For a brief and all-too-rare moment in American politics, the case for slavery reparations took center stage Tuesday night, and William Darity Jr. was thrilled. Darity is a public policy professor at Duke University and an acclaimed scholar on reparations, and for the first time in his life the idea of compensating the living Black descendants of American slaves was being discussed by people running for president—one of them, author and spiritual guru Marianne Williamson, actually working out the math on stage, in front of an audience of millions. “It was,” Darity told Mother Jones, “a fairly dramatic moment.”
