Black Working Class Research Articles

Creating Racial Structural Solidarity

This article draws on recent transnational protests against police brutality to advance an understanding of anti-racist solidarity that aims to improve over Mara Marin’s ‘structural solidarity’ view. On Marin’s view, anti-racist solidarity is grounded in the racial structure. But Marin forgets that racial domination exerts a segregative influence on different groups, so that whites and middle-class blacks tend not to frequent the social milieux that would help them develop a sense of solidarity with working-class blacks. To address this problem, the article hypothesises that the conditions for anti-racist solidarity are not inherent in the racial structure but created by social movements, as exemplified by Black Lives Matter: to the extent that white and middle-class black participants in the George Floyd protests experienced the racist police brutality they were denouncing on behalf of the black working class, these protests functioned as non-segregated milieux that could ground the solidarity of the former with the latter at the national and transnational levels.

Digital Platforms and the Maintenance of the Urban Order

Abstract Neighborhood digital platforms – such as Nextdoor, Citizen, Neighbors, anti-crime Facebook groups, Ring surveillance technology, and 311 see-click-fix applications – are recent entrants into urban life. Existing accounts suggest they help build intra-community relationships, but that they also amplify paranoia, racism, and carceral impulses of American homeowners. We ask: how is the new technology increasing solidarity and exclusionary impulses, and what role does it play in the changing American urban landscape? Using offline and online ethnography of one community’s year-long contestation over public space, we find that three effects of the platforms help explain the maintenance of urban order in this case. First, the platforms push residents to see disparate instances of urban disorder as a linked manifestation of organized crime. Second, the platforms help to turn fleeting and uncorroborated accounts into durable events that foster community efficacy. Third, by increasing perceptions of urban disorder and greater community efficacy, the platforms facilitate the accrual of offline material resources. We suggest that in highly contested areas of American cities – areas where wealthy residents vie with a largely Brown and Black working-class for use of space – neighborhood digital platforms help to funnel services that support property value into smaller sections of otherwise disinvested neighborhoods.

Class Root of Police Brutality: The Missing Gap in the Black Lives Matter Movement

ABSTRACT This paper explores the activism of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and argues that the missing link in the movement is the class question, which has impacted on its tactics, strategies, and modus operandi. Since its emergence, the BLM movement has won some concessions in police reforms, defunding of police, policy changes in use of body camera and greater transparency in policing, yet the problems of racism, police brutality, over-policing, and police killings persist. What seems to be problematic is the narrow understanding of the problems and the cosmetic nature of police reforms that have failed to address the capitalist root of the problem. By sidestepping the class question, the movement has failed to understand that racism, police brutality, and police killings are essential tools used by the ruling class and the state in the American capitalist system to sustain its rules, domination, and control. By taking the class question off the agenda, the engagement of the BLM movement has been reduced to the race question and race consciousness, which led to a failure to unpack racism and policing as class questions and draw the tactics of the movement around the class question. The solution to this impasse is to understand black struggle as a subset of class struggle and prioritise the radicalisation of the black working class as a social base to connect with the black underclass and American working class in general and externalise the issues as generic problems facing Americans. The paper concludes that it is the unity of the American working class that can confront the capitalist underpinning of the problems of racism, police brutality, and extra-judicial police killings in American society.

Remembering Herbert Gutman's Work, Culture, and Society Fifty Years On

Remembering Herbert Gutman's <i>Work, Culture, and Society</i> Fifty Years On

Thrift, Morality, and Migration in the Barbados Savings Bank

Abstract There has been little historiographical attention to working-class banking in the Caribbean. This article adds to the scholarship by considering the founding and use of the Barbados Savings Bank by working-class Black Barbadians. Colonial administrators hoped the bank would teach formerly enslaved Barbadians how to properly transition into the free wage labor force and sought to encourage household arrangements dependent on a male breadwinner who would use the bank for long-term savings. Using the new depositor ledgers of the Barbados Savings Bank, I argue that everyday Barbadians instead used this financial institution as a family repository of targeted savings for the purpose of emigration, defying colonial desires of a dependent workforce organized in patriarchal single-income households.

Coming of Age in Jim Crow DC: Navigating the Politics of Everyday Life

This book provides an important addition to the African American saga by offering an oral history of Black youth in segregated Washington, DC. The coverage is for the interwar years.Through skillful use of previous interviews and community studies, the author reveals what poor and working-class Blacks in their formative years were thinking, doing, and feeling. It's a revealing story that clearly notes the variety of sensibilities in a population that from the outside seemed homogenous.Paula C. Austin essentially revisits the work of Black sociologists who studied the nation's capital through extensive interviews within the Black community. She fills in aspects of Black life that earlier researchers missed or misinterpreted. For example, an interview with Susie Morgan reveals the relationship of poor teens with the police and the use of forbidden spaces allowable to whites. How these children dealt with the use of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool and the Southwest Settlement House tells the reader much about their spatial relationship to Jim Crow DC and their efforts to live with what was available. The need for recreational space resulted in a defiance that, as Susie Morgan said about the Pool, “Course we know we ain't got no business there, but that's why we go in” (p. 79).Expanding on the earlier studies, Austin also delves into attitudes of these poor and working-class youth toward class, sexual relations, political activity, and general engagement with their plight in a segregated city. Rather than apathy, acceptance of their subordinate place, and an absence of community connection, the author writes of residents engaged, aware, politically active, and desiring change in their neighborhood and in their future.The author also provides important insight into these adolescents’ sense of racial identity, gender, and, as with James Albert Gray, their leadership skills. Approved or unapproved outside activities are also examined in relation to clubs and gangs. Within this discussion, Austin offers a trenchant analysis of a burgeoning sense of masculinity. Nathaniel Smith's interview is informative in this sense in regard to his membership in the Society Gents Club and his views of what it meant to be a man.Likewise, the discussion of Black girls and women indicates their role in gangs, attitudes toward femininity, the future, marriage, and violence. Austin's use of interviews with the same person over several chapters and issues provides effective transitions and deeper probing. This is the case with Susie Morgan, whose views and stories, along with others such as Myron Ross, Jr., fill the chapters and shape the book's analysis.With both girls and boys, their inner thoughts show a more nuanced process than earlier studies reveal. Interviewers did not always present their questions in a way to elicit honest answers or ignored some of the information they received. And here Austin brings the reader into fresh territory. More is learned about these individuals than in the initial interviewer's interpretations. The rereading and reassessment of 1930s oral histories can provide clues to present behaviors among the adolescent Black poor and working class. The study also makes a good case for condemning past or present-day racial profiling and, as the author states, recognizing the humanity of a maligned and misunderstood group. To outsiders, and even to some of the interviewers, these neighborhoods and youths appeared to be degraded and hopeless elements within the city's poorest areas. Yet a hopefulness existed among the Black adolescents studied and re-analyzed that is a useful aid to present-day community workers and future scholars.

The class basis of racialisation: The missing link in neo-Marxist analysis of racism

Racialisation is a Marxist concept that has been utilised to understand racism patterns and reproduction in Western societies for more than three decades. In Marxist parlance, racialisation is the ideological process through which the state racialised a section of the population (ethnic minorities) for political purposes. The centrality of the state in racialisation discourse has inhibited the class basis that underpins racialisation. This article articulates the class analysis of racialisation, positing that racialisation stems from racism ideology that the Western ruling class utilised to divide the people along the ethnic line as a means of preserving and maintaining ruling class influence and prestige in society and protecting the capitalist system from being challenged by the unity of the people along the class line. Racialisation is utilised to reproduce racism, using media, laws, regulations and institutional practices to entrench division and disunity in society and preserve their control system under capitalism. In discussing the future of racism, this article critiques the current anti-racism campaign/movement founded and rooted in race discourse and race consciousness and argues that a shift from race consciousness to racialised consciousness is pivotal towards deconstruction and eradicating all vestiges of racism in the global society. The article concludes that racialised consciousness would act as a political unifier in anti-racism campaigns and connects the struggles of Black working and middle class with that of the White working and middle class in terms of collaboration and solidarity, to collectively challenge the capitalist system that is responsible for oppression, inequality and racism on class lines.

Long COVID and chronic pain: overlapping racial inequalities

The American Public Health Association (APHA) and prominent U.S. health organizations have acknowledged racism as a central cause of health inequality. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. confronts an additional public health crisis: mass impairment from Long COVID. Occupational segregation and institutionalized racism have made working-class Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) more likely to experience Long COVID. Medical gatekeepers also prevent equal access to health: BIPOC face more obstacles in their search for disability accommodations and social support. To provide health equity to the Long COVID community, Disability Studies must confront racialized understandings of chronic pain and the consequences of these meanings by centering the lived experiences of BIPOC living with chronic pain.

African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry by Joe William Trotter, Jr.

Reviewed by: African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry by Joe William Trotter, Jr. Cicero M. Fain (bio) African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry. By Joe William Trotter, Jr. (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2022. Pp. 176. $34.99 cloth; ebook $34.99) Joe William Trotter, Jr., ranks among the pantheon of America's most influential historians. For more than forty years, beginning with his 1985 work Black Milwaukee: The Making of an Industrial Proletariat, 1915–1945, he has chronicled the African American experience, most profoundly on the centrality of the Black working class to America's economic, industrial, cultural, and political development. His pioneering and provocative work examining the intersections of race, class, labor, urbanization, and gender within diverse urban- and rural-industrial settings has challenged prevailing historiography and expanded our understanding of Black migration, labor relations, and community formation. It has also added important dimensionality, complexity, and agency to Black workers, families, and communities within the historical narrative. Arguably, Trotter's most enduring contribution to our understanding of the African American urban experience was his employment of the proletarianization model in Black Milwaukee as an alternative theoretical framework to the long-standing "ghetto synthesis" model. That study animated important dialog and debate in its prioritization of class over racial identification as the defining consciousness of the Black working-class experience. In a 2007 Journal of Urban [End Page 67] History essay, Trotter acknowledges some of the limitations of his proletarianization model. In it, he concludes, "were I to write Black Milwaukee today, I would seek to synthesize past and present intellectual currents in African American urban and labor historiography, pay closer attention to the relationship between different eras in the transformation of African American life, and offer a broader and more comprehensive case study of the Black urban experience."1 The culmination of these objectives are the five essays comprising his most recent book, African American Workers and the Appalachian Coal Industry. Encompassing nearly thirty years of research on the African American experience, class, and race relations, in the Appalachian coal fields, the collection reiterates the continuing relevancy of the proletarianization model as an analytical tool—in this instance, primarily in its examination of the working-class experience of Black coal miners within his homeplace of the southern West Virginia coal mining region. Here, as a boy, Trotter experienced the disproportional impact of technological, social, and political changes on Black workers, families, and communities after World War II, which caused unemployment and out-migration. This reassessment of the field since Black Milwaukee's publication embraces innovations in scholarship on racial, class, and gender dynamics of working-class formation as ways to reformulate the proletarianization model. In presenting the coronavirus as one of the rationales for its publication, the essays historicize the continuing vulnerability of poor and working-class Blacks and people of color who work and live in dangerous, racialized, and unhealthy environments. This collection cement's Trotter's status as the foremost historian on U.S. labor and working-class studies. Its summary of the history and historiography of Black coal miners in Appalachia posits the continuing theoretical applicability of the proletarianization model in the twenty-first century, points to new pathways to pursue to explore its utility, and underscores the continuing resonance of his [End Page 68] southern West Virginia upbringing on his scholarship. Highly readable, meticulously researched, and skillfully rendered, African American Workers is a worthy addition to Trotter's remarkable legacy. Cicero M. Fain CICERO M. FAIN, III is visiting diversity scholar at Marshall University and the author of Black Huntington: An Appalachian Story. His current book project is entitled Buffalo Soldier, Deserter, Criminal: The Remarkably Complicated Life of Charles Ringo. Footnotes 1. Joe William Trotter, Jr. "Black Milwaukee: Reflections on the Past Twenty Years," Journal of Urban History 33 (May 2007): 567. Copyright © 2022 Kentucky Historical Society

Electing to electrify: unpacking the local crisis and state response in Sun Valley, Soweto

ABSTRACT This article draws from a wider research project on ‘Energy Racism’ to explore the experiences and perspectives of ordinary residents in Sun Valley, Soweto (in Ward 22). From August 2020, due to a broken electricity transformer, residents of Sun Valley suffered in the dark. They employed many strategies to access energy and called a range of meetings with ANC councillors and Eskom officials, but their pleas fell on deaf ears until they threatened to boycott the 2021 local government elections. President Cyril Ramaphosa then announced that the problem would be resolved and suddenly, in a clear-cut drive to secure votes, the transformers were fixed within days of the 1 November election. We argue that the decision to electrify Sun Valley is part of the strategy of ‘energy racism’ since it relies upon and assumes that the Black working class will continue to bear the burden of the electricity crisis. Building upon the notion of racial capitalism, the article suggests that mainstream political parties in South Africa promote the systemic exclusion of townships and informal settlements until the precise moment that it becomes necessary for authorities (the Black faces of white monopoly capital) to cash in on their piecemeal inclusion.

Toward a Theory of Super-Exploitation: The Subproletariat, Harold “Hal” Baron, and the Crisis of the Political Economy of Black Labor

This article argues that the African American working class can be conceptualized as a subproletariat: a subsection of the working class generally restricted to unstable, unskilled, low-wage, non-union, and “dirty” labor. The restructuring of capital during various periods in the U.S. history always strategically positioned the vast majority of Black people in subproletarian labor. Under the current crisis in the political economy of Black labor, uneven development and economic dislocation have deepened the lack of stable, skilled, living wage jobs in poor Black regions of the USA. This article expands on the earlier work of Joe Trotter and Harold “Hal” Baron to build a framework to understand this phenomenon. This paper proposes that Black labor and the Black working class provide the most succinct starting points to understanding the complexities of contemporary forms of anti-Black racial oppression.

Highs, Lows and Turning Points in Marginalised Transitions and Experiences of Noncompletion amongst Pushed Dropouts in South African Higher Education

Against a backdrop of dominant deficit, victim-blaming and class/colourblind theories of unequal educational transitions and higher education outcomes, this article analyses thematically in-depth narrative interviews with Black working class “dropouts” in South African higher education to explore how this group of former students narrate and make sense of their educational journeys and how their accounts could strengthen efforts to achieve just and equitable experiences and outcomes for students from all walks of life. Their narrative accounts reveal that, (a) in their marginalised educational transitions, despite disrupted and sometimes traumatic formative years (lows), their transformative habitus and community cultural wealth enables them to find highs in nadir moments; (b) their educational pathways are paved with unlikely steppingstones and improvising agents of transformation who overcome the odds of under-resourced schooling experiences; (c) despite policymakers’ best intentions, student financial aid moderates but does not ameliorate the perils of being Black and working class in higher education; (d) as pushed dropouts, they are victims of a class and colourblind criminalisation of failure that naturalises injustice in already unjust educational contexts. This study illuminates the transformative and social justice potential in analysing narrative accounts of those who often disappear from higher education without a trace.

“Africa's First Woman Press Photographer”: Mabel Cetu's Photographs in Zonk!

“Africa's First Woman Press Photographer”: Mabel Cetu's Photographs in <i>Zonk!</i>

The Ballad of Robert Charles: Searching for the New Orleans Riot of 1900

Rural histories often explode onto city streets. In an excellent new book, K. Stephen Prince illustrates this phenomenon for the American South at the dawn of the twentieth century. The defiance of one rural migrant, a Black Mississippian named Robert Charles, convulsed New Orleans, Louisiana, and the New South's Jim Crow racial order in the summer of 1900. On July 23, Charles defended himself against members of the New Orleans Police Department who first attacked him with nightsticks and then attempted to arrest him. Over five days, Charles killed seven white men, including four policemen. In retaliation, white mobs indiscriminately killed at least six Black men and women, injuring countless more. White law enforcement proved indifferent to or incapable of protecting Black life and property despite the deputization of 1,500 citizen policemen.But Prince doesn't stop there. In admirably accessible prose suitable for graduate and undergraduate students, he has written “a book about the nature of historical inquiry” (9). The author waded into sources believing he could “write a concise, narrative history” of the New Orleans riot (7). He emerged from research less certain, deciding instead to focus on the construction of the event's historical record and legacy, the “silencing, forgetting, and erasure” at the heart of Jim Crow's archive (9). Prince signals a notable example in the book's title. In 1938, the jazz artist Jelly Roll Morton told Alan Lomax about the existence of a song about Robert Charles. “I once knew the Robert Charles song,” Morton says, “but I found it was best for me to forget it.” His reason? “This song was squashed very easily by the [police] department . . . due to the fact that it was a trouble breeder” (1). Even after Charles's death, Prince argues, the Jim Crow state imposed a “narrative inequality” by policing the memory of Black rebellion (9).Perhaps Prince's greatest innovation is the book's structure. After an introduction in which the author reviews relevant histories of Jim Crow, the carceral state, and Black life, comes a prologue where Prince sketches the New Orleans riot in its simplest terms. Five thematic chapters follow. In chapter 1, “Setting,” Prince recreates the spatial and racial geographies of Jim Crow New Orleans. “Silence,” chapter 2, focuses on the known and unknowable life of Robert Charles, from his agricultural roots to his paid position selling Black nationalist and African emigrationist literature amid the sounds of early jazz. Chapter 3, “Riot,” explores the mob disorder of July 1900 from three vantage points: “white rioters, black New Orleanians, and the city's political and economic elite” (89). Prince considers local and national meaning-making in the aftermath of the riot in chapter 4, “Reckoning,” before closing with chapter 5, “Remembrance.” Prince ends with an eight-page epilogue that reconsiders New Orleans's twentieth-century history of urban inequality and violence as a spectral memorial to the life and death of Robert Charles.Yet how urban was Robert Charles's New Orleans, anyway? Readers of Agricultural History might take special interest in Prince's interrogation of space. In chapter 1, we learn that unimproved swampland constituted much of today's Crescent City in 1900. Charles and other poor Black migrants alternately thrived and survived in the back of the town on the marshy periphery that became more important as racial segregation limited the mobility of Black residents through the so-called Metropolis of the South. Prince argues that Black New Orleans “served as the hub of a diasporic community, a way station in a cycle of internal migration . . . a migrant community” (47). This New Orleans was less cityscape than a constantly reconstituting shelter for refugees from the plantation regime.On the other hand, New Orleans's white elite imagined a capital of the industrial South. Like progressives elsewhere, they terraformed their city to marginalize the Black working classes necessary for the creation of white wealth. They deployed a police force to draw fictional lines between white and Black space. And on the night of July 23, 1900, Robert Charles was the reminder of segregation's folly. “The audacious act of being in the city,” Prince writes, “constituted . . . an affront to white supremacy” (53). The rural could be Black, not so the urban.Ultimately Prince urges us to scrutinize such hard boundaries: known/unknown, urban/rural, remembered/forgotten. His study of Robert Charles and the social upheaval attached to his name opens new directions for American and southern historians of police power and Black rebellion. He also offers a model of careful historical analysis of biography, place, and event. Readers will find few heroes or villains in his account, and fewer injunctions. Instead, The Ballad of Robert Charles seeks to understand the manifold violence necessary to maintain white supremacy in America.

Black insurgent aesthetics and the public imaginary

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the spontaneous production of graffiti art and murals covering the entrances of businesses in the central business district of Oakland, CA, in the wake of the global protest movements, in 2020, against state violence and systemic racism. I argue that the art made legible what gets hidden through the violent processes of gentrification, neoliberal urbanism, and displacement/dispossession. The paper rethinks what borders, policing, and reclamation mean in a time of economic instability and a global health crisis, through the placement of these vernacular expressions in Downtown Oakland. What is revealed through the art is the convergence of two co-constitutive publics – a segregated, decaying city mostly inhabited by poor and working-class Black and Latinx residents and laborers, and a modern, prosperous, neoliberal city that caters to a privileged class of white residents and tourists – especially as the city grappled with the management and regulation of public space in the midst of a global pandemic. The article thus theorizes public space as layered and always contested, and not simply a space of conflict but also collective engagement.

Jazz Feminism is to Soul as Purple is to Lavender

Jazz Feminism is to <i>Soul</i> as Purple is to Lavender

At the Intersection of Race, Occupational Status, and Middle-Class Attainment in Young Adulthood

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1997 cohort, the study explores the intersection of labor force attachment and economic inequality. Using a wealth-based definition of middle-class status, changes in wealth inequality among the working and managerial class are examined. Results indicate that Black and Latinx young adults are disproportionately working class and that racialized identity is a stronger predictor of wealth attainment than occupational classifications among Black young adults. Wealth differentials by race are not static; they are growing over time, with downward mobility and lower growth experienced by both Black working and managerial class young adults.

Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity by James Smethurst

Reviewed by: Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity by James Smethurst Matthew Calihman James Smethurst.Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 2020. 227 pp. $26.95. Amiri Baraka’s development as an artist and thinker has raised vexing questions about race, nation, and class as forms of social identification and mobilization. In 1965, Baraka left the racially and ethnically mixed bohemian arts milieu of lower Manhattan for a life in Black nationalist cultural and political work. He decamped to Harlem, and within the same year, he returned to his hometown of Newark, New Jersey. A decade later, in the mid-1970s, he renounced Black nationalism for a Marxist politics that envisioned leading roles for African Americans and other peoples who had been subject to colonial domination and exploitation. For some observers, these changes were ruptures. But in Being & Race: Black Writing since 1970 (1988), Charles Johnson argued that Baraka’s development was a single continuous struggle: “There is from the very beginning a tension in his thought [End Page 97] between modern leftist intellectualism and race politics, between international Marxism and black nationalism” (24). Although many critics have shown that Baraka engaged with Black nationalism in even his earliest writing, few have recognized how far back his engagement with Marxism went. As William J. Maxwell notes in F.B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature (2015), the subject who first emerges in Baraka’s FBI file, opened in 1957, was at least “curious” about Marxist politics (117). But the crucial study here is James Smethurst’s The Black Arts Movement: Literary Nationalism in the 1960s and 1970s (2005), which transformed scholarship on Black Arts by surveying the movement’s various regional manifestations and by tracing its origins to midcentury intersections of Black nationalism, bohemianism, and Old Left working-class radicalism. The Black Arts Movement established Baraka’s personal and institutional connections to a Popular Front movement that survived up to his time. In Brick City Vanguard: Amiri Baraka, Black Music, Black Modernity, Smethurst resumes his exploration of Baraka’s relationship to Marxism. The book focuses on the philosophy of history that Baraka began to devise early in his career and fully formulated during the four decades preceding his death in 2014, a period that critics have generally neglected. Smethurst considers Baraka’s historical materialist vision of the development of an African American culture, a Black nation, and a Black working class, the last of which, Baraka proposed, would play a vanguard role in an international communist movement. And in Brick City Vanguard as in The Black Arts Movement, place matters: It was in Newark, Smethurst argues, that Baraka learned to hear Black music as a kind of vernacular historiography of culture, nation, and class. Baraka’s Newark was a place where many thousands of Southern Black migrants, including his own parents, entered industrial modernity. Challenging most earlier accounts of Baraka’s family history (including many of Baraka’s own accounts), Smethurst writes that Baraka’s parents entered this world as working-class strivers and maintained a basically proletarian outlook even after they found their way to middle-class jobs. In workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods, among other social contexts, the Joneses and other Black Newarkers encountered European immigrant groups (most notably, Jews and Italians) in relationships that were determined by Northern Jim Crow but that involved cultural exchange. However, because the Great Migration continued through most of the twentieth century, the Black Newark culture in which Baraka grew up and to which he returned as an adult maintained a vital connection to its Southern Black roots; for example, the city’s Black musicians and audiences remained in touch with Southern blues styles.In some ways, the Newark in which this book places Baraka looks like the Northern metropolises in Richard Wright’s Marxist “folk history” of Black America, 12 Million Black Voices (1941). But whereas Wright’s narrative ends with a prophecy of Black people thronging hopefully into new interracial industrial labor unions, Baraka’s Newark story, as Smethurst recounts it, confronts a modern city in which racial caste persists and where the industrial...

Forty Acres for the Modern Day: The Economic Implications of Reparations for African Americans

As part of the national racial reckoning in the United States, reparations for African Americans have been proposed to correct the injustices of slavery and discrimination. The main economic goal of reparations is to close the racial wealth gap. While the gap is substantial, uncertainties remain about the program’s scope, magnitude, method, financing, effectiveness, and equity. Potential methods include lump sum or monthly cash payments, targeted investment in the Black working class, college scholarships, health care subsidies, favorable home loans, a trust fund for borrowing, and institutions to promote community building. Design of the reparations program is crucial to ensure recipients do not transfer the benefit back to payers when spending the benefit on goods and services. For this reason, reparations must invest in African American workers’ productive capacity, job skills, and training. Despite the potential economic benefits, concerns remain regarding equity and political feasibility. Policymakers should carefully weigh the benefits and costs of a reparations program and pay attention to how the design impacts its effectiveness and equity.

Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon

Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon