Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved(Thomas Craemer, Trevor Smith, Brianna Harrison, Trevon Logan, Wesley Bellamy, and William Darity Jr., The Review of Black Poilitical Economy)
Reparations to African Americans and now the African American slave descendants are long overdue. State sponsored slavery and discrimination are two major reasons as to why this debt is owed to Black Americans. These injustices have since created an environment within the economy where a host of inequalities that have hindered and hinder African-Americans from accumulating wealth a livable level of income and wealth. These include but are not limited to, colonial slavery, U.S. slavery, post-Civil War massacres, Jim Crow Era discrimination, New Deal Discrimination, WWII segregation and post-Civil Rights discrimination, and more. Craemer et al. suggests that a reparations program would help close this gap and help neutralize the intergenerational wealth gap. While he provides estimates for three types of reparation plans: land-based, price-based, and wage-based, this paper seeks to refute traditionally held beliefs of opponents of reparations for African-Americans.
