Stolen Lives: Redress for Slavery’s and Jim Crow’s Ongoing Theft of Lifespan

By Elizabeth Wrigley-Field

Field Reparations proposals typically target wealth. Yet slavery’s and Jim Crow’s long echoes also steal time, such as by producing shorter Black lifespans even today. I argue that lost time should be considered an indepen dent target for redress; identify challenges to doing so; and provide examples of what reparations redressing lost lifespan could look like. To identify quantitative targets for redress, I analyze area- level relationships between Black lifespans and six measures of intensity of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial terror. Results reveal inconsistent relationships across measures, suggesting difficulties in grounding a target for redress in such variation. Instead, I propose that policies aim to redress the national lifespan gap between White and Black Americans. The article concludes with a typology of potential strategies for such redress.  

RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences June 2024, 10 (2) 88-112; DOI: https://doi.org/10.7758/RSF.2024.10.2.04