Reparations Requires Changing the System – Non Profit News

The following is a transcript of the video above, from our webinar “Remaking the Economy: How to Change Our Stories about the Economy.” View the full webinar here. Jeremie Greer: So, I think one of the biggest misunderstandings about the racial wealth gap is this idea that we’re going to person-by-person individualize our way out of it…and then the data points to this, right? So there’s a recent research study by Ellora Derenoncourt that found that if you gave everybody, every Black person, reparations—and look, I believe all Black people should get reparations on the size and scale that Sandy Darity and other researchers have pointed out. But even if you did that, the structures and systems in our economy will take that back almost immediately and reestablish the racial wealth gap. What does that tell us? That tells us that, at the same time that we’re focusing on making up for the wealth gap that has been created—through, say, reparations, or some other policy—we have to address the systems and structures that created in the first place. “The thing that I think is most misunderstood about the racial wealth gap is that it’s going to take wide systematic change.”...