Documented losses from post-slavery harms range from 94 billion to 12.6 trillion

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. (I have not advocated for compensating for the losses associated with chattel slavery, which comes in as high as 111.4 trillion. Why? Because I believe focusing on chattel slavery alone is a red herring and gives the opposition the upper hand in arguing that it happened so long ago. It misses the reality that chattel slavery shape-shifted and never really ended.) — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 557

Categorization

• XREF: The ‘shape-shifted and never really ended’ formulation is the hinge that connects this chapter’s cost ledger back to the three-part architecture in the opening chapters.