—Michael Lyles, B1Daily

The reparations debate often stalls on one question: What would America actually owe? A 2026 academic paper attempts to replace the abstraction with a concrete federal blueprint, and its answer reaches into the trillions.

Published in BMJ Global Health in March 2026, A Plan for Black American Reparations, by A. Kirsten Mullen, Eugene Richardson, Mary Bassett and economist William Darity Jr., argues that the central economic objective of reparations should be eliminating the Black-white racial wealth gap.

The Wealth Gap Becomes the Bill

The authors argue that the wealth gap is a useful measure because it captures the accumulated consequences of slavery and subsequent generations of discrimination rather than attempting to calculate a separate price for every historical injustice.

That approach builds on earlier work by Darity, Mullen and Marvin Slaughter, which concluded that the racial wealth gap provides the strongest overall gauge for determining the size of a Black reparations bill.

Previous estimates from Darity and Mullen placed the necessary federal expenditure at at least $10 trillion to $12 trillion to eliminate the disparity. Separate economic modeling has produced a similar magnitude, estimating approximately $562,500 per Black household, or roughly $10 trillion overall, under assumptions designed to equalize average Black and white household wealth.

These figures are economic models, not an enacted congressional price tag.

Who Would Qualify?

The 2026 framework is not simply a universal program based on present-day racial identification. It is specifically designed around Black American descendants of people enslaved in the United States.

That distinction transforms reparations from a general anti-poverty program into a claim based on a particular historical relationship between the federal government and a defined population.

The authors organize their proposal around four fundamental questions: Who qualifies? How much is owed? What form should compensation take? And who should pay?

Their answer places responsibility primarily on the federal government and makes monetary compensation central to the proposal.

Cash Matters

This framework also challenges the increasingly popular idea that scholarships, housing initiatives, business programs or community investments alone should constitute reparations.

Those programs may be valuable, but if the objective is eliminating a wealth deficit, then actual wealth must reach eligible households.

There is an important economic caveat. Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis research has modeled a roughly $10 trillion wealth transfer and found that simply eliminating the wealth gap at one moment may not guarantee permanent convergence. Its model suggests complementary policies encouraging investment and entrepreneurship could be necessary to prevent the gap from reopening.

That suggests a reparations endgame could require both direct wealth transfers and policies protecting long-term wealth creation.

The Real Barrier Is Political

The 2026 paper’s most provocative conclusion is that designing a reparations program is no longer the impossible part.

The authors contend that a workable blueprint can identify eligible recipients, establish a financial target, determine payment mechanisms and assign federal responsibility. In their assessment, the central obstacle is ultimately political resistance in Congress.

That changes the nature of the debate.

The question is no longer merely whether reparations can be calculated.

Economists and reparations scholars have produced numbers, eligibility proposals and implementation frameworks.

The harder question is whether the United States would ever authorize a transfer of wealth large enough to accomplish what these scholars argue reparations should actually do.

If closing the racial wealth gap is the objective, symbolic programs will not be enough. The numbers suggest that genuine economic repair would require trillions of dollars and a political decision unlike anything modern America has attempted.

—Michael Lyles, B1Daily