University of Oregon issued the following announcement on Feb. 28.
Two national experts on race and inequality will give a virtual talk on building a comprehensive case for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery that also includes a program of acknowledgment, redress and closure.
William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen will discuss “Reconstruction, Redress and Redistributive Justice" at 5:30 p.m. March 8 in the next offering from the African American Workshop and Lecture Series. The event is free and open to the public. An RSVP is requested.
Darity and Mullen also will meet virtually throughout the day with diverse constituencies across campus.
At their public lecture, Darity and Mullen will discuss a strategy for a reparations plan and their award-winning 2020 publication, “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century.” The work was the recipient of the inaugural 2021 Book Prize from the Association of African American Life and History and the 2020 Ragan Old North State Award for Nonfiction from the North Carolina Literary and Historical Association.
“From Here to Equality” posits that today’s Black-white wealth gap originated with the unfulfilled promise of 40 acres of land for freed slaves in 1865; they say payment of that debt is overdue and feasible. Their definition of reparations includes acknowledgement of responsibility by the culpable party and recognition of the damages inflicted upon the enslaved and their descendants and the advantages gained by the culpable party.
Redress constitutes acts of restitution, including erasing the Black-white wealth gap. A last step is closure, with an agreement by both the victims and the perpetrators that the account is settled.
“Reparations is a discussion not only about the past, but about a more just future,” said Yvette Alex-Assensoh, vice president for equity and conclusion. “As such, the discussion of reparations is a fitting way to end this year’s African American Workshop and Lecture Series. At a time when the concept and actuality of a renewed ‘racial reckoning’ is fading some in our county and community, the voices of Darity and Mullen are critical in laying out a road map of what true reparations means in order to reconcile generations of inequities that impact daily lives.”
Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts-consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings writers of color to the Carolinas. She was a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond concept development team that was awarded a commission from the Smithsonian Institution to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture.
She also is a faculty member with the Community Folklife Documentation Institute. Her writing appears in museum catalogs, journals and commercial media, such as “Black Culture and History Matter,” which examines the politics of funding Black cultural institutions.
Darity is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics and the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University. He has served as chair of the Department of African and African American Studies and was the founding director of the Research Network on Racial and Ethnic Inequality at Duke.
Darity’s research focuses on inequality by race, class and ethnicity, stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap, North-South theories of trade and development, skin shade and labor market outcomes, the economics of reparations, the Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution, the history of economics, and the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment.
The UO African American Workshop and Lecture Series is sponsored by the Office of the President and the Division of Equity and Inclusion. This event will be the last of the series for this academic year.
To learn more about the series or see video recordings of other events from this year and past years, see the Division of Equity and Inclusion’s online information on the series.
Original source can be found here.
Source: University of Oregon
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