What's owed, and what you can give now
Two words get used interchangeably in this conversation, and they should not be.
Conflating them lets both slide. If redistribution gets treated as reparations, it lets the state off the hook. If reparations get treated as the only real answer, nothing moves while we wait.
So it is worth being precise about which is which.
Two different things
Owed, and offered.
Exhibit — Comparison
Reparations · owed
Redistribution · offered
What it is
Repair for a documented injustice — slavery, and the state-backed discrimination that followed it. A matter of justice rather than charity.
Resources you choose to move now. Mutual aid, sliding scale, funded care, solidarity.
Who acts
The federal government — the party culpable for the harm, and the only one able to pay a debt this size.
Individuals, practices and communities. You, and the people you work alongside.
Scale
Roughly $10–14 trillion, or about $267,000–$300,000 per eligible descendant.
Smaller, and immediate. It compounds when birth workers do it together.
Status
Debated for generations. Some state and local efforts underway; nothing enacted federally.
Available today. No commission, no legislation, no permission required.
The debt
What is owed.
The figure is not a guess. It is derived from the size of the gap itself.
Exhibit — Figure
What reparations is estimated to require
$0–0 trillion
William Darity and Kirsten Mullen tie the figure to the size of the racial wealth gap. Black Americans are about 13% of the population and hold around 4% of the country’s wealth. Reparations, in their framing, would bring those two numbers into line.
No individual can pay that, and no individual should be asked to. It is a national obligation, owed by the government that wrote and enforced the policies in Act II. Which is exactly why it cannot be the only thing on the table.
The choice
What you can move.
Here is the part that is yours right now. Start with your own numbers, then watch what happens when other birth workers do the same alongside you.
The amounts are small on their own, and they are not meant to feel sufficient. They are meant to be accurate.
Exhibit — Calculator
The year, added up
That reaches 240 births a year, and works out to $1,440 from each birth worker.
You can’t do everything, but you can do something. Redistribution isn’t the whole answer, and it isn’t yours alone to carry. It’s one root in a larger system — a concrete way to move resources toward the families who have had the most withheld, from exactly where you stand. Even an amount that feels modest per birth becomes genuinely impactful when it’s shared over time.
The multiplier is the honest part of this exhibit.
One birth worker redirecting a modest amount monthly does not change a maternal mortality rate. A hundred doing it consistently funds a birth center's operating gap, or a year of doula care for families who could not otherwise afford it, or the salary of the person keeping a mutual aid fund running.
Money is also not the only resource that redistributes. Access does. Credibility does. A referral list, a speaking slot handed to someone else, a vendor contract, an introduction, a policy comment period — all of these are things practitioners control and rarely think of as transferable.
The question is not whether you have enough to matter. It is what you currently have, and whether it is doing what you would want it to do.
Reparations are owed at the national scale. Redistribution is what you can move this month. Both are real, and neither substitutes for the other.
Sources 2 entries
- Darity, William A. Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen. From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century. University of North Carolina Press, 2020.
- Federal Reserve. Survey of Consumer Finances, 2022 — population and wealth shares.