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RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Black Reparations: Insights from the Social Sciences
William Darity, Jr.
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
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.
 
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logo for Russell Sage Foundation
RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Black Reparations: Insights from the Social Sciences
William Darity, Jr.
Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
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.
 
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"Swing the Sickle for the Harvest is Ripe"
Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia
Daina Ramey Berry
University of Illinois Press, 2010
 Examining how labor and economy shaped the family life of bondwomen and bondmen in the antebellum South

"Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe" compares the work, family, and economic experiences of enslaved women and men in upcountry and lowland Georgia during the nineteenth century. Mining planters' daybooks, plantation records, and a wealth of other sources, Daina Ramey Berry shows how slaves' experiences on large plantations, which were essentially self-contained, closed communities, contrasted with those on small plantations, where planters' interests in sharing their workforce allowed slaves more open, fluid communications. By inviting readers into slaves' internal lives through her detailed examination of domestic violence, separation and sale, and forced breeding, Berry also reveals important new ways of understanding what it meant to be a female or male slave, as well as how public and private aspects of slave life influenced each other on the plantation.

A volume in the series Women in American History, edited by Anne Firor Scott, Susan Armitage, Susan K. Cahn, and Deborah Gray White

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front cover of Women's Activist Organizing in US History
Women's Activist Organizing in US History
A University of Illinois Press Anthology
Compiled by Dawn Durante; Introduction by Deborah Gray White
University of Illinois Press, 2022
Women in the United States organized around their own sense of a distinct set of needs, skills, and concerns. And just as significant as women's acting on their own behalf was the fact that race, class, sexuality, and ethnicity shaped their strategies and methods. This authoritative anthology presents some of the powerful work and ideas about activism published in the acclaimed series Women, Gender, and Sexuality in American History. Assembled to commemorate the series' thirty-fifth anniversary, the collection looks at two hundred years of labor, activist, legal, political, and community organizing by women against racism, misogyny, white supremacy, and inequality. The authors confront how the multiple identities of an organization's members presented challenging dilemmas and share the histories of how women created change by working against inequitable social and structural systems.

Insightful and provocative, Women’s Activist Organizing in US History draws on both classic texts and recent bestsellers to reveal the breadth of activism by women in the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Contributors: Daina Ramey Berry, Melinda Chateauvert, Tiffany M. Gill, Nancy A. Hewitt, Treva B. Lindsey, Anne Firor Scott, Charissa J. Threat, Anne M. Valk, Lara Vapnek, and Deborah Gray White

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