Wednesday, October 7, 2020

Final Reparations Poster IngmVirtual program on YouTube live, 7 p.m.

The Path to Reparations:
No Yellow Brick Road

William Darity           A. Kirsten Mullen

 Duke University                        Artefactual

The co-authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century will discuss the promise of and the obstacles to achieving reparations for descendants of U.S. slavery. They also will examine the benefits of mobilizing a reparations project to eliminate the black-white wealth differences in the United States. In addition, they will examine the flaws in existing legislation to promote black reparations.

The event is sponsored by the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues and co-sponsored by the Women’s & Gender Resource Center and the departments of sociology and history.

Topic overview written by Carolina Celedon ’22

Biographies (provided by the panelists)

William Darity image credit Justin Cook Minneapolis FedWilliam A. (“Sandy”) Darity Jr. 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. His most recent book, coauthored with A. Kirsten Mullen, is From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century ((University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Mullen Image A. Kirsten Mullen is a folklorist and the founder of Artefactual, an arts-consulting practice, and Carolina Circuit Writers, a literary consortium that brings expressive writers of color to the Carolinas. She was a member of the Freelon Adjaye Bond concept development team that was awarded the Smithsonian Institution’s commission to design the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Under the auspices of the North Carolina Arts Council she worked to expand the Coastal Folklife Survey. As a faculty member with the Community Folklife Documentation Institute, she trained students to research and record the state’s African American music heritage. Kirsten was a consultant on the North Carolina Museum of History’s “North Carolina Legends” and “Civil Rights” exhibition projects. Her writing in museum catalogs, journals, and in commercial media includes Black Culture and History Matter (The American Prospect), which examines the politics of funding black cultural institutions. She and William A. Darity, Jr. are the authors of From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).

Video of the Presentation