Editor’s note: Twelve months on from the killing of George Floyd, The Economist is publishing a series of articles, films, podcasts, data visualisations and guest contributions on the theme of race in America. Among them is a piece offering a different view on reparations.
WE MUST BEGIN with a disclaimer: we enthusiastically support reparations for black American descendants of persons enslaved in America, but we cringe at the phrase “slavery reparations”. We begin the case for redress with slavery, but we extend it to include the near-century-long era of legal segregation and white terror campaigns that followed (best known, with blithe understatement, as the “Jim Crow” era), and the atrocities that continue today: mass incarceration; police executions of unarmed black people; sustained credit, housing and employment discrimination; and the immense black-white wealth disparity. Black American descendants of the enslaved have borne and continue to bear the undue burden o