[music]

Brian: It's a Brian Lehrer show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. We talked on Wednesday's show after the commemorations of the 100th anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre about the controversy that broke out there last week, over reparations for survivors and descendants of survivors of the massacre. So much wealth was destroyed when the so-called Black Wall Street neighborhood in Tulsa was targeted and destroyed. That it has affected the prospects of specific people who can be identified as individuals in Tulsa and have never been made whole. Beyond centering the history for more public awareness like was done this week, beyond the ceremony and a lot of media conversation. What does Tulsa, what does America owe those families in actual dollars and cents? We talked about that in terms of Tulsa on Wednesday. Now, we'll take it on nationally. Now here's part of the problem. Conventional approaches to closing the racial wealth gap have only worked to a limited degree. Here's President Biden acknowledging an example of that in his speech in Tulsa on Monday.

President Biden: Shockingly, the percentage of Black American homeownership is lower today in America than when the Fair Housing Act was passed, more than 50 years ago. Lower today, that's wrong. We're committed to changing that.

Brian: The president is proposing a new program to help Black Americans buy homes. It's one of several measures he announced in his Tulsa speech intended to close the racial wealth gap. We'll talk about some of the others with our guests, Andre Perry, from the Brookings Institution in just a minute, but equity in a home, think about it is just one example of the gaping wealth disparities that simply shouldn't exist anymore, or certainly shouldn't be as big as they are if the civil rights laws and affirmative action and other measures instituted way back in the 1960s were working well enough. By measures, I've seen widely cited. The average white family in the US owns 10 times the wealth of the average Black family, not 10 percentage points more. 10 times. Think about that if you're white. Think about that if you're anyone else. The Biden measures we should say are also mostly conventional. The president avoided the word reparations in that Tulsa speech, but there are examples of reparations around the country that are worth talking about. In March, the city of Evanston, Illinois passed a small one, $25,000 toward mortgages and other homeownership costs for Black residents.

Also in March, the Virginia legislature passed and Governor Ralph Northam signed a bill called the Enslaved Ancestors College Access Scholarship and Memorial program. A lot of words, what it means is it requires five state universities that were built in part by enslaved people to identify those people by name as much as they can be known and memorialize them and spend money on college scholarships or economic development in communities with historic ties to slavery. Get this, the money cannot come from tax dollars or tuition hikes at those colleges. Some other colleges elsewhere in the country are doing things like that too. Are Evanston, Illinois, and the Commonwealth of Virginia paving the way for what could be a more comprehensive national approach to something that might be called reparations? Can these approaches bring racial wealth, equity any better than those that have come before? With us now is Andre Perry, scholar, and journalist, and senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy program at the Brookings Institution think tank. He also has a book published last year, called Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property In America's Black Cities. Dr. Perry, we really appreciate you joining us for this today.

Welcome back to WNYC.

Dr. Andre Perry: Hey, thanks for having me again.

Brian: There are so many places we could start, but let's start here. You wrote a Washington Post op-ed in April about the Evanston Illinois program headlined, Evanston's grants to Black homeowners aren't enough, but they are reparations. Why do they count as reparations in your eyes, and why is that important?

Dr. Perry: First of all, we have to always acknowledge that damage was done. Injury was caused by various entities, including the federal government, state government, local municipalities that you said institutions like churches, universities. Everyone had a moral debt to pay for their role in either slavery, systemic discrimination in housing, criminal justice. It's just simply the right thing to do if you're a municipality and you know that you caused injury or harm to the people living in your community. One, there's this, in my opinion, a moral debt to be paid. Two, that injury caused significant financial harm among other things, but we can certainly calculate the financial harm. If you're in Evanston and you lived in an area that was [unintelligible 00:05:40], you were denied opportunities to purchase, refinance your home, build wealth, pass that wealth on to your children. It contributes to the 10:1 wealth gap between white and Black Americans that you spoke of earlier.

For me, this is something communities should be doing, institutions should be doing. It's never too late to do the right thing.

Brian: You're quite a pro-reparations critic of the Evanston plan, these $25,000 grants to Black homeowners to buy or maintain mortgages. You're quite a pro-reparations critic of that plan. Evanston Alderman and Cecily Fleming, who called it merely a housing plan dressed up as reparations. What's the distinction she was trying to make and is it important?

Dr. Perry: Yes, there is a distinction that a lot of people really do believe that reparations is an Act of Congress that acknowledges or sets forth a comprehensive approach to redress the injuries caused. It would be eventually HR40 that a reparation study, they would come up with a plan and that plan would essentially be enacted by Congress. Then you would see essentially probably trillions of dollars going to cover the reparations plan. The problem with that is, nothing really comes from Washington. Big things go to Washington, and so for me, reparations are the same. Reparations won't come from Washington. It will go to-- We're starting to see communities, local leaders acknowledge what they've done wrong. By the way, the federal government wasn't the only entity to cause injury to Black people. Even in the housing market, housing is a product that comes from the federal state, and local entities.

All of those things essentially colluded to harm Black people, but each has a responsibility to pay back, so it is small. No question, it's not enough, I knowledge, but it is reparations. Reparations plain and simple is repairing the damage caused by an entity. In this case, it was Evanston, so Evanston had a role to play.

Brian: Now, listeners, our phones are open. Let's talk about reparations. If you are white and you're aware, and you can't unsee once you've seen that there's a 10 times wealth gap between white people and Black people in this country still. How comfortable are you living with that discomfort? It's got to be uncomfortable when you think about it, right? To know that being white winds up giving you 10 times on average the wealth of the average Black people. It can't just be individual choices that are leading to that. There must be something systemic that's 400 plus years old. How comfortable are we as white people because I'm white living with that discomfort without doing something meaningful about it? If you're a white, there's that question. If you're Black, if you're anyone look yourself in the eye, look at the history of stolen labor and wealth and opportunities for wealth formation. Look all that in the eye. Look at wealth disparities to this day and tell us what does America owe to Black people here and how should it be paid? (646) 435-7280, or ask a question of Dr. Andre Perry from the Brookings Institution and author of the book, Know your price. (646) 435-7280. (646) 435-7280 or tweet at Brian Lehrer. Dr. Perry, what about the proposals to reduce racial wealth disparity that the president announced in Tulsa? There's the one to help Black Americans buy and keep homes that I mentioned. The other main one that I've seen is to increase federal contracts with minority-owned, small businesses, to 50% of federal contracts that the executive branch controls up from 10%, which the White House estimates would mean $100 billion in investments over the next five years, reparations or not reparations, meaningful or not meaningful?

Dr. Perry: Well, I think that Biden has a conceptualization of equity that is defined as fairness under the law. In many of the actions in the fact sheet that the Biden administration put out this week really address fairness under the law, things that government should have been doing in the first place. Making sure that procurement or contracting services with Black, brown and Asian businesses are going through the federal government, making sure that there's investment in Black businesses. I think it's important to remove the drags of racism from the federal government. That's what I think this latest attempt is doing. One that's a personal issue of mine in the fact sheet, they're going to look at appraisals. A lot of my research has shown that homes in Black neighborhoods are underpriced by 23%, about $48,000 per home. Cumulatively, there's about $156 billion in lost equity in Black neighborhoods, simply because of the concentration of Black people in the area, and so that's $156 billion. I just want to put this into context $156 billion would have financed more than 4 million Black-owned businesses based on the average amount Black people use to startup their firms.

It would've paid for more than 8 million four-year college public degrees, replaced the pipes in Flint, Michigan, 3,000 times over. It would have almost covered all of the hurricane Katrina damage. It's double the annual economic burden of the opioid crisis. That's just $156 billion. Can you imagine if some type of reparations package that will cover the racial wealth gap, which it would require anywhere between $5 to $12 trillion based on different estimates? A lot could be done. The point is that I do think removing racism from federal policy, encouraging state and local leaders to do the same will help. Even if you remake everything consistent under the law, you won't necessarily close the racial wealth gap. That requires some form of stimulus.

Brian: Before we go to calls and our lines are full. Tanya in East New York, I see you on line one. You'll be the first caller. Who would qualify as you imagine it because I think the concept of reparations is overwhelming to many people who don't know how to figure out who would qualify? How much is owed? How could they be fairly paid? How much of a difference could they make? Let's just take one of those. Descendants of enslaved people in this country who could demonstrate that lineage somehow personally, or also other members of the African diaspora, like immigrant family members from the Caribbean or Africa itself, or only people below a certain wealth threshold today, how could that question of eligibility be handled? Because I think, to be frank, a lot of white people get hung up on this.

Dr. Perry: Oh, yes. There's different claims for a different injury. For the enslaved in America, you're talking about the federal government paying for the reparations for the descendants of the enslaved Americans. We would not be paying for members of the diaspora who were descendants of the enslaved in Jamaica or the Caribbean or in Africa, it would really be American descendants. We could achieve that through a number of ways. Actually, we have a lot of physical records. Then you have now genetic testing and lots of other things, we can work that, but for things like housing, redlining it wasn't that long ago, we actually know who lived in these areas that were red line. Municipalities would be responsive states and municipalities and the federal government would be responsible for those claims. It's somewhat confusing, but really not. Throughout history, we've given reparations to groups, including 9/11 victims for injuries caused by things that were out of their control. We've seen Asian-Americans who were, in turn, receive reparations. We've seen native Americans receive reparation. Of course, internationally, we've seen Jews and other groups receive reparations.

There is practice in doing this. This is not coming out of the blue. What I think people get caught up on, you'll hear often hear people say, "I didn't own slaves. Why am I paying?" "No, you're not paying the federal government paying." There's lots of services I don't use that the federal government paid for." Just this past year, what's interesting is that after two weeks of being socially distant, you've had businesses demanding the federal government repair for asking them to shut down their business. Now, imagine what it's like to be socially distant for generations. What kind of repair would you need? This idea that people get hung up on reparations, I just don't buy it. I think that people believe in reparations, most Americans believe in reparation. They just don't believe in reparations for Black people. Then the questions come because when it comes to Americans and COVID or 9/11 victims or other incidents, we say, "Hey, that's the right thing to have some form of reparations." When it comes to Black people, people then say, "Oh, I didn't own any slaves. I didn't do it." It doesn't hold up.

Brian: The distinction I think white people need to look at, I'll speak personally. "I didn't own any slaves. My ancestors didn't own any slaves. My four grandparents all were immigrants in the 20th century, so they certainly didn't own any slaves." Does that mean that I didn't benefit from systemic racism? It doesn't mean that.

Dr. Perry: That's exactly right. There's burdens and benefits that come from systemic racism. Many white Americans and regardless of your lineage, benefited from systemic racism and as evidenced by the 10:1 wealth gap. It's also evidenced in homeownership rates. Even you see the effects of all of this in death rates because of COVID. That systemic racism provided a layer of protection that Black Americans on average do not have, or did not get in the same way.

Brian: Tanya in East New York, you're on WNYC with Dr. Andre Perry from the Brookings Institution. Hi, Tanya, thank you for calling in.

Tanya: Hi. Thank you for having me. Dr. Perry, my thing is with the systematic racism, do they really want to give us reparations? Everybody knows about Black Wall Street. We know how systematic racism takes things out of the Black American communities and things like that. My thing is that we do not want to intrude on anything white people have. We want our own fairness. We wouldn't go in your neighborhoods if y'all kept the resources in our neighborhoods like y'all have in yours, we wouldn't need to go to your school if it was fair. All we want is to be treated like equal people who helped build this country, just like the white Americans who took the country from the native Americans. All we want is reparations. It's not hard. Black people, if you know we Black, when we go on for these loans, why is so hard for reparation? We Black, when it comes to get redline. For houses, I get higher interest rates and all this stuff like that. Then my house is devalued because you guys-- because systematic racism says this area is not good.

East New York is not good now because people say it's not good, but as soon as other cultures come in the neighborhood, then it's going to get the resources and get developed, and then it'll be a good neighborhood. My thing is that we want our neighborhoods to be good when we're in there because we won't come to yours. If you leave us with what we supposed to have, we will not bother you or come to other areas. That's all we want. Reparations got-- Sorry.

Dr. Perry: I want to say what's interesting. I do a lot of research on housing and it's fascinating to see home values increase when white people move in a community which robs-- When white people aren't there, you're not seeing the infrastructure. You're not seeing the funding in the schools. You're not seeing everything from the street lights being fixed to the potholes [crosstalk]

Tanya: Exactly.

Dr. Perry: We don't need white saviors. We just need what was always owed.

Tanya: Thank you.

Dr. Perry: Like I said, this is not about the handout. This is about the federal government, state government, local government denying Black people opportunities. This is another important piece. When you deny Black people opportunities, you essentially throttle the economy. The more jobs, the more housing, the more assets Black people own, the proverbial pie grows, everything expands. For me, this is an incidence of cutting your nose to spite your face. When you deny Black people resources, you deny the economy resources.

Brian: Tanya, thank you very, very much. Keep calling us. Dr. Perry, you wrote in the Washington Post article about some elements that you think meaningful wealth-building strategies should include in public policy. You listed the housing grant programs but also student loan repayments and small business loans as well as what you call direct payments, all those forms of reparations. Among those, student loan forgiveness seems to be a particular hot button right now. Many advocates are unhappy that Biden hasn't proposed any version of that yet and specifically that he didn't mention it this week in his Tulsa speech. I'm curious how central you think student loan forgiveness is to any conversation about reparations or racial wealth disparities? Again, I think a lot of people look at student loan debt as a national problem that affects almost everybody who goes to college these days. Yet it gets mentioned in the same bucket as reparations, how come?

Dr. Perry: Largely because remember most of the history of higher education, Black people were denied access to white institutions. We had although the HBC was an excellent institution, we had a limited number of them. For us, we were again, denied opportunity in education. I do believe-- I wrote a paper that people can check out when considering student loan debt, the government should consider wealth and not income. Because when you look at debt cancellation, it really does help people in low wealth. It is not a super significant factor in closing the wealth divide. What it does, it improves the debt to income ratio so that then people can then buy homes. Then you really start to see wealth development. It's an intermediary of sorts that the student loans is just a drag on people's wallet. When they're deciding about what job to take or they're trying to get a home, it's a barrier. We need to remove these little things because we essentially, were denied the opportunity to go to the land grants to get the scholarships. That's why it's included in my idea of-- [crosstalk]

Brian: There also disparate rates of student loan debt, right? By race?

Dr. Perry: Absolutely. Many more Black people as a percentage have to take student loans and it takes us a much longer time to repay them. Let's be clear. A lot of student loans are never repaid because of this. A lot of people just go to their graves essentially paying interest because they're locked out of the job market that would give them the income to pay it back. Again, all these things are connected because wealth is so central to our outcomes in America. The more we can close wealth gaps by either increasing the amount of assets that you have or by decreasing the amount of debt that you have. We can get closer to improving those wealth divides.

Brian: There's that bill passed in Virginia this year for those five state colleges, William and Mary UVA, the Virginia Military Institute, Longwood University, and Virginia Commonwealth University to institute reparations programs. When we continue with Dr. Perry after a break, our next caller is going to be Bruce from Yonkers. Bruce, we see you. Who says he grew up in Virginia and wants to put some of that in context. Stay with us.

[music]

Brian Lehrer on WNYC. We're having more of this national conversation about reparations that all the focus on the Tulsa Race Massacre anniversary this week has helped to bring to the surface. My guest is Dr. Andre Perry, senior fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution think tank and author of the book, Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities which was published last year. Bruce in Yonkers, you're on WNYC. Hi, Bruce. Thank you for calling in.

Bruce: Good morning, Brian and Dr. Perry. Dr. Perry, thank you for the work that you're doing. I called in because you mentioned the Virginia law. I actually grew up in Virginia and was a victim of its school system. To me, if there's any lasting in addition to Michelle Alexander's great book on The New Jim Crow, if there's any other lasting Jim Crow in our country, it's around education and the way we finance public education. When I was in second grade at the end of the school year, my second-grade teacher sat us all down and explained that the following school year we would be having little colored children in the classroom with us. She seemed pretty nervous about the whole thing. We were looking around at each other going, "Oh, that's cool." [crosstalk].

Brian: Just to be clear about context, you're white?

Bruce: Yes. [crosstalk]

Brian: This teacher was talking about children who are other, "color' joining you?

Bruce: Right. Clearly meant Black children. This wasn't ancient history. This was 1965. Virginia's governor and the whole Berg family, which pretty much ran the state at the time had an open policy of maximum resistance to the brown versus board of education decision. They fought integration for many years after that Supreme Court decision and only came into compliance in the mid-60s. From that time to today, particularly in the way we finance our public education, we've been discriminating against Black kids forever. I'm a big believer in reparations and in particular in our major overhaul of the way we finance public education. I have a radical idea for how to fund that, but that aside-- [crosstalk]

Brian: I need to go on to other callers, but you want to give us a 15-second soundbite version of your radical idea to fund it?

Bruce: Yes. Our state tax system is a mess. Instead of trying to chip away at some marginal amount of each person's wealth, we ought to establish a dollar amount, say 10 million, 20 million, pick some reasonable number per child that someone can leave to their progeny. The remainder of the wealth of state goes into what national education fund specifically for this purpose.

Brian: Bruce, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it. We will let people sit with that proposal and digest it and think about it on their own as we move on to our next caller. Nieta in Mount Vernon. You're on WNYC. Hello, Nieta.

Nieta: Hi. How are you?

Brian: Good. How are you?

Nieta: I'm fine. Basically, I am a Black woman in America. Specifically, I identify as an American Descendant of Slavery, which is known as ADOS. That's a phrase that was coined by Yvette Carnell in Antonio Moore. They have a website ados101.com where you can find a very comprehensive detailed reparation plan. In that plan, it specifically states that reparations is meant for the American descendants of the enslaved. That's not to disparage our African or Caribbean counterparts but it is to say that a specific debt is owed on the soil for those who bought, died, worked for free, and were subsequently given every struggle in order to be perpetually oppressed, and checked out.

That's something that I wanted to mention, and especially the fact that it's quite insulting with the anniversary being here that the best offer that's on the table to rectify or repair is an offer that's so low, that it's just a slap in the face. If I had a slip and fall accident, I'd probably get a better settlement than something of this degree. That's just an insult. It adds insult to injury, and that's something that ADOS American have or constantly being trouble with is that everything that we do to fight for our struggle is undermined by backhanded offers, that are really not adequate and they're not what we want.

The people that are usually speaking on this issue, are pundits or, experts that are of Caribbean descent because we are all lumped together as one group. Instead of being a specific group with a specific justice claim and that's very disparaging. We really do require cash payment, because that's just what is owed. Again, if I had a slip and fall, I wouldn't be given programs, I'd be given the cash settlements.

Brian: Since you're going to this level of specificity do you have a number in mind? Whether that number would be the same for every ADOS person or how far have you thought this?

Nieta: I, along with a number of ADOS members, we actually look to the economist and the analysts who have actually done the work and that would be Yvette Cornell and Antonio Moore. On ados101.com, it talks about the amount that's due and the specific reasoning behind that because of all of the research that's been done. I think that another insult is asking people who haven't done the research, to just come up with arbitrary numbers. There is work that has been done around this topic, by people who are actually invested in seeing justice come to pass. There is an answer to all of these questions that doesn't really need to be asked by laymen and women who haven't really dedicated the time, effort, or energy into really delving into what the economic implications have been. Also, I think that--

Brian: Is it easy to say-- Let me move forward just as we're running out of time. Is it easy to say what their conclusion was in dollars and cents?

Nieta: Again, you'd have to go to ados101.com, it is too much to just say right now, but I would encourage all the readers to go there. I would also say that tax exemption, free education, and housing grants would be programs that would be great because programs are things that also support the foundation of reparations. That shouldn't be one cash payment, but a series of payments over time. It's something that should also be specifically for African Americans or American descendants of slavery. A lot of times the media speaks of people of color, which is very ambiguous, BIPOC minorities, Black and brown. Again, another insult is that in the Hispanic community when they go and advocate for themselves, they advocate specifically for their own group and they really never say, Hispanic and Black. There's never any, crossover there. Whenever we have a program because we're lumped in the same underprivileged communities, all of the resources that should go to repairing things that have happened specifically to our people. Then get we get lumped in. That waters down.

Brian: Waters down. Nieta, thank you so much. We're running out of time in the segment, Dr. Perry, but I want to get your response to Nieta she raises important issues there. I don't want to let it go unnoticed that it's not all immigrants when they're fighting for immigrant rights or Hispanic people who would not say, "ADOS people deserve something special." People tend to advocate for the group's interest. In your book, Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America's Black Cities do you try to quantify the total amount of wealth stolen in today's dollars, or from today's descendants? I think some people get stuck on an idea that to pay back the whole debt would bankrupt the Treasury. Then they get overwhelmed, and they just don't go anywhere?

Dr. Perry: It's clear that we won't bankrupt the Treasury. We just doled out $6 trillion over the last year, and the fears of everything from inflation to bankruptcy it never came to pass. We can do this over several years. When people quantify they do it in different ways and they usually look at the total amount of the wealth gap and what it would take to close that gap. In general, there are different models, but they run anywhere from $5 trillion to $20 trillion in general. There are different claims for different injuries. When it comes to slavery, you're talking about the American descendants of the enslaved. When you're talking about housing discrimination, you're talking about the people in red line areas and those are different claims. Sometimes there's consternation, but I think more people recognize that there are different claims, requiring different forms of payment. If you're talking about slavery, yes, you're talking about cash payments to the descendant. If you're talking about housing discrimination, you are talking about low-interest financing, and housing grants, and certainly business loans and things like that.

For me, it's not really that controversial. The issue is, how do you pay this? What period of time do you do this and what forms? That's something lots of us are working on constantly and there are numerous models around this. I would just say, check out some of the writings on reparations. Certainly, Sandy Daredi, myself, and others throughout the country are working on this. There are many ways many different models that we could take, but we should not stop because there's debate about should it be cribs, or should it be Native America or different groups of Black people? Yes, there should be different programs for different people.

Brian: We leave it there, unresolved, but the conversation continues. It will certainly continue here. Andre Perry, Senior Fellow in the Metropolitan Policy Program at the Brookings Institution. He also has a book called Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America's Black Cities published last year. Thank you for having this conversation with us Dr. Perry, we really appreciate it.

Dr. Perry: Thanks for having me.

Copyright © 2021 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.