I've been thinking about Nikole Hannah-Jones's newest piece for the New York Times Magazine, "It's Time for Reparations." Hannah Jones, the creator of the 1619 Project and the author of several articles on school segregation, argues that in order for America to live up to its ideals that are promised in the Constitution, then reparations must be paid to Black Americans to reconcile the harm caused by racist people, racist policies, racist institutions, and racist ideas that are always conflated with patriotic arguments. Her piece reminds me of and echoes the ideas of Ta-Nehisi Coates's "The Case for Reparations" and his statement before Congress for the passing of HR-40, the bill that is necessary to study reparations in order to answer the many questions that people have when they are even brought up in conversation.
In thinking about reparations, I thought about Raj Chetty, an economist that I first read about in the Atlantic's profile of him, "The Economist who Would Fix the American Dream." He has taken huge data samples and studies the conditions that are necessary in order to reignite the American Dream. Like Hannah-Jones, Chetty knows that America is not living up to its ideas and it is best shown by the number of people who lack access to the American dream, which Chetty states plainly as someone being able to do better than their parents did. Chetty himself is a product of the ideas of the American Dream, but those ideas were given to his parents in India before they immigrated to the United States.
Chetty's organization, Opportunity Atlas, has an interactive map based on the data that was collected, looking--down to the block--the ability for social mobility based on parents' income, the race of the child, and the gender of the child. There are more modifiers that the viewer can apply to the exploration of the map like the economic outcome (salary) of the family based on their commute time and the number of children in a family. With each area, the map also links the data-driven studies (mostly based on the data released by the U.S. Census) written by the Opportunity Atlas team.
Chetty spoke at greater length about his studies and the tangible actions that his team has initiated for outcomes in Seattle and Charlotte in an episode of the Ezra Klein Podcast.
I wonder what Chetty would say about his data, studies, and conclusions being used in the arguments for reparations. The Atlantic article's writer, Gareth Cook is clear when he explains that Chetty wants to avoid politicized conversations around his work and who deserves more and who must give to those who deserve, but he hopes that his extensive studies will make the needs clear for any political party who looks at it. It sounds like if his ambition is to save the American Dream, then he is going to have push against those who believe it is available for all when it is clearly not. Regardless of whether he is pushed to that edge in taking a political stance with his economic work (which seems unavoidable as his work brushes against sociological ideas and breaks down politically motivated practices and their effects), his studies will prove that the American Dream is a myth while laying the framework for what needs to be done.
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