The Queen Mother

The question of reparations couldn't be more urgent, as the health care crisis for black Americans worsens. In Queen Mother Audley Moore, we have a newly relevant template for change.

- By A. Kirsten Mullen

“Something that is often missing from reparations talk,’” legal scholar Alfred Brophy observed in 2010, is a specific plan for repairing past tragedies.” California and New York have joined the dozen or so states and municipalities that have initiated what they are calling reparations programs. As a core platform issue, presidential candidate Marianne Williamson proposed up to 500 billion in payments to the descendants of US slavery, but even that was woefully inadequate.

Enslaved Africans were the first abolitionists—seizing every possible moment to liberate themselves and their families—and they were the first architects of reparations. Other groups in the US have developed successful redress strategies— Holocaust victims, Japanese Americans unjustly incarcerated during World War II, 9/11 victims, the Iran hostages, victims of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting, and many others—but black American descendants of US slavery have come up empty-handed.

The racial wealth gap is the most robust indicator of the cumulative economic effects of white supremacy in the United States. It is on average about 850,000 per black household, fora total of 14 trillion. The annual budgets of all 50 states and every municipality in the country combined is about 4.68 trillion. Only the federal government has the capacity to pay the bill, and a sufficient proportion of white Americans must support doing so.