Enslaved labor’s uncompensated value compounds to trillions today.

Evidence

The legacy of slavery is that it continued to generate wealth for people like Margaret Barber and her descendants through the investment of her Compensated Emancipation Act payment, just as it resulted in the wage theft, loss of freedom, and generations of trauma inflicted upon enslaved Africans and their heirs. In 1983 the historical economist Dr. James Marketti estimated that enslaved black workers produced anywhere from 7 billion to 40 billion in income for their enslavers. That number is somewhere between 20 billion and 114 billion today. Even if we were to settle on 40 billion, that is still a conservative estimate. Once you add interest to that sum, the monetary value increases dramatically to between 13 trillion and $36 trillion. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 451

Categorization

• QUESTION: Marketti’s 1983 estimates — need the precise methodology (wage-differential approach?) to defend the arithmetic in any reparation debate.
• DEFINE: Establishes the ‘accounting’ number a reparations claim rests on: uncompensated labor plus interest, not a moral abstraction.