News
Durham celebrates its 150th birthday, revisits its past
Duke Chronicle, Wednesday, April 17, 2019Last Wednesday, Durham turned 150 years old. The city hosted a celebration at the American Tobacco Ampitheater Saturday, which it said would feature free birthday cake, live performances, an inflatable bull race and a keynote speech by Mayor Steve Schewel. In... Read More »
Modern Monetary Theory, explained
Vox, Tuesday, April 16, 2019Modern Monetary Theory is having a moment. The theory, in brief, argues that countries that issue their own currencies can never “run out of money” the way people or businesses can. But what was once an obscure “heterodox” branch of economics has now become a major topic of debate... Read More »
The black-white wage gap is growing. It’s worse in Texas.
Houston Chronicle, Tuesday, April 16, 2019The longest bull market in history. Record low unemployment. Robust jobgrowth. But as the U.S. economy races ahead, it is leaving black workers behind, according to government data and several studies. Despite one of the the longest economic expansions in U.S. history, black workers... Read More »
Ten Solutions to Bridge the Racial Wealth Divide
Inequality, Monday, April 15, 2019The deep and persistent racial wealth divide will not close without bold, structural reform. It has been created and held in place by public policies that have evolved with time including slavery, Jim Crow, red lining, mass incarceration, among many others. The racial wealth divide is greater... Read More »
Where the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates stand on reparations
Facing South, Thursday, April 11, 2019Four hundred years after the first enslaved Africans set foot on the land that would come to be known as the United States of America, and 154 years after the ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution abolished slavery "except as punishment for a crime," ... Read More »
Democrats Are Warming To The Idea Of Reparations
The Huffington Post, Thursday, April 11, 2019Five years ago, Ta-Nehisi Coates thrust the issue of reparations back into the national spotlight. In his 15,000-word essay in The Atlantic, Coates meticulously laid out why the country’s long history of slavery and Jim Crow discrimination against black people necessitated a bill like HR 40, which... Read More »
Leading reparations scholar weighs in on Georgetown's big vote
ABC News, Thursday, April 11, 2019Watch the video here.
The US students who want to pay slavery descendants
BBC News, Wednesday, April 10, 2019Students at Georgetown University are voting on whether or not they should pay reparations to the descendants of slaves sold by the institution. In 1838 the Jesuit university, which relied on financial support from wealthy plantation owners and often received slaves as gifts from prosperous... Read More »
This Could Be the First Slavery Reparations Policy in America
Politico, Tuesday, April 9, 2019In September 2014, a Georgetown junior published a column in The Hoya, the student newspaper, with the headline: “Georgetown, Financed by Slave Trading.” It unearthed a known but largely forgotten history: that the esteemed Jesuit university had saved itself from financial ruin in... Read More »
Elizabeth Warren Had Charisma, and Then She Ran for President
The Atlantic, Tuesday, April 9, 2019Charisma comes from the Greek word for “divine gift,” and back in 2015, political commentators thought Elizabeth Warren had a lot of it. Vox called the senator from Massachusetts “a more charismatic campaigner than [Hillary] Clinton.” Roll Call said Clinton couldn... Read More »