"I might be willing to support reparations if..." (Part I)

A friend of mine recently told me the following regarding reparations:

I might be willing to support reparations if the money were used for home improvement or down payment on a house, college tuition, and other things that would advance people, such as starting a small business.

In the spirit of charity, I think people sometimes make this point because they want reparations to work. They want sustained justice, not merely patched wounds.¹  Looking deeper, concerns like the one raised by my friend might have to do with the efficiency and efficacy of certain types of reparation. For example, cash transfers (one strategy for making reparations) might undermine productivity and dis-incentivize self-sufficiency. This could hurt people in the long-run, the argument goes, by making recipients dependent on the cash transfer (especially if the cash transfer is substantial). This is the so-called "problem of dependency."

I've a few thoughts. First, why think African Americans would not invest reparation monies toward improving their own socio-economic standing? I take it that the above concern is mostly directed toward African Americans with low socio-economic status, otherwise one wouldn't talk about the importance of investing into homes, education, businesses, etc. After all, middle and upper class African Americans have already made those investments. They generally have college degrees, businesses, good homes, good jobs, etc.² Those with lower socio-economic status, on the other hand, tend to lack many of these things. So, let's focus on the least-well off who are eligible for reparations. 

Start with the investment habits of the poor more generally. There is good evidence that America's poor care about investing in their own upward mobility and financial security. For example, Sara Halpern-Meekin and her colleagues found that poor families receiving the Earned Income Tax Credit (the U.S.'s most robust form of poverty assistance. Hereafter, "EITC") use substantial amounts of it to pay off debt and make investments toward "getting ahead" (e.g., education, vehicle repairs, new vehicles, a deep freezer, etc.). Unsurprisingly, it is also common for poor families to have a "making ends meet" use for their EITC monies (e.g., paying rent and utilities). Still, according to a study by Smeeding and his colleagues: "Almost 70 percent of all beneficiaries [in the study] with children had an economic and social mobility related use for the ETIC...Cars and schooling were the most important specific uses listed under mobility uses." In line with this result, research by Goodman-Bacon and Mcgranahan shows that recipients of EITC use substantial portions of it toward investing into better transportation. As research shows, transportation is crucial for keeping a job and getting access to good work, especially for the urban poor. And while EITC increases consumption spending slightly, this is usually toward "treats" for children. Based on ethnographic research, we know that the least well-off care deeply about their children feeling like "ordinary kids." We're all the same here: we care about improving our lives, and we care about our loved ones. Hence, we (including the poor) make investments into these things. This is only the tip of the iceberg, but the research strongly suggests that America's poor are prudent and family-oriented with respect to how they invest assistance monies––this includes poor African Americans. In so far as poor African Americans receive reparation monies, therefore, we have evidence for thinking that they will use it to advance their socio-economic status. 

Why was this in question in the first place, one wonders? To a large degree, I think it's because of the deeply held assumption that monetary assistance creates dependence and undermines motivation.³ Although I've partly addressed this concern here, in part two of my reflections on the comment above, I take a further look at the dependency narrative.

Footnotes: 

1 FOOTNOTE^↩ On the other hand, let's be real: sometimes, statements like the one above are thinly veiled forms of passive aggressive cynicism and racial animus––"I'd support reparations if African Americans were responsible...but they're not."

2 FOOTNOTE^↩ Still, perhaps the concern is that reparation monies would dis-incentivize middle and upper class African American youth from making these investments. Or African American middle-upper class individuals would cease being as productive in their entrepreneurial efforts, would cease working altogether (again, supposing the reparation monies were substantial enough), and so on. I don't have the time to address this concern here. My hot take, tho: I find this concern highly incredible. It's hard to take it seriously without attributing unsubstantiated and harmful pathologies to African Americans. Just ask yourself: if you're a a middle class, white person––probably the social status of most of my readers––do you think you would stop caring about education, work, future investment, etc., just because you acquire many thousands of dollars from the Federal government? I doubt it. Why think differently about African Americans? Besides, we have evidence that, in general, middle class African Americans have more conservative spending habits than their white counterparts. This probably has something to do with their experience overcoming economic and social adversity. It's odd, in my view, to think that that would vanish just because they receive reparations monies. 

3 FOOTNOTE^↩ On top of that, we've inherited a long legacy of stigmatizing the poor––especially as concerns poor minorities. For more on this, see Rebecca de Souza's work, Feeding the Other: Whiteness, Privilege, and Neoliberal Stigma in Food Pantries. For recent work on the psychology of our judgmentalism toward the poor, see this excerpt from Claudia Hammond's book, Mind Over Money. As she writes, "[S]tudies have shown that children as young as five have already acquired negative ideas about the poor that they carry through their childhood." 

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