Forty acres and a mule? How Flint residents believe the government should repay Black Americans
Calls for reparations - or actions to make amends to Black Americans for enslavement and ongoing discriminatory practices - date back to the years immediately after the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863. The “nation’s earliest architects of reparations,” the formerly enslaved, asked explicitly for land and monetary compensation as a pathway to economic independence and restitution for the dehumanization of enslavement. Early (failed) promises from the federal government led to the common conception of “forty acres and a mule” as reparations for Black Americans. More recently in the United States, local leaders have developed other proposals that expand the concept of reparations beyond land and cash payments and address the effects of systemic racism in the realms of housing, neighborhoods, education, health, and criminal justice, among others. These different ideas about what racial restitution means and how it should be enacted reflect an important policy challenge: How should a nation atone for the atrocities of enslavement, systemic racial violence, and ongoing discrimination?
Residents and community leaders in Flint, Michigan, are in the early stages of brainstorming what reparations for local Black Americans might look like, as part of a national reparations project. Through this project, the University of Michigan is working with local leaders in Flint to develop communitybased reparations initiatives that could mitigate some of the harms caused by structural racism in Flint, including the city’s ongoing water crisis. This brief explores Flint residents’ attitudes toward potential reparations initiatives. In the MIMACS survey, reparations are defined as governmental action to make amends to Black Americans for the ongoing harm caused by slavery and more recent discriminatory policies. We explore attitudes towards the general idea of governments making amends, as well as specific reparative policies that are either targeted toward individual Black Americans or larger systemic changes.
Key findings
- Flint residents are more likely to support specific reparative policies than they are to support the general idea of reparations. Just over half (53%) of Flint residents support the idea of governments making amends to Black Americans. However, a much larger share of Flint residents (71%) support at least one of the specific reparative policies.
- Race, education, and income figured prominently into Flint residents' attitudes toward reparations, with Black residents, higher-income residents, and more educated residents showing higher levels of support for efforts to make amends to Black Americans. Support for reparations did not vary by respondent gender or age.
- A majority of Black Flint residents, the intended beneficiaries of the reparations policies under consideration, support cash payments (73%). However, an even greater proportion of Black residents (78%) support reparations in the form of financial assistance for buying or improving a home, financial support for postsecondary education (77%), or financial support for Black businesses (75%).
