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Home > PolicyCast > 233 The U.S. pays reparations every day—just not to Black America
Podcast: PolicyCast
Episode:

233 The U.S. pays reparations every day—just not to Black America
Category: Education
Duration: 00:45:26
Publish Date: 2022-02-03 17:09:28
Description:

HKS faculty members Cornell William Brooks and Linda Bilmes explore the vexing disconnect between the vast US system of restorative justice and the multi-faceted, intergenerational harms suffered by Black Americans. 

Farmers. Fishermen. People who’ve lost bank accounts or pensions. People who’ve had a bad reaction to a COVID vaccine. People who’ve had a reaction to any other vaccine. Indigenous people. Veterans. Descendants of veterans. People who get hurt on the job. People who built nuclear bombs. People exposed to pesticides. Coal miners who get black lung disease. People who lose paychecks or homes from floods, droughts, pests, or other natural disasters. People who are impacted by trade agreements.

That’s a long list. But it's still a fraction of the many people and groups who receive compensation either from the or through the government for the harms they have suffered. Every day, someone somewhere in America is being compensated under the concept of what is known as restorative justice, a type of justice that instead of meting out punishment to a wrongdoer, seeks to make the victims or their families whole—or at least repair them as much as possible. Restorative justice is also known as reparative justice, or, in the context of the experience of Black Americans from the first slave ships in the 1600s through to today, simply reparations. 

But unlike those other, everyday reparations, Black reparations are seen by many as a highly-charged political third rail, so last year Harvard Kennedy School faculty members Cornell William Brooks and Linda Bilmes launched a research project to see if they could change the conversation. What they found is a situation that is, to put it mildly, perverse. Cataloging the harms suffered by Black Americans through the centuries from slavery itself through segregation, disenfranchisement, economic and educational discrimination, wealth inequality, and more, they found that no group was perhaps more deserving of being made whole. They also studied and cataloged a huge system of American restorative compensation that works every day to make people whole for harms they have suffered. What they didn’t find, however, was a connection between the two.

Cornell William Brooks is a professor of the practice of nonprofit management, a former civil rights attorney for the U.S. Justice Department, and the former national president of the NAACP. Linda Bilmes is a senior lecturer in public policy, the U.S. representative to the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration, and has made a career of re-examining assumptions about the costs, values, and priorities of public programs. They joined host Ralph Ranalli to discuss their research, which is due out in a paper to be published in the coming weeks.
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