The most jarring pages in The Black Reparations Project are filled almost exclusively with numbers.A table is headed with the dry title “Annual Total Debt Estimates and Cumulative Debt Estimates at 3% Interest, 1776–1860” and dull column labels like “Hourly Wage,” “Person-hours per year,” “Annual total debt,” and “Cumulative debt at 3% interest.” The rest of the space, spilling across more than two pages, is bursting with digits, harrowing digits that represent the wages American enslavers withheld each year from the people they enslaved.[1]
The values listed in the “Hourly Wage” column of this table inch upward from 2 cents an hour to 8 cents an hour, but each of the other columns begins with a large number and skyrockets from there. In 1776, the year of the Declaration of Independence, 423,392 enslaved people worked 3,708,910,416 hours, for what would have been a cumulative wage of $64,154,126.11. Nearly a century later, in 1860, the total number of enslaved people was 3,953,760; the number of hours they worked, 34,634,937,600; the number of dollars they were owed, $2,770,795,008.00; and the cumulative debt across all years was $174,083,934,939.88. In 2019, the interest compounded on that figure would yield a total debt of $19,137,157,136,693.00. Go ahead—read that number out loud. It’s nineteen trillion, one hundred thirty-seven billion, one hundred fifty-seven million, one hundred thirty-six thousand, six hundred ninety-three.
The book’s editors could simply have explained how the figure was calculated and printed the result. Nineteen trillion dollars is that astounding. But the inclusion of the entire table causes the mind to boggle in unexpected ways. As I scanned row after row of commas, decimal points, and digits, arranged over and over again in seemingly random, never-ending sequences, it struck me that the exercise was impossibly reductive. A series of numerals could not possibly account for the blood seeping from a whiplashed back, the stench of human excrement in a ship’s hold, or the anguished cry of a mother as her child is pulled from her grasp—the real, lived experience of the millions of human beings pressed into chattel slavery in the United States. And yet, in another sense, the pages of numbers are not reductive at all: they represent a real debt that stands, as yet, unpaid.
As he made his way to the city where he would be crucified, Jesus famously encountered a rich man with a question. “‘Good teacher,’ he asked, ‘what must I do to inherit eternal life?’” (Mark 10:17 NIV). Mark 10:21 records the answer: “Jesus, looking at him, loved him and said, ‘You lack one thing; go, sell what you own and give the money to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; then come, follow me.’”
How tender of Mark to point out that Jesus loved the man. Jesus’s instruction did not spring from judgment, hatred, or revulsion. Neither did he assess the rich man for what he might give to Jesus’s own cause. Jesus didn’t fawn over him or pitch him a fundraising campaign. Jesus simply loved the man, and, in loving him, invited him into possession of a treasure greater than everything the man already owned.
Yet the man “went away sad, because he had great wealth” (Mark 10:22). The rich man could not fathom that letting go of his fiscal wealth would actually be an investment in heavenly capital. He didn’t understand that Jesus, in love, was offering him something real.
Notice how the rich man asked how he could inherit eternal life. He didn’t want to work for it or buy it. He wanted to receive it as a gift. Perhaps that was his pattern. Perhaps he’d come to possess everything else in life by means of inheritance, which makes me wonder, why are we loath to relinquish that which we ourselves did not earn?
Blood money soaks my own inheritance.[2] My direct ancestors, on both sides of my family line, enslaved human beings. My father once mailed me a copy of an 1859 will that listed people’s names among the property being bequeathed. With the stroke of the signature on the bottom of that page, my great-great-great-great-grandfather inherited four human beings. Their names were Alfred, Susan, Jim, and John.
Each human being is priceless. But Alfred, Susan, Jim, and John had price tags. By entering the numbers in my family’s will into an online interest calculator, I was able to determine the monetary value of those four human beings in today’s dollars: $131,130.18. And that was just their sale. The value of their stolen labor, along with the labor of their parents and grandparents, stretching back over the decades—or even centuries—that my family practiced enslavement, quickly vaunts into the millions.
No one has ever written me a check and said, “Here’s your slave money,” so it’s hard to know exactly how the labor my family stole from Alfred, Susan, Jim, John, and countless, nameless others has enriched me. But I can put my finger on my family tree and trace the moments my forefathers stepped handily away from farm life to become bankers, pharmacists, businessmen, doctors. I can tell you that I spent my first Christmas in the eight-bedroom, nine-bathroom mansion owned by my maternal grandparents, just a quarter mile down the shore of Lake Washington from the spot where Bill Gates, once the richest man in the world, would later choose to build his own storied complex. I can tell you that my paternal grandparents wrote a check to cover most of my graduate school education. I can tell you that I have never, not once in my life, wondered whether there would be a roof over my head or food on my table. I don’t know whether, in the end, any monetary inheritance will actually be passed down to me from my forebears, but the value of what I have already received—the nutrition, the education, the security, the socioeconomic capital—is astronomical.
How much of it came from slavery’s ill-gotten gain?
In their book Reparations,Duke L. Kwon and Gregory Thompson use the analogy of a stolen car gifted to someone who did not know it was stolen. As they suggest, if the police were to find the person using the car and present evidence of the vehicle’s rightful ownership, that individual would have to return the gift even though they did not steal it themselves. “Restitution must be made,” Kwon and Thompson write, “by the heirs of thieves.”[3]
What do I owe, now, to the descendants of Alfred, Susan, Jim, and John?
An epigraph to a chapter in The Black Reparations Project cites the Jeremiah Study Bible version of 1 Kings 21:19: “Thus says the Lord, ‘Have you murdered and also inherited?’”[4] The verse comes from the story of King Ahab, the idolatrous villain of Israel’s history who “did more evil in the eyes of the Lord than any of those before him” (1 Kings 16:30 NIV). In this chapter, we’re told, Ahab wanted to buy a choice vineyard from his neighbor Naboth. When Naboth refused, Ahab became “sullen and angry”; he “lay on his bed sulking and refused to eat” (21:4). When Ahab’s wife, Jezebel, learned why Ahab was upset, she responded, “Cheer up! I’ll get you the vineyard,” and she proceeded to send royal orders for Naboth’s execution (21:7). Once Naboth’s neighbors had stoned him to death, Jezebel urged her husband to go out and take possession of the coveted vineyard. That was when the prophet Elijah caught up with Ahab—“Have you murdered and also inherited?”
New Hampshire is the only state that has not codified the slayer rule, a probate law that prevents a person from inheriting property from someone they themselves have murdered. Mullen and Darity point out that in the aftermath of the Holocaust, David Ben-Gurion called for German reparations to Jewish survivors “so that the murderers do not become the heirs as well.” Those reparations went into effect less than a year later. But for hundreds of years in the United States, it was legal for enslavers not only to rob human beings of their liberty for the duration of their lifespan, itself a kind of slow murder, but also to outright murder those same human beings with no fear of recrimination. All this while the enslavers enriched themselves and their descendants through the labor of those whose lives they were actively stealing. Truly, as Mullen and Darity put it, with respect to American slavery, “the murderers have inherited.”[5]
And it’s not just the history of slavery that needs to be redressed. Throughout The Black Reparations Project, the contributors carefully lay out the ramifications of a whole host of racist governmental policies from the era of chattel slavery right through to the present day, and these dehumanizing policies have had serious repercussions on Black wealth, health, education, and community life. Throughout the course of our nation’s history, Black Americans have not only lost lives and wages to slavery; they have also been systematically excluded from land grants, Social Security benefits, Federal Housing Administration loans, GI Bill education benefits, and more. For generation after generation, the US government has subsidized the accretion of white wealth while preventing the possibility of Black wealth.
What will become of us as a society if we continue to delay making this right?
In Ahab’s case, Elijah promised that “in the place where dogs licked up Naboth’s blood, dogs will lick up your blood.” Three years later, the prophecy came true.
Reparations for slavery can begin on a personal level. Individuals and families can give money, time, and other resources as a way of paying back the descendants of the enslaved at least some of the debt our own ancestors incurred. I am just beginning to work out what this looks like for me. I try to patronize and promote Black artists, business owners, and service providers whenever I can. When I wrote a book assessing my own inherited legacy of white supremacy, I wrote a reverse tithe into my book contract: 90 percent of the book’s proceeds benefit Black, Indigenous, and other people of color, while 10 percent goes to me. I know these efforts are not enough. Yet I don’t want my awareness of their insufficiency to prevent me from beginning at all.
Community groups can join in the work as well. Today, neighborhoods, churches, colleges, and cities are among those working to uncover and repair historical ties to white supremacy. Organizations like Reparations 4 Slavery help individuals, families, and groups take meaningful steps toward repaying our collective debt.[6]
But the sheer scale of the atrocity of state-sponsored slavery demands a national-scale response. “Given the history of the national government’s direct role in creating the black-white gap in wealth,” write the editors of The Black Reparations Project,“the federal government must take a direct role in eliminating that gap.”[7]
National reparations have happened here before. The United States provided restitution to Japanese Americans incarcerated during World War II, to the families of those killed in terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, and to the Americans held hostage in the US embassy in Tehran in 1980. Reparations have even been paid to enslavers: the District of Columbia Compensated Emancipation Act, which was signed into law by Abraham Lincoln in 1862, set aside a fund of one million dollars (12 billion in today’s dollars) to compensate enslavers of the district for the monetary losses they incurred with emancipation. Yet no national-scale reparations to the enslaved and their descendants have ever occurred.
The Bible envisions a society that pays reparations. The law of Moses established for the Israelites the concept of the Year of Jubilee: every fifty years, the people were to return any land, property, or hired workers who had been acquired since the previous Jubilee (see Lev. 25:8–55). The Israelites themselves had received reparations: when they escaped from slavery in Egypt, “the Lord made the Egyptians favorably disposed toward the people,” and the Egyptians gave silver, gold, and clothing to the people they had recently enslaved (see Exod. 12:36).
What would it look like if the Lord made Americans favorably disposed toward the descendants of the people whom we have enslaved?
Currently, Americans are not so favorably disposed. Eighty percent of white Americans oppose the idea of cash reparations—the opposed tend to be older, less educated, and Republican.[8]
It’s easy to fear that national-scale reparations might exacerbate our political dividing lines. When I worry about how other white people would react to that kind of expenditure, I am worrying about my own community. My town’s population is about 90 percent white and features hotly contested elections in nearly every race. I know some of my neighbors already feel that their own needs are being ignored. They do not understand themselves to be responsible for the injustices of slavery, nor to have benefited from it. And those dividing lines in American politics have already begun to fissure into yawning chasms right here underneath our feet. Our small town recently witnessed a series of local demonstrations by alt-right groups. How would those neighbors react if their government decided to pay out large sums of money for which they were categorically ineligible?
But we cannot let these kinds of fears hold us back from doing what is right. As a society, we can and should address the effects of widening income inequality across all racial groups, yet that need does not negate the need for specific reparations to the descendants of American slavery.
The man who went away sad was not the only rich person Jesus encountered on the road to Jerusalem. There was also Zacchaeus, a hated tax collector who had profited by cheating his neighbors. Unlike the rich man in Mark 10, Zacchaeus did not seek Jesus out or try to justify himself. He hid in a tree, hoping to glimpse the spectacle of the miracle man passing by. But Jesus sought him and called him by name: “Zacchaeus, come down immediately. I must stay at your house today” (Luke 19:5).
Undone by this grace, Zacchaeus made a snap decision. “Look, Lord! Here and now I give half of my possessions to the poor, and if I have cheated anybody out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount” (Luke 19:8). When he heard Zacchaeus make this commitment to reparations, Jesus exclaimed, “Today salvation has come to this house” (19:9).
Jesus was headed to Jerusalem, where he knew he would take away the sins of the world. Yet here on the road with Zacchaeus, Jesus did not speak of salvation the way we in the church today often speak of salvation. He did not lead Zacchaeus in a sinner’s prayer. He did not assess the rightness of Zacchaeus’s beliefs. For Jesus in this moment, salvation was evidenced by one thing only: Zacchaeus was willing to do the right thing with his money.
“If you are offering your gift at the altar,” Jesus told his followers in the Sermon on the Mount, “and there remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there in front of the altar. First go and be reconciled to them; then come and offer your gift” (Matt. 5:23).
Jesus says, in essence, that right spiritual worship cannot take place apart from making things right with our neighbors. One might even read, in these verses, a warning: our gifts to God may not be accepted if we do not first settle up with our fellow human beings.
America, it is time that we remember. Our brothers and sisters have something against us. Millions of stolen lives. Billions of unpaid hours. Nineteen trillion indebted dollars.
Are we willing to let go of what we have inherited from our murderous ancestors? Will we hear this call and walk away sad? Or will Jesus be able to exclaim over us that, truly, salvation has come to this house?
[1] Thomas Craemer, Trevor Smith, Brianna Harrison, Trevon D. Logan, Wesley Bellamy, and William Darity Jr., “Wealth Implications of Slavery and Racial Discrimination for African American Descendants of the Enslaved,” in The Black Reparations Project: A Handbook for Racial Justice, ed. William A. Darity Jr., A. Kirsten Mullen, and Lucas Hubbard (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2023), 37–39.
[2] Parts of this section are adapted with permission from Sanderson, The Place We Make: Breaking the Legacy of Legalized Hate (Colorado Springs, CO: WaterBrook, 2023).
[3] Kwon and Thompson, Reparations: A Christian Call for Repentance and Repair (Ada, MI: Brazos, 2021), 149.
[4] See Mullen and Darity, “Learning from Past Experiences with Reparations,” in The Black Reparations Project, 111.
[5] Ben-Gurion quoted in Mullen and Darity, “Learning,” 114; and Mullen and Darity, “Learning,” 128.
[6] See Justin Wm. Moyer, “Racist Housing Covenants Haunt Property Records across the Country,” Washington Post, October 22, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/racist-housing-covenants/2020/10/21/9d262738-0261-11eb-8879-7663b816bfa5_story.html; Amy Scott, “A Baltimore Church Grapples with Its Racist Past,” Marketplace, April 27, 2021, https://www.marketplace.org/2021/04/27/baltimore-church-grapples-with-racist-past/; Michela Moscufo, “College Campuses See Growing Reparations Movement,” ABC News, July 30, 2022, https://abcnews.go.com/US/college-campuses-growing-reparations-movement/story?id=87069082; Char Adams, “Evanston Is the First U.S. City to Issue Slavery Reparations,” NBC News, March 26, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/evanston-s-reparations-plan-noble-start-complicated-process-experts-say-n1262096; and Reparations 4 Slavery, https://reparations4slavery.com/.
[7] Darity and Mullen, “Where Does Black Reparations in America Stand?,” in The Black Reparations Project, 17.
[8] See Kiana Cox, “Black and White Americans Are Far Apart in Their Views of Reparations for Slavery,” Pew Research Center, November 28, 2022, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/11/28/black-and-white-americans-are-far-apart-in-their-views-of-reparations-for-slavery/.