In 2022, among households with at least one resident child under age 18, the typical white household had $166,000 more wealth than the typical black household. A confluence of factors contributes to the black-white racial wealth difference, including a legacy of economic hardship due to slavery, Jim Crow segregation and violence, and exclusionary education, housing, employment, and related public policies and discriminatory practices. Reparations offer restitution and redress for these enduring harms. For black children, a child-centric reparations-based policy response can work in concert with other types of economic policies, such as access to credit, home and land ownership, and social and human capital investments that can collectively improve black wealth and intergenerational economic mobility for black Americans.
This trio of research briefs, Black Reparations for Children, based on the newly released "A Framework and Policy Case for Black Reparations to Support Child Well-Being in the United States" offer a framework for children as a focus of any reparation effort.
- Making the Case for Black Reparations for Children, details how due to a variety of social, public policy and economic forces, black children are more likely than white children to experience negative outcomes throughout childhood.
- Racial Wealth Gaps are Larger among Households with Children, describes how the black-white wealth gap is widest for households with children.
- A Child-Centric Cross-Disciplinary Framework to Black Reparations, offers a cross-disciplinary conceptual framework that suggests a three-pronged child-centric reparations strategy for black children.
Taken as a collective, these briefs motivate and describe an approach to black reparations for children.
Each of these three briefs showcases an element of a longer paper; for full text and references see Gennetian, L., Gibson-Davis, C., Darity Jr, W. "A Framework and Policy Case for Black Reparations to Support Child Well-Being in the United States” in Nature Human Behavior and OSF Preprints | Black Reparations and Child Well-Being: A Framework and Policy Considerations