLP
1AC
1AC---Reparations Advantage
The advantage is REPARATIONS.
The afterlife of slavery manifests itself in unequal wealth distribution among black and brown populations and racialized wealth gaps – the plan’s congressional framework for reparational redistribution solves.
Dennis 20(Ashley Dennis is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of African American Studies at Northwestern University. She researches US history, specifically Black women educators in Northern cities during the mid-twentieth century, 10-8-2020, "Mapping a Plan for Reparations in the Twenty-First Century," AAIHS, https://www.aaihs.org/mapping-a-plan-for-reparations-in-the-twenty-first-century/)//BRownRice
As the U.S. reckons with systemic racism in the wake of global protests over the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, reparations for Black people has resurfaced as a part of the solution to racial injustice and has gained support at unprecedented levels in modern history. The city of Asheville, NC recently joined Evanston, IL in approving reparations for its Black residents, while places such as Seattle, WA; Providence, RI; and the state of California consider implementing reparation programs. Thus, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century is a timely and vital contribution to national discussions about reparations. William Darity, the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University, and Kirsten Mullen, a writer, folklorist, museum consultant, and lecturer, force readers to confront how anti-Black racism has and continues to impede the financial well-being of African Americans and provide a blueprint for addressing these injustices. More specifically, they base their demand for reparations on the egregious injustices of slavery, Jim Crow, and ongoing systematic racial inequality in housing, education, police brutality, mass incarceration, employment discrimination, and prodigious wealth and opportunity gaps.
From Here to Equality is divided into six parts. Darity and Mullen first present a political history of the Black reparations movement in the U.S. and highlight the current wealth gap between Black people and white people. They then provide a cogent historical overview of the grave historical injustices, from slavery to the present, that led to the wealth gap. The authors demonstrate that the nation had the opportunity to right its wrongs against Black people at numerous junctures throughout history, but instead the country intentionally prolonged their economic exploitation and oppression. The authors then tackle common criticisms of reparations and outline a concrete plan for its execution to solve the wealth gap. Throughout the book, references to reparations claims, or settlements in different contexts, support their argument that reparations are not only necessary and feasible but also have precedents. This includes the U.S. government’s allocation of reparations to Japanese Americans wrongfully imprisoned during World War II and the German government’s provision of reparations for Nazi Holocaust victims.
Darity and Mullen’s most significant contribution to the literature on reparations is the final section of the book where the authors compile and respond to the most common concerns about reparations and provide a detailed plan for its implementation. They provide concise, insightful rebuttals to dismissals of reparations, most of which are drenched in racism, in a clear question and answer format. For example, in response to the ignorant assertion that Black people “have already received reparations in the form of an abundance of welfare monies and funds from other social programs,” Darity and Mullen point out that social programs were initially designed in the 1930s to exclude black people (264). They dispense with the myth that Black people make up the majority of recipients of federal aid. Moreover, they argue that the purpose of benefits was not to solve historical and contemporary injustices against Black Americans. In response to those wondering about reparations for Black immigrants or other minority groups, the authors reiterate that the book’s objective is to offer reasons for reparations for Black Americans. “We have no doubt,” they assert, “that other groups may have legitimate claims, and we urge them to bring forward their cases” (250).
From Here to Equality Darity and Mullen take their scholarship one step further by providing a detailed reparations program for Black Americans. They address the program’s essential factors, including who should pay, who should receive, the quantity of the debt owed, and how the plan would work. Darity and Mullen argue that the federal government, not individual perpetrators, are responsible for payments because the entire political order “bears responsibility for sanctioning, maintaining, and enabling slavery, legal segregation, and continued racial inequality” (257). Given that broad popular support is necessary for the successful implementation of reparations, they posit that the U.S. Congress is best suited to govern the program. The legislative branch should begin with establishing a commission that examines the history of racial injustice in the U.S., the findings of which could be salient in garnering broad support for the reparations project. They note that Congressional approval of H.R.40, which calls for a congressional commission to examine slavery and its intergenerational impacts and determine the practicality of restitution, could be an important step towards reparations.
Regarding eligibility, the authors argue for two criteria. One, eligible participants have to be U.S. citizens who can prove that they had at least one ancestor who was enslaved in the U.S. after its founding. Two, eligible participants also have to present documentation that they identified as Black at least twelve years before either the start of the reparations program or the creation of a congressional or presidential reparations commission, based on which initiative comes first. The second criterion would prevent people who spent their life ‘passing’ for another racial group from taking advantage of the benefits of the program. These are helpful starting points; however, several questions remain. For example, who would pay for the genealogical research required for Black people to prove their eligibility? What about gaps in the archive? Are formerly enslaved and freed people in the U.S. who migrated to other countries, including Liberia, Canada, and Ghana, to escape racial violence in the U.S. ineligible for restitution for wealth stolen from their ancestors during slavery and the Jim Crow era?
Because the authors regard the racial wealth gap as “the most robust indicator of the cumulative economic effects of white supremacy” in the U.S., they favor economic models that determine the monetary value of reparations based on the racial wealth gap. These estimates put the financial portion of the reparations bill at $10.7 trillion, or an average payment of approximately $267,000 per person for 40 million eligible descendants of enslaved Americans.
Specifically, COVID has ushered us into a new age of fiscal antiblackness – black economic mobility and progressive wealth tax are key to reverse the trend.
Zewde and Hamilton 20(NAOMI ZEWDE is an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy at the City University of New York and a research fellow at the Roosevelt Institute, DARRICK HAMILTON is the incoming Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and University Professor at The New School., 8-26-2020, "Truth and Redistribution," https://www.yesmagazine.org/issue/black-lives/2020/08/26/racial-wealth-gap-black-power)//BRownRice
The protests in every city rallying against police killings and racialized violence directed at Black bodies are inseparable from the economic conditions that Black communities are facing. The fact that a Black man can be killed by a law enforcement officer over an approximately 10-minute period with a knee on his neck in broad daylight while repeatedly screaming for mercy, and that he can’t breathe, speaks to a larger political economy that devalues people’s lives based on their race or ethnicity.
Black Americans, because of racialized stigma and their economic and political position, are not only more vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence, but to a global pandemic as well. Their diminished political position is evidenced by their exposure to unjust police violence, and their economic vulnerability is made most vivid by the persistent and unjust racial wealth gap that leaves Black families with few resources to address a shock like the COVID-19 pandemic. Moreover, the overall public response to the pandemic and to broader economic insecurity has been highly racialized. Black lives are devalued in our economy and our fiscal policies reflect that.
In a nutshell, our racial dilemma is grounded in a political, economic, and identity-based devaluing of Black lives that has persisted ever since the first enslaved African arrived in Jamestown in 1619. The ensuing history of the United States is built on both racial and economic injustice, two related but distinct problems.
These racial and economic injustices, while entrenched, can be addressed. Below are three complementary policies that can make meaningful progress toward undoing centuries of systemic inequities, while prospectively ensuring capital access going forward: (1) Reparations through which the nation acknowledges and redresses its exploitation and extraction of Black resources and personhood; (2) Baby Bonds (publicly funded trust accounts) to establish a birthright to capital; and (3) a wealth tax to break up the concentration of wealth among the capitalist elite and diffuse the political power that goes along with such concentration.
Contingent gains have missed the boat with the racial wealth gap – absent a solid foundation for future wealth accumulation and mobility via redistribution, inequality only snowballs.
Rosalsky 22(Greg Rosalsky, June 14 2022, Why The Racial Wealth Gap Is So Hard To Close, https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2022/06/14/1104660659/why-the-racial-wealth-gap-is-so-hard-to-close)//BRownRice
It's been almost 160 years since Union General William T. Sherman led 60,000 soldiers on his "March to the Sea," a scorched-earth campaign through Georgia aimed at bringing the American Civil War to a quicker end. Shortly after, Sherman met with a group of black ministers in Savannah to discuss the future. With slavery over and the war coming to a close, these community leaders told Sherman what their newly freed people wanted: land. Land, after all, was then the most important form of wealth, the key to a more prosperous life.
Four days after the meeting, on January 16, 1865, Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, which confiscated from Confederate landowners about 400,000 acres along the coast, stretching from Charleston, South Carolina, down to St. John's River in Florida. The order, which received President Abraham Lincoln's approval, redistributed that land — in 40 acre parcels — to newly freed slaves. Later, Sherman ordered that the Union Army lend these new landowners mules to help them harvest their land. And that's how we got the well-known phrase: "40 acres and a mule."
But, a few months after approving Special Field Order No. 15, Lincoln was assassinated. And his successor, Andrew Johnson, was a turncoat. He quickly began reversing pro-Black policies of the Lincoln Administration, including the policy of redistributing 400,000 acres of Confederate land to freed slaves. Johnson returned the land to the white Southern planters who originally owned it, and America's freed slaves were never compensated for centuries of exploitation and oppression.
"Thus, the efforts to provide the freedman with land and tools ended, and by 1870 he was left to shift for himself amid new and dangerous social surroundings," wrote the scholar W.E.B. Du Bois in 1901. "No such curious and reckless experiment in emancipation has been made in modern times."
[Editor's note: This is an excerpt of Planet Money's newsletter. You can sign up here.]
Fittingly, economists Ellora Derenoncourt, Chi Hyun Kim, Moritz Kuhn, and Moritz Schularick begin their new study about the racial wealth gap with this quote from Du Bois. The study is the first to construct a long-run dataset on racial wealth disparities, extending from 2020 all the way back to 1860, the eve of the Civil War. It's titled "Wealth of Two Nations: The U.S. Racial Wealth Gap, 1860-2020."
This new study adds to a growing body of evidence showing that, despite ostensible progress made since the civil rights movement, when it comes to the most important, bread-and-butter economic issues of income, wealth, and mobility, progress in ending racial inequality is stalling — or even reversing. The study brings into focus the simple math of why — absent radical measures — America won't be seeing true racial equality anytime soon.
Wealth Of Two Nations
Ellora Derenoncourt is a young economist who has burst into the limelight of econ nerdom with a series of eye-opening papers about racial inequality. She completed her PhD in economics from Harvard in 2019, and, last year, she was appointed by Princeton University as an assistant professor. She's the founder and director of Princeton's Program For Research On Inequality.
Derenoncourt was kind enough to walk us through her new study on a Zoom call. When we asked her about the long-run pattern of racial wealth inequality she and her colleagues have uncovered, she turned to her white board and drew a picture. The vertical axis of the graph is the degree of racial wealth inequality (the ratio of white-to-Black wealth). And the horizontal axis is years.
Describing the data pattern as a "hockey-stick shape" (with the hockey stick lying on its handle), Derenoncourt showed that the degree of wealth inequality between white and Black people was extremely high in 1860 and then rapidly plunged through the late 19th and early 20th centuries. From 1950 onward, however, it has remained pretty flat. That is, there's been virtually no progress in closing the wealth gap. In fact, the study finds, since the 1980s, the gap has been widening.
Let's start back in 1860. This was before Emancipation, when about 4 million of the 4.4 million Black people in America were enslaved. Slavery robbed the vast majority of Black Americans of the ability amass wealth and pass it on to their children. They themselves were a form of wealth — other people's wealth. In this barbaric world, the ratio of white-to-Black wealth was 56 to 1. Said in a different way, for every dollar the average white person had, the average Black person had only about 2 cents.
Despite President Johnson rescinding the 40-acres-and-a-mule order, Black Americans made huge progress reducing the wealth gap in the first years after Emancipation. By 1870, just five years after passage of the slavery-abolishing 13th Amendment, the white-to-Black wealth gap dropped to 23 to 1, less than half what it was.
Why did the racial wealth gap fall so quickly? One reason is the effect the Civil War and abolition had on white slaveowners. Enslaved people had been a huge form of wealth — about 15% of the total wealth of white America in 1860. Hence, their liberation reduced the average wealth of white America, thereby shrinking the racial wealth gap.
However, Derenoncourt and her colleagues calculate that only about 25% of the drop in the racial wealth gap can be explained by white slaveowners' losses. Instead, they find, most of the reduction was the result of newly freed people being able to earn, save, invest, and amass wealth for the first time.
As inspiring as the story is of an oppressed people embracing freedom and working hard to build a better life for themselves against all odds, it's also important to note that a large part of the reason for the steep decline in the racial wealth gap in these early years reflects some simple math. When one group starts off with basically zero wealth, even tiny gains in wealth look huge. When the denominator (the bottom part of the fraction) of the white-to-Black ratio goes from nothing to something, wealth inequality falls sharply.
It's largely for this reason that the economists find that, despite the failure of Reconstruction, the imposition of Jim Crow apartheid, and the countless other stomach-churning injustices perpetuated against Black Americans in this era, the first 50 years after Emancipation saw the greatest progress in narrowing the racial wealth gap in American history. What had been a 56-to-1 wealth gap fell to a 10-to-1 gap by 1920. That is, by 1920, for every dollar the average White American had, Black Americans had about ten cents.
A hundred years ago, it might have looked like Black Americans were on the fast-track to closing the wealth gap with white Americans. However, progress has slowed since then, and starting in the 1980s, the gap began widening.
The Racial Wealth Gap In Modern Times
Despite all the ostensible progress Black Americans made in politics, business, and culture in the mid-to-late 20th and early 21st centuries, the economists find there's been very little progress in closing the average racial wealth gap since 1950. By 1950, the ratio of white-to-Black wealth fell to 7 to 1. Today, it's 6 to 1. For every dollar the average white American has, the average Black American has only about 17 cents. (For those wondering about the median, it's even worse: for every dollar the median white household has, the median Black household has just 10 cents).
How could this be? Haven't Black Americans made a bunch of progress since the civil rights movement? Why hasn't that translated into big gains in wealth?
To help explain what's going on, Derenoncourt and her colleagues conduct a thought experiment. They create a sort of dream simulation to see what the racial wealth gap would look like had Black Americans lived in a more equal world post-Emancipation and had been able to amass wealth at the same exact rate as white Americans. That is, starting at the extreme level of wealth inequality we saw in 1860, the simulation shows what the racial wealth gap would look like had Black Americans been able to achieve identical rates in savings and capital gains. Such a scenario would have required overcoming segregation, discrimination in labor markets, scars from slavery and concentrated poverty, exclusions from social welfare programs, barriers to buying homes in nice neighborhoods, hurdles to obtaining bank accounts, loans, stock portfolios, and so on.
The economists find that in this more equal dream world, the white-to-Black wealth ratio today would be 3 to 1, as opposed to 6 to 1. That's a pretty huge difference. It's half as much wealth inequality. Yet, the average Black American would still only have a third of the wealth of the average white American.
Even with all the benefits bestowed to Black people in this dream scenario, Derenoncourt says, the graph of the evolution of racial wealth inequality still has the same "hockey-stick" shape that they observe with the real-world data. That is, wealth inequality falls sharply after Emancipation, and then around the mid-20th century, progress in closing the gap slows considerably. That's because of the math of trying to close the wealth ratio.
"If you start with something in the denominator that's very small, which is how we started this whole experiment in Emancipation, then the initial increases in that denominator are going to have the biggest effects on that ratio," Derenoncourt says. "And then over time, the rate of convergence is just going to get smaller and smaller."
The reality is it takes time to amass wealth

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