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NEWSPAPER COLUMNS—ERIC MOUNT Reparations: Back to the Future A Forgotten History: How Our Government Segregated America What if we address reparations by reducing the wealth gap?

Why is it so hard for white people to talk about racism?

Free College Tuition—An Idea Whose Time Has Come?

SOURCES Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, 2012 Ta-Nehisi Coates, “The Case for Reparations,” The Atlantic, June, 2014 William A. Darity, Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the TwentyFirst Century, due April, 2020, UNC Press Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism, 2018 Richard Rothstein, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, 2018

REPARATIONS: BACK TO THE FUTURE 81% of white Americans are opposed. Only 58% of African-Americans are in support (another study said 68%). Presidents Clinton and Obama were opposed. Baby Boomers (ages 51 to 69) are 79% in opposition; for Generation X (ages 35 to 50) it’s 73%. Only Millennials (2338) show a majority in favor or not sure (51%), and 44.2% of those in that group belong to a minority race or ethnicity. We are talking, you may have guessed, about reparations for slavery and its ensuing injustices and cruelties. And recently it seems that more people than ever are talking about this issue, especially those on a growing list of presidential candidates.

Some 30 years after Michigan Congressman John Conyers proposed a reparations bill, only to see it languish long in obscurity, we have recently seen first Texas Representative Sheila Jackson Lee and then New Jersey Senator Cory Booker introduce bills to study the possibility of reparations for the impact of slavery and the century of semi-slavery enforced by Jim Crow laws.

Regarding this resurgence of attention to reparations, conservative columnist George Will, after raising numerous objections, warns the Democratic Party that this “flippant talk” only serves to advance President Trump’s electoral aspirations. The counterpoint comes from columnist David Brooks, who calls himself a “different kind of conservative.” After earlier reservations, he now makes a case for reparations if we are to move forward as one nation.

In June, we will be five years past the article in The Atlantic entitled “The Case for Reparations” by award-winning author Ta-Nehisi Coates. It generated quite a buzz, and Brooks calls his initial response “mild disagreement.” With trenchant documentation Coates traced the deprivation of property ownership, home mortgage opportunity, equal employment and educational opportunity, and location in better neighborhoods that stalked African Americans wherever they went.

The red-lining and the denial of loans needed to gain the benefits of the G.I. Bill for black veterans have not only been the fault of banks and other lending institutions. In his 2019 study, The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, Richard Rothstein joins Coates in showing the role of governmental policies in enforcing residential segregation, which is a key ingredient in the maintenance of economic inequality.

Another economic feature of the African American experience is what Brooks calls “the gigantic wealth divide.” The income gap remains—still roughly the same as in 1970, but the wealth divide is even more startling. White households are on average worth twenty times as much as black households. 15% of white household have zero to negative worth, whereas more than a third of black households do.

Brooks calls this reality the lack of a financial safety net, and he has also discovered in his study of America’s divides that African Americans have suffered from the lack of a

psychological and moral safety net that comes when society consistently affirms that you belong, that you are part of us.

After sustained study of America’s divides in various parts of the country, Brooks is ready to make his own “case for reparations” (N.Y.Times, March 8, 2019). True, paying reparations is a drastic policy, and it is hard to execute, but the African American experience is “at the core of our fragmentation” as Americans. This experience is unique among our divisions, and it requires “a concrete gesture of respect” for what African Americans have endured. Respect, more than guilt, is the issue in the here and now for Brooks.

Brooks names slavery is a sin that “assaults the moral order.” It is “the original sin that hardens the heart, separates Americans from one another and serves as the model and fuel for other injustices.” “It is a collective debt that will have to be paid.” Slavery and discrimination not only steal labor, “they attempt to cover over a person’s soul.” As long as this evil goes unacknowledged and unaddressed, we cannot move forward as one people with one uniting story.

Brooks knows all of the questions. He has asked them himself. Who should get reparations? Irish? Italians? Asians? Is there no statute of limitations on our forebears’ sins?

Who should receive reparations? What about poor whites? Recent African immigrants? What about LeBron and Oprah? What form should they take? Direct cash payments? Tax credits? A universal basic income? Affirmative action in education and employment? (Several advocates for reparations in the current discussions do not support direct cash payments to descendants of slaves, and several believe that something benefitting all people that have been “left behind” is needed.)

A particularly vehement form of criticism comes from white nationalists and white supremacists such as Stephen Miller and Richard Spencer, as well as others. To them every remedy attempted or advocated to address past injustices and cruelties suffered by African Americans is an unearned benefit taken away from deserving white people. All affirmative action is discrimination in reverse. Accusation trumps acknowledgement and acceptance.

Coates wrote his article in part to make people stop laughing about reparations. Some of his words that resonate especially with Brooks and others of us who want something done that responds to our country’s original sin are these: “Reparations—by which I mean the full acceptance of our collective biography and its consequences—is the price we must pay to see ourselves squarely . . . . What I am talking about is more than recompense for past injustices— more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I am talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to a spiritual renewal.”

If we could agree that something more needs to be done, that would be a start. And if we could heal the racial divide, we could move forward as a far less polarized people. Until then we are left with William Faulkner’s words: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

WHAT IF WE ADDRESSED REPARATIONS BY REDUCING THE WEALTH GAP? The wealth gap just may be more critical than the income gap for redressing the continuing effects of slavery and providing reparations. Outlier economist William Alexander “Sandy” Darity, professor of public policy at Duke, has been exploring these ideas for decades, but they are just now getting the attention they deserve in the discussions of reparations.

We can discover his explanation of what traditional economists miss by consulting his April report, published in collaboration with Darrick Hamilton, Alan Aja, and others, entitled “What We Get Wrong about Closing the Racial Wealth Gap.” Black people constitute 13% of the nation’s population, but they hold less than 3% of its wealth. The median African-American household has consistently held 50 to 60% of median white family income over the last fifty years, but it holds only 5 to 10% of white family wealth. There is an $800,000 differential between the average or mean black household and the average or mean white household. Get more details in From Here to Equality by Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen, due out in April.

The effects of this gap are not hard to imagine. Lack of financial security for emergencies and economic downturns, lack of resources to provide payments for college tuition or a mortgage down payment, and lack of start-up capital to start a business head the list. The black population has never inherited wealth, and differences in wealth lock in systemic advantages and disadvantages.

Darity and his collaborators beg to differ with those who would attribute the wealth gap to black dysfunction—for examples, lack of educational attainment, lack of saving behavior, or failure to emulate “successful minorities.” Black people have less wealth at every level of educational attainment. Once household income is considered, black people equal or even exceed the saving behavior of whites. More successful minorities often draw on start-up capital that African-Americans have lacked.

To what then should we attribute this yawning wealth gap. It has a history of slavery and discrimination behind it. First there was chattel slavery (itself a system for building wealth). Then there was convict leasing, which was slavery by another name based on imprisonment for such minor “offenses” as loitering or failure to address a white person properly. There were the lynchings in the thousands and plunderings during Jim Crow.

(According to the Tuskegee Institute, 4,743 people were lynched between 1882 and 1968 in the U.S., including 3,446 African Americans and 1,297 whites.)

Recent history has seen the continuation of discriminatory housing practices like redlining and predatory lending. For government complicity, consider that New Deal policies restricted Social Security and the G.I. Bill mostly to whites. When the benefits were expanded, we have seen what Darity calls the “ravaging” of the welfare state by some recent administrations. We have also seen the scourge of mass incarceration of people of color that accompanied the War on Drugs and the persistence of police killings of African Americans.

Given this history, Darity and his co-authors conclude, “By most any measure— unemployment, wealth, family income—the relative economic position of black Americans hasn’t changed since the Civil War.” It is against the backdrop of this history that the discussion of reparations should proceed. Darity has two suggestions of policies that would help repair the wealth gap, and the benefits would not be limited to African Americans. The first would be a federal jobs guarantee. Black unemployment has long hovered at twice the rate for whites. This gap could be addressed by the availability of good jobs (with health insurance and non-poverty wages) for every American.

The second proposal is a baby bonds program. At age 18, every American would be provided with a trust fund, the level depending on one’s place on the economic ladder. The level could range from $500 to $50,000. The cost would be steep, but it would made huge inroads on the wealth gap (tied to lack of any inherited wealth). Again the benefits would not be limited to African Americans, but they would be greatly helped.

Paying more attention to the wealth gap in considering reparations brings us up against an opinion gap on reparations. According to an October poll by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs, only 29% of Americans say the government should pay reparations to descendants of enslaved black people. (Only 15% of white Americans take this position, compared to 74% of black Americans and 44% of Hispanics.) Even an apology for slavery is opposed by 64% of white Americans, but supported by 77% of blacks and 64% of Hispanics.

“It’s over with,” is a prevailing sentiment about the effects of slavery. Our Senator McConnell has taken the cake in this regard. Rejecting any move toward reparations, he believes that we’ve been there and done that. “We’ve tried to deal with our original sin of slavery by fighting a civil war, by passing landmark civil rights legislation. We elected an African-American president.” (This consolation is offered by a political leader who has done all in his power to prevent Obama’s election and his racial justice initiatives and to reverse those steps.)

In the words of Courier-Journal guest columnist Emma McElvaney Talbot, McConnell is “clueless about slavery, its impact today in the U.S.” Our flying trip through black history above and the wealth gap that Darity and others have detailed are precisely what Senator McConnell and legions of others do not get.

Despite the prevailing odds, those who are highlighting the wealth gap are doing us a favor in the continuing reparations discussions. A 2019 Metropolitan Housing Coalition housing report found that Louisville needs to convert 22,000 African American residents into homeowners to erase the racial homeowner gap. Whether we support Darity’s policy proposals or guaranteeing post-secondary education for all who seek it or private and public initiatives to enable home ownership and business ownership (i.e. wealth accumulation), a

focus on the wealth gap can bring major steps toward the establishment of justice and the provision of reparations for an ugly past with continuing effects.

FREE COLLEGE TUITION—AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME? College tuition keeps rising. Student debt keeps mounting. Discouragement about higher education affordability keeps growing. Presidential candidates are proposing answers, and most Americans are agreeing. Is free tuition at public institutions an idea whose time has come?

If you find the statistics from the Values Survey of 2019 by the Public Religion Research Institute convincing, the idea definitely has legs. How so? According to the survey, a solid majority of Americans (68%) favor or strongly favor free tuition at public institutions. Less than 3 in 10 oppose or strongly oppose the idea.

If there is a devil on this issue, it’s in the details. There are age group disparities of note.

As we might expect, young Americans (18-29) are the heartiest supporters. 81% are in broad or strong support. Only 19% of them oppose or strongly oppose. The majority, however, shrinks with age—70% of 30-49 year olds, 65% of the 50-65 year olds, and only 56% of those over 65.

Then there are ethnic demographic details. 62% of African Americans, 47% of Hispanics, 38% of other/mixed race Americans, and only 24% of white Americans are on board. Among black Americans (3%) and Hispanics (4%), less than 1 in 10 strongly oppose. In contrast, nearly 1 in 5 white Americans (18%) and other/mixed race Americans (15%) strongly oppose. Is it possible that we can detect here some white suspicion of extending too much help (even “reparations” to people of color?

Among whites, there are some telling disparities. 65% of non-college-educated whites favor or strongly favor free tuition. College-educated whites are evenly split—with 50% favoring and 50% opposing. Among those with only a high school diploma or less, 40% are in favor. Among those with some college credit, 36% are in support, and college grads drop to 25%. What sentiments might lie behind these percentages? Maybe--“I made it the hard way; why should they have it handed to them”?

There is also an interesting divide between those who regard a college education as a “risky gamble” and those who regard it as a “smart investment.” 60% of grads say “smart investment” while 39% say “risky gamble.” Among all Americans, 49% say “risky gamble,” and 50% say “smart investment.” People want to believe in what they labored to get.

As for ethnic demographics, 53% of black Americans say “risky,” and 45% say “smart.”

For Hispanics, it’s 48% to 52%; for other/mixed race Americans, it’s 56% to 44%.

The larger splits are registered by college-educated and not college-educated white people. 57% of not college-educated say “risky.” 39% of those who are college educated say that. Do we tend to discredit what we failed to achieve or see as beyond our reach?

Finally, there are the partisan divides. 60% of Democrats say “smart investment” while only 47% of Independents and 45% of Republicans agree. 55% of Republicans say “risky gamble,” as do 52% of Independents and 38% of Democrats.

It would appear that those more privileged educationally are more apt to extoll the value of a college education. Those who consider themselves outliers in the culture of higher education or in access to higher education may be more inclined to discredit the value or to begrudge access for others enabled by the government or private sources.

When we are aware of the yawning racial wealth gap (as documented in a recent column in this space), we might see that college availability and affordability could well be an important step toward closing that gap. Likewise the guarantee of access to higher education for all Americans without limiting that enabled access to ethnic minorities is a way to providing reparations for past injustice to people of color without limiting that access to people of color.

Providing such a guarantee need not mean subsidizing families at the very top of American income and wealth distribution. But when both the descendants of slaves and economically challenged white people both stand to receive free tuition for college, one can see how strong statistical support might develop for free college tuition at public institutions.

It’s no wonder that presidential candidates are endorsing it. It’s no wonder that a large percentage of voters also support it. It does seem to be an idea whose time has come. And it could be a form of reparation that would win over detractors who currently oppose any form at all.

A FORGOTTEN HISTORY: HOW OUR GOVERNMENT SEGREGATED AMERICA Just in time for African American History Month and long overdue to inform every middle school, high school, and college American history course, comes The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America, a new book by Richard Rothstein, an expert on race, education, and social policy at the Economic Policy Institute.

The timing is also right for a rejoinder to the crusade to “Make America White Again” being mounted by Richard Spencer and other white supremacists and white nationalists. Their claim is that every remedy attempted or advocated to right injustices suffered by African Americans is an unearned benefit taken away from deserving white people.

The book is, in addition, a rejoinder to what Rothstein calls “the myth of de facto segregation.” This myth claims that the causes of riots in places like Ferguson, Baltimore, Milwaukee, and Charlotte in 2014 through 2016 were private decisions and practices such as white flight and redlining by lending institutions. Urban ghettos then are the products of accidents and misguided prejudice or perhaps of self-segregation, real estate steering, and income differences. They are unintended consequences.

Like The Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates (“The Case for Reparations,” June, 2014), Rothstein begs to differ. The cited private causes do have consequences, but our author is convinced that residential racial segregation, which underlies much of our society’s economic inequality, is “de jure segregation,” brought about by law and public policy. Working over an eight-year period starting in 2009, informed by a voluminous bibliography, documenting with forty pages of end notes, he makes the case that what African Americans suffered in the way of inferior housing and education and lack of meaningful job opportunities from Woodrow Wilson through FDR are consequences of governmental laws and unhidden public policies that segregated every metropolitan area in America and of governmental failure to enforce laws and regulations aimed at ending racial discrimination in housing. What is more, this resulting system of residential segregation is intentional.

In 1866, the U.S. Congress passed a Civil Rights Act prohibiting actions “that perpetuated the characteristics of slavery,” and racial discrimination in housing was included.

In 1883, the Supreme Court rejected this interpretation, denying that exclusion from housing markets could be “a badge or incident of slavery.” The protections of the Civil Rights Act were thereby dismissed for a century until, in 1968, the Fair Housing Act and another Supreme Court decision rejected the 1883 decision. Racial discrimination in housing was reinstated as an unconstitutional relic of slavery. That didn’t mean that it stopped. As recently as the financial crisis of 2008, one of the most troubling causes was the regulatory tolerance of banks’ “reverse redlining”—the excessive marketing of exploitative subprime mortgages in African American and Hispanic neighborhoods.

From the 1920s to today, Rothstein traces the violations of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights regarding residential segregation. For example, public housing during World War II

was unavailable to African American workers, who had to commute further to defense jobs that received lower pay than comparable jobs of whites. After the war white people were often able to move up into the middle class while African Americans continued to deal with blatant discrimination under Jim Crow laws. Whites were welcomed into suburbs that reacted violently to African Americans who attempted to integrate their neighborhood. The real estate industry and the banking industry collaborated to steer the races away from each other.

The litany of woes is long. The federal government urged suburbs to adopt exclusionary zoning laws, thereby encouraging white flight. The Federal Housing Association sponsored whites-only suburbanization. State courts blessed private discrimination by ordering eviction of African Americans barred by local association rules and restrictive covenants. Churches, schools, and hospitals did not lose tax exempt status for promoting restrictive covenants.

Police sometimes even encouraged mob violence against desegregation attempts rather than make arrests. State real estate commissions did not deny licenses to brokers who claimed an ethical obligation to impose segregation. Federal and state highway planners used urban interstates to demolish neighborhoods and force residents deeper into ghettos. Working class black families were trapped in lower-income minority communities. The federal government spent billions on tax breaks for single-family suburban homeowners and failed to fund transportation networks adequately. Toxic waste facilities were consistently located in predominantly African American neighborhoods. In every instance, different actions by federal, state, and local government could have produced very different outcomes.

The Supreme Court gets a share of the blame. In 1883, for example, it saw the Thirteenth Amendment as abolishing slavery but not addressing its ensuing implications, such as exclusion from housing markets. Today’s Supreme Court under Chief Justice Roberts has regarded residential segregation as the product of private choices (remember “the myth of de facto segregation) not state action. Therefore, residential segregation has no constitutional implications, and government remedies are impermissible. For Rothstein, Roberts and his colleagues got their facts wrong, and government remedies should be required for this unconstitutional injustice.

Remedies are needed, but what should or can they be? Unlike voting rights and access to public accommodations, they can’t be legislated or forced. Doing nothing is unacceptable, but undoing the system of residential segregation will be “incomparably difficult,” according to the author. Incentives can be offered, and initiatives can be taken, but we should not be naïve.

Remedies are bound to be costly in some instances (effects on home prices, for example), and they can’t help but be imprecise in righting the wrongs for those actually wronged. If questions about the possibility and advisability of proposed remedies begin to multiply in the minds of readers, Rothstein anticipates many of them and provides a substantial appendix with responses to “Frequently Asked Questions.”

On the encouraging side, studies have shown that both white people and African Americans favor integrated neighborhoods although they disagree on the desirable

percentages for optimal integration. There is also a case to be made that white people are hurt by the system of segregation as well as African Americans (for example, school quality in lowincome neighborhoods, busing drawbacks, and lack of diversity in workplaces too distant from predominantly African American neighborhoods).

For Rothstein, any remedies will remain inconceivable as long as people continue to accept “the myth of de facto segregation” as all-explanatory. Citizens need an accurate account of how we got to our current state of residential segregation-- as Rothstein words it, “a shared understanding of our common history.” As matters stand, school textbook after school textbook has not gotten the story straight. The Color of Law speaks powerfully to conditions that a constitutional democracy should not ignore--and not a moment too soon.

WHY IS IT SO HARD FOR WHITE PEOPLE TO TALK ABOUT RACE? “He’s not a racist. He is a really nice guy.” “I don’t see color. I can’t be racist.” “I work in a diverse environment. How could I be racist?” Robin Diangelo tells us in her New York Times best seller, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism.

A former professor of sociology and multicultural education, Diangelo, who herself is white, has spent more than twenty years as a consultant and trainer with corporations, schools, and other organizations on issues of racial and social justice. When it comes to white defensiveness or fragility about racism, she has seen it all. Frank conversations about racism are hard on our good opinions of ourselves, and we can bristle at the implications. Racial bias is largely unconscious, and we don’t welcome having it called to our attention. She concludes from her experience, “The only way to give feedback without triggering white fragility is not to give it at all.”

The degree of difficulty roots in the dominant world view of white society. “The dominant paradigm of racism as discrete, individual, intentional, malicious acts makes it unlikely that whites will acknowledge any of our actions as racism.” Her focus instead is “the inevitable racist assumptions and patterns displayed by white people conditioned by living in a white supremacist culture.”

More than individual acts, she wants to make visible “a system of unequal institutional power” that is buried in our culture. From birth we are socialized into racial superiority and privilege, not because our parents are bent on perpetuating racism. Instead white racism is inevitable because the impact of a history of genocide, slavery, and colonization continues to affect us despite our better intentions. White dominance and privilege do not give way easily.

The author acknowledges that that she was a fully adult parent and college graduate before she fathomed the power of this socialization to regard whiteness as the norm for humanness and racial identity is what only non-whites have. “Our institutions,” she writes, “are designed to reproduce racial inequity and they do so with efficiency.” Schools are particularly effective at this, she believes, but the criminal justice system, our entertainment industry, and indeed all of our institutions are part of the problem.

One of our defenses against acknowledging the reality of institutional or cultural or systemic racism is to adopt a colorblind stance and consider ourselves post-racial. According to Diangelo, this stance may be well-intentioned at the outset, but it ends up protecting our racial bias while maintaining our identities as open-minded people. The more we object to blatant racism morally, the more we resist acknowledging our complicity in its subtler forms.

We may claim not to see color, but we can’t be colorblind in a racist society. To say that we do not see the race of the person standing before us who has had a very different experience from because of race ours is not to see the other person at all. We see our white identity not as identity politics but as an objective point of view. We may label the identity

politics of non-whites as racism in reverse without acknowledging that civil rights gains would not have occurred without some form of identity politics. Indeed she argues that all politics have rested on identities.

Diangelo cites a survey showing that 55% of white people believe that white people are being discriminated against, especially by the government. Far fewer actually claim to have experienced discrimination themselves, but any advancement of racial minorities often brings protest against reversals of the good old days when white privilege went largely unchallenged.

White Fragility thoroughly catalogues the feelings, forms, and repetitive practices of institutional racism. It also thoroughly identifies and illustrates both the negative and the positive responses she has encountered in her efforts to make racist assumptions and patterns visible. The author has found over and over that people don’t want diversity training to be uncomfortable. They really don’t want to have their assumptions and their good opinion of themselves challenged. They are quick to feel attacked and to make themselves the victims instead of those who are the casualties of racism. They are inclined to punish rather than thank someone who attempts constructive feedback.

The author’s manner comes across as respectful, but she cannot approve the desire of many white people to make being nice all that anti-racism requires. “Authentic anti-racism is rarely comfortable,” she believes.

She assures her readers that the challenge to racism is never finished “because,” she writes, “I will never be completely free of racism or finished with my learning.” She had already warned us, “I know that I have blind spots and unconscious investments in racism.”

Accepting her challenge is not for the faint-hearted or, should I say, the fragile of mind and heart, but for any who sense the magnitude of racism’s effects on our avowed desire for community and its culpability for our divisions as Americans, it is a challenge to which we need to rise. Our self-liberation as whites is at stake as well as the liberation of victims of racism. .