"I might be willing to support reparations if..." (Part II)
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.
As I said in the other post, if we read comments like these charitably, I think we see a concern about the success of reparations. In specific, the concern has to do with the efficacy of certain types of reparation. For example, perhaps the worry is that 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 overly dependent on the reparation monies they've just received (especially if the transfer is substantial). This is the so-called "problem of dependency." My initial response was to raise the following question: why think African Americans would not invest reparation monies toward improving their own socio-economic standing? Following the evidence, I think we have good reason to believe that African Americans (in particular, the least well-off who are eligible for reparations) would invest reparation monies toward their own economic success. When we look at research regarding the way people use the most substantial form of assistance available in the U.S. (the Earned Income Tax Credit), we find that recipients regularly use it industriously and for the purpose of getting ahead. Despite some of our most deeply seated beliefs (biases?), African Americans are no different.
Why was this in question in the first place, one wonders? Among other explanations, it's partly because of the deeply held assumption that "hand outs" create dependency. We need to be honest with ourselves, though: it's an unfortunate and deeply hurtful feature of American life that we tend to think (whether consciously or subconsciously) that dependency is especially problematic for poor African Americans. As El-Burki and his colleagues show:
[T]he tendency to blame poverty on the poor is compounded when race is involved. Media scholars...have established that although a plurality of welfare recipients are White, the media overrepresent the poor as ethnoracial minorities and in particular as African American. The studies of media scholars thus echo the findings of sociologists: Because media representations of public assistance recipients continually depict them as racial minorities, many Americans feel that the poor mostly are racial minorities who are lazy and unwilling to support themselves.
In addition, America has not moved beyond the racially charged trope of "welfare queens"––single, Black mothers allegedly living comfortably on government assistance.
Not only does this connection between assistance and dependency reinforce stigma against the poor (especially poor African Americans), this view is problematic in another way: the evidence does not support it. For one, current welfare policy no longer makes it possible for the vast majority of economically needy to live comfortably on "free handouts." This has been the case since the welfare reform of 1996. Sociologist John Iceland describes the situation as follows:
[Welfare reform in 1996] abolished [Assistance for Dependent Children] and replaced it with a system of smaller grants to states, which established rules of eligibility but were required to end welfare to recipients after two years, regardless of whether they had founds jobs by that time. It also set a lifetime limit on assistance at five years (see Poverty in America: a Handbook, 3rd ed).
The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) continues to be the most substantial source of public assistance, and it has an eligibility condition requiring that recipients work at least half the year. The more you work, the more you earn (up to a limit). Comparatively, other programs that do not have work conditions make a tiny dent in bringing down poverty levels. For example, in 2009, Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF) diminished poverty by .1 percent (not 1 percent; .1 percent! See the Iceland reference above).
Second, even before this transformation in the U.S. welfare system, claims about widespread dependency were largely groundless. Referring to the alleged welfare dependency of the 80s and early 90s, Michelle Gilman (poverty lawyer and professor at the University of Baltimore) writes:
[O]nly a small minority of [welfare recipients] stayed on welfare for more than six years. Most welfare recipients use welfare for a short-term spell, or they cycle on and off for short periods as economic circumstances dictate...[Moreover,] as opposed to the stereotype of the welfare queen, most welfare recipients show adherence to a work ethic; indeed, they have long worked part-time and/or earned unreported income in order to meet basic expenses. They also share the same attitudes and values about work as the rest of the population. Unfortunately, the “welfare queen” is remarkably resistant to facts.
For more on the weak evidence in favor of the dependency thesis, here are some places to look. This policy report by the Humanitarian Policy Group discusses the alleged problem of dependency as it concerns international aid (for a summary of the report, look here). As the authors of the study write: "Even in contexts of prolonged aid delivery and in refugee camps, studies have stressed that people remain ‘imaginative, resourceful and industrious.’" The authors conclude: "Despite the lack of evidence, the concept of a dependency syndrome has remained remarkably persistent, and continues to influence aid agency and government policies."
As concerns dependency in the U.S., this article by Princeton sociologist, Matthew Desmond, is a good place to start. Desmond writes:
Researchers set out to study welfare dependency in the 1980s and 1990s, when this issue dominated public debate. They didn’t find much evidence of it. Most people started using cash welfare after a divorce or separation and didn’t stay long on the dole, even if they returned to welfare periodically. One study found that 90 percent of young women on welfare stopped relying on it within two years of starting the program, but most of them returned to welfare sometime down the road. Even at its peak, welfare did not function as a dependency trap for a majority of recipients; rather, it was something people relied on when they were between jobs or after a family crisis. A 1988 review in Science concluded that 'the welfare system does not foster reliance on welfare so much as it acts as insurance against temporary misfortune.'
I also recommend Halpern-Meekin et al, It's Not Like I'm Poor, and John Iceland, Poverty in America: A Handbook (3rd ed), for more on the transformation of American welfare and the under-supported concern about dependency.
Despite the efforts of politicians and media outlets to push this narrative, and despite our (my) own implicit propensity to stigmatize the poor, the dependency narrative is one of 20th century's most pernicious and under-supported worries about the poor. And, as I argued here, there is evidence that recipients of government assistance in the U.S. are motivated to use assistance monies in economically productive ways. If we care about the aggrieved, and if we care about evidence-based policy evaluation, we can do better. Until we break the deadlock of this narrative on our thinking, we will continue to stigmatize the poor, to think of them as undeserving, and, consequently, withhold our support for assistance. As concerns reparations, the narrative of dependency will lead us to mis-evaluate the potential value of cash transfers as part of a program of reparations. You might think there are better ways of doing reparations. Fine. But the potential for dependency is a weak reason for thinking so.
To repeat: if cash transfers are made available as part of a "portfolio of reparations" (and, in particular, if cash transfers are distributed in a periodic lump sum manner similar to the EITC), we lack good evidence for thinking that this form of compensation would significantly undermine African Americans' investment into other forms of economic investment.
I close with two final points. Economist William Darity talks about the possibility of "pre-reparations"––a set of services that provide coaching and educational assistance on economic investment, made available to those who are eligible for reparations. Perhaps this possibility would allay some of the concerns underlying my friend's comment. Finally, on some proposals, reparations involve the creation of trust funds for eligible members. These trust funds make money available for things like down payments on a house, business startups, education, and so on. This proposal is fairly common, as far as I can tell. Moreover, if cash transfers are morally justified as part of a program for reparations, (a) the allotted amounts need not be anything close to the amount one gets from winning the lottery (though I think they should be substantial) and (b) the allotted amount could be distributed periodically rather than all at once. It's important to remember that reparations can happen in multiple ways (see below). Cash transfers might constitute part of the project, though by no means the entire (or even most important) part. For something so morally and economically significant, we can expect that ingenuity, wisdom and creativity will go into it. African Americans deserve nothing less.
To explore various proposals on how to attempt reparations, see Darity and Mullen's, From Here to Equality: Reparations for African Americans in the 21st Century, as well as, The Hidden Rules of Race: Barriers to an Inclusive Economy. A helpful podcast discussion of Darity and Mullen's work on reparations is available at Truth's Table (Season 2, "Reparations Now").
These strategies could sow seeds of healing––first for African Americans, and then for the entire nation. What we need is the courage to pursue justice, the integrity to examine the evidence concerning the enduring impact of racism, and the wisdom to see that this issue impacts all of us.
In the next (and final) post, I offer a philosophical consideration in response to my friend's point.
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