Today’s episode of The Daily Whatever Show hit deep.
is off on assignment somewhere top secret, so it was just me and the incomparable —author, financial analyst, and one of the sharpest minds out there when it comes to connecting race, history, and economics. Together, we took on a topic most politicians won’t touch: reparations—what they mean, why they matter, and why now is exactly the time to talk about them.Marlon started by laying out a truth most Americans never learned in school: slavery wasn’t just a moral catastrophe—it was America’s original business model. By the mid-1800s, enslaved Black people were the single most valuable “asset” in the country—worth over $3 billion then, or roughly $100 trillion today when adjusted for inflation. That wealth built the railroads, factories, and banks that still define our economy. Even Wall Street was literally founded on slave-backed bonds. When we talk about reparations, we’re talking about the unpaid wages and stolen generational wealth that made white America rich and left Black America fighting to catch up ever since.
Marlon shared his own family story—painful, detailed, and unforgettable. Through Ancestry records, he traced his lineage back to the 1700s in North Carolina, to ancestors listed by name on slave census rolls. One branch of his family was enslaved by members of the Cherokee Nation—proof of just how tangled and pervasive the legacy of enslavement is across every corner of this country. He even discovered a post–Civil War Homestead Act document granting his great-great-great-grandfather 40 acres in Arkansas—a promise most never received. As Marlon put it, “I don’t know if he got the mule—but he got the 40 acres.”
We talked about the enduring economic cost of that broken promise. Today, the racial wealth gap between white and Black Americans stands at roughly $16 trillion. And studies show that investing that same amount back into Black families wouldn’t just be moral—it would boost the U.S. economy by nearly the same number. America always finds money for what it values: wars, tax cuts, even billion-dollar bailouts. Reparations would be no harder—if we valued justice as much as profit.
And there are models. Evanston, Illinois became the first U.S. city to launch a reparations program in 2021, offering $25,000 housing grants to Black residents affected by redlining, funded by real estate and cannabis taxes. California’s Task Force on Reparations completed a landmark report in 2023 outlining 115 specific policy steps to close the racial wealth gap. And in Los Angeles County, descendants of the Bruce family won back beachfront property stolen through racist eminent domain a century ago.
As Marlon reminded us, this isn’t unprecedented: the U.S. has paid reparations to Japanese Americans interned during WWII, to Holocaust survivors, and in limited forms to Native tribes. We’ve just never done it for the crime that built the nation itself.
We ended on hope—and a challenge. Truth and reconciliation aren’t supposed to be easy. But if America ever wants to heal, it has to start by telling the truth and paying its debts.
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