Can baby bonds address the injustice of racial wealth disparities?

Abstract

The injustices that have been visited upon racial minorities in the United States have a substantial economic legacy, both in terms of wealth disparities and resulting structural differences in economic opportunities. In response, some prominent Black scholars and policymakers have proposed a ‘baby bonds’ wealth-building policy. In this paper, I complement the economic justifications for this policy by examining the case for the proposal in terms of racial justice. The common justifications in the literature use a ‘justice as rectification’ framework, but this framework is a poor fit for the baby bonds proposal, unless we first examine the policy as a way to mitigate barriers to economic opportunity caused by persistent wealth gaps. This analysis focuses the case for baby bonds on their real selling point: a universal wealth policy can limit the intergenerational impact of injustice and misfortune of all kinds.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• justice
• inequality
• wealth
• redistribution

JEL Classifications:

• H0
• I3

Data availability statement

Data sharing does not apply to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Ta-Nehisi Coates (2014), while using very similar logic in his overall argument, does explicitly note that compensation is not the end goal, writing: ‘What I’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices—more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. What I’m talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to spiritual renewal. Reparations would mean the end of scarfing hot dogs on the Fourth of July while denying the facts of our heritage. Reparations would mean the end of yelling ‘patriotism’ while waving a Confederate flag. Reparations would mean a revolution of the American consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history.’

2 The most obvious of these is system of slavery in the United States, the horrors of which are somewhat well known. After slavery was made illegal, however, there was also the systematic campaign of terror, theft, exclusion and murder that lasted at least from the late 1800’s to the middle part of the 20th century. Breed (2001) and Lewan and Barclay (2001) document that the violence of lynching included of a campaign of economic crimes that included the displacement of Black people from their land, homes, businesses, just as much as it was also a campaign of social and political control.

3 Thinking only in economic terms can cause us to miss the enduring legacy of racist images and stereotypes in our culture (Bonilla-Silva, 2017; Mills, 1999). It is not a simple matter, moreover, to address this kind of racist culture through the normal vocabulary of liberalism or the tools of public policy (Graham, 2001, 2011).

4 For a deeper dive into this idea, consider the work of Nancy Fraser who described the possibility of a remedy ‘cross-redressing’ different kinds of harm to a particular group (Fraser & Honneth, 2004). In that case, the discussion was of injustices related to distribution and recognition.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Steven McMullen

Steven McMullen is an associate professor of economics at Hope College. He pursues research on economics and moral philosophy, with particular interests in environmental ethics and theology.