Resurrecting the Promise of Forty Acres

Resurrecting the Promise of Forty Acres
Date
Thu February 25th 2021, 4:00 - 5:15pm
Event Sponsor
McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Basic Income Lab
Location
Virtual Event

Join William A. Darity Jr. & A. Kirsten Mullen as they discuss the message of their book From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. The authors will examine the limitations and weaknesses of piecemeal attempts at reparations, particularly the inability of such steps, to eliminate the black-white differential in wealth. The case for African American reparations is directly linked to the basis of the damages of slavery, the harms of the Jim Crow period, and anti-black atrocities in the post-Civil Rights Acts era, positioning the US government as the culpable party that must pay the debt. The authors will establish the particularity of African American reparations for black Americans, compare a variety of methods for establishing the appropriate size of the reparations fund, and how best to disburse the funds. African American reparations, according to Darity and Mullen, is the mechanism to assure the material conditions for full citizenship for the black community in the United States. From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century is the recipient of the inaugural 2021 Book Prize from the Association of African American Life and History and the 2020 Ragan Old North State Award for Non-fiction from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.

Ralph Richard Banks, the Jackson Eli Reynolds Professor of Law and faculty director of the Stanford Center for Racial Justice, will moderate the discussion. This event is co-sponsored by the Center for Comparative Studies in Race & Ethnicity, the Stanford Basic Income Lab, and the Stanford Center for Racial Justice.