Documented black American losses across multiple categories total trillions of dollars

Evidence

One study estimated the cost of labor market discrimination for the forty-year period between 1929 and 1969 at 1.6 trillion. A number of studies have suggested how much black workers lose annually from ongoing race discrimination and occupational segregation in the labor market. For just one year in the 1970s, the cost of continuing racial discrimination in employment has been estimated between 94 billion and 123 billion. The loss of black-owned farmland during the twentieth century was calculated at 326 billion. Estimates of the Tulsa massacre alone are between 32 million and 47 million in 2020 dollars. Focusing on the land that was never distributed to the newly freed, estimates place the loss at anywhere between 168 billion to 12.6 trillion. As for the racial wealth gap, the price tag is almost $8 trillion. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 557

Categorization

• XREF: These are the hard numbers needed to defend reparations as accounting; materially updates the figures in the current reparations literature (William Darity and Kirsten Mullen’s estimates).
• ADDENDUM: Relates to the ‘On Sacrifice’ article’s logic of quantified historical loss; also the tax-reform strategy echoes Whiteness of Wealth which the reader already knows.