The U.S. pays reparations every day—just not to Black America

HKS faculty members Cornell William Brooks and Linda Bilmes explore the vexing disconnect between the vast US system of restorative justice and the deep-rooted, intergenerational harms suffered by Black Americans. 

Every day, someone somewhere in America is being compensated under what is known as restorative justice, a type of justice that instead of meting out punishment to a wrongdoer, seeks to make the victims or their families whole—or at least repair them as much as possible. Restorative justice is also known as reparative justice, or, in the context of the experience of Black Americans from the first slave ships in the 1600s through to today, simply reparations. 

But unlike those other, everyday reparations, Black reparations are seen by many as a highly-charged political third rail, so last year Harvard Kennedy School faculty members Cornell William Brooks and Linda Bilmes launched a research project to see if they could change the conversation. Cataloging the harms suffered by Black Americans through the centuries from slavery itself through segregation, disenfranchisement, economic and educational discrimination, wealth inequality, and more, they found that no group was perhaps more deserving of being made whole. They also studied and cataloged a huge system of American restorative compensation that works every day to make people whole for harms they have suffered. What they didn’t find, however, was a connection between the two.

Cornell William Brooks is a professor of the practice of nonprofit management, a former civil rights attorney for the U.S. Justice Department, and the former national president of the NAACP. 

Linda Bilmes is a senior lecturer in public policy, the U.S. representative to the United Nations Committee of Experts on Public Administration, and has made a career of re-examining assumptions about the costs, values, and priorities of public programs. They joined host Ralph Ranalli to discuss their research, which is due out in a paper to be published in the coming weeks.