Top Reparations Scholars Dr. Sandy Darity And Kirsten Mullen Win American Book Festival Award

professional headshot of William Darity

By Ann Brown

November 29, 2021

Top reparations scholars Dr. Sandy Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen have won the 2021 American Book Festival Best Book Award in the Social Change category for their comprehensive reparations tome, “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.”

“From Here to Equality” was published April 20, 2020, by ?the University of North Carolina Press and makes the most comprehensive case to date for economic reparations for U.S. descendants of slavery, according to the University of North Carolina Press website. The book calculates the costs of federal reparations using “innovative methods” that assign a monetary value to historical wrongs.

The book begins with an assessment of the intergenerational effects of white supremacy on Black economic well-being. Then Darity and Mullen look to the past and the present to measure the inequalities “borne of slavery.”

Darity is the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University. Mullen is a writer, folklorist, museum consultant, and lecturer whose work focuses on race, art, history, and politics.