An economist tells us about the legacy of the Tulsa massacre on generational wealth in black America and why a Congressional bill to study reparations doesn’t go far enough.
It also wasn’t in isolation. The Tulsa massacre came two years after the Red Summer of 1919, when whites launched as many as 35 terrorism campaigns against blacks. The U.S. government further disenfranchised blacks by excluding them from the New Deal and the G.I. Bill; razing their neighborhoods through “Urban Renewal” programs; and encouraging the decades of gentrification that persist to this day.caught up with Dr. William “Sandy” Darity, Jr.
We don’t have … a data set that would be able to tell us whether or not, for example, in the communities where the massacres occurred, black households in those communities had higher levels of wealth than they did in other parts of the country. But if we could demonstrate that, that would confirm the kind of suspicion that you had.And the two fuse.
There was a chilling effect that was associated with the occurrence of this massacre in conjunction with the earlier massacres of 1919 and others that occurred during [this] time. It made it fairly clear to black Americans everywhere in the United States that there was a true danger associated with having any visible prosperity, which in turn could have an adverse effect on people’s efforts to try to fulfill their entrepreneurial dreams.
And then there’s some structural problems with the bill including the fact — and this is really, really disturbing — that it treats the Federal Advisory Committee Act as non-applicable to the proceedings of this particular commission, which means that they have no obligation to be transparent or to provide public records of their proceedings.
Patients recovering from Effects of Race Riot of June 1st, American Red Cross Hospital, Tulsa, Oklahoma, USA, American National Red Cross Photograph Collection, November 1921.The failure in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War to preclude or prevent the former Confederates from having any type of significant role in the nation’s electoral process.
But the other thing is, the federal government is the culpable party insofar as its federal policies and practices, as well as federal inaction, that has created this enormous gulf in wealth between blacks and whites. So the federal government is the capable party and again the party and it should meet the bill.
I’m open-minded about the question of whether or not there should be other acts of atonement or racial equity that are directed specifically to them. But in terms of a federal reparations program, it’s an impossible task to say who has been harmed more or who has been harmed less. Our premise is that there should be equal payments made to all eligible recipients.
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