Reparations as “seed capital for the nation that we are becoming”

Here is a simple, solemn promise to you: by the time you read Heather McGhee’s vision for racial reparations below, you will never think of the issue the same way. McGhee is an author, activist, and policy wonk. We last spoke to her in 2021, right after the publication of her book The Sum of Us, which argued brilliantly that fighting racism benefits all Americans, because racism has cost all Americans so much. Why? Racist policy in the U.S. has been a national-scale study in cutting off your nose to spite your face. In what McGhee has famously called “drained-pool politics” (she writes about how, in the late 1950s, communities refused to desegregate their New Deal-era public pools and instead simply drained them, depriving everyone of access), the country’s leaders have chosen to deprive all Americans of public goods rather than extend them to Black people. The zero-sum arguments of today’s authoritarians and yesterday’s neoconservatives are simply the latest variations on the theme. More recently, thanks to a new reparations commission in New York State, McGhee has been thinking about that aspect of public policy through her Sum of Us lens. She argues here, too, that taking responsibility for old...