Note the catalog copy pertains to both parts of this double issue:

Slavery in the United States was a brutal, racialized system of forced labor which helped provide the startup capital for the U.S. economy’s meteoric rise. Post-slavery legal race discrimination produced segregation not only the Jim Crow South but also in northern states, where Blacks were denied many benefits of the New Deal that helped lift whites into the middle class. The 60 years since the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 have witnessed mass incarceration, ongoing police killings of unarmed Blacks, continued discrimination in housing, employment, and credit markers, and a persistent devaluation of Black lives. This history of enslavement and discrimination has yielded disastrous intergenerational consequences for Black wealth and socioeconomic well-being, and calls for reparations have gained currency as a way to redress these historical wrongs. This special double issue of RSF brings together the most current social science research and policy options with regard to reparations for Black Americans.
 
While reparations have been issued to many peoples around the world, including in the U.S., reparations to Black Americans remain highly contested. Contributor Kathryn Anne Edwards and co-authors use case studies of previous reparations policies to offer important insights into the features that might shape reparations policy for Black Americans. Trina Shanks and colleagues argue that the structure of existing child development accounts provides a practical framework for delivering reparations payments to recipients of all ages through structured savings plans that promote asset growth and fiscal autonomy.
 
The political feasibility of reparations programs will largely depend on public opinion. Jesse Rhodes and colleagues draw on surveys administered between 2021 and 2023 to show that up to 28 percent of White Americans support cash reparations, up from a tiny 4 percent in 2000. Kamri Hudgins and co-authors suggest that public education on racial disparities may increase the feasibility of a reparations program. Thus, education on real-existing racial disparities in intergenerational wealth, income, health, homeownership, and education may prove to be crucial to affect a federal Black reparations program.
 
This important double issue of RSF employs rigorous social science research to shed new light on one of the most pressing and contentious policy proposals of our times. Engaging the debate over reparations from the past to the present and from the global to the local, this double issue of RSF provides a valuable roadmap to the issues at stake in the Black American reparations movement.
 

Editors:

William Alexander Darity, Jr. is professor of public policy at Duke University

Daina Ramey Berry is Michael Douglas Dean of the Humanities at the University of California, Santa Barbara

Thomas Craemer is Associate Professor of Political Science at the School of Public Policy at the University of Connecticut

Dania V. Francis is Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

Contributors to the double issue: Erykah Benson, Lisa Berdie, Daina Ramey Berry, Linda J. Bilmes, Cornell William Brooks, Sydney Carr, Margaret M. Clancy, Thomas Craemer, Jessica Cruz, William Darity Jr., Elizabeth Jordie Davies, Asher Dvir-Djerassi, Kathryn Anne Edwards, William Elliott III, Dania V. Francis, David Hochfelder, Lilliauna Hopkins, Jin Huang, Kamri Hudgins, Vincent Hutchings, Jenn M. Jackson, David J. Knight, Kathleen Lawlor, Earl Lewis, Matthew D. Nelsen, Monique Newton, Tatishe M. Nteta, Mara Cecilia Ostfeld, Giuliana Perrone, Ann Pfau, Olivia J. Reneau, Jesse H. Rhodes, Stacy Kinlock Sewell, Trina R. Shanks, Michael Sherraden, Jasmine Simington, Zoe Walker, Gregory Wall, Jonathan Welburn, Elizabeth Wrigley-Field , Alford Young Jr., Haotian Zheng