A little more on the topic
What my book is really about
Book update:
As I was preparing to publish this post, I found out that ACTS OF FORGIVENESS received a starred review from Publishers Weekly! It’s the first review to come out about the book so it’s a nice way to kick off. If you haven’t already, hopefully this gives you a little incentive to preorder the book…
Now for the rest of the post:
Is anger the best starting point for writing a novel? Maybe, maybe not. A lot of writers try to start with a character’s voice instead of a topic or a political point. For me the two sort of coincided. I was reading Midnight’s Children and working on an article for The Atlantic about America’s racial wealth gap. I began thinking more about our country’s unwillingness to even study the impact of slavery on American society, the oft-proposed first step toward enacting a federal reparations policy. The statistics around the wealth gap have long enraged me (that’s why I pitched the article idea to The Atlantic) but there’s only so much you can do with the facts of a situation. The question was how to turn it into art?
A look at some of the numbers1:
Older single Black women with a bachelor’s degree have a median net worth of $11,000 compared to $384,000 among white single women with a college degree of the same age range
Single white women (ages 20-29) who have completed college have a median net worth of $3,400 compared to negative $11,000 among single Black women of the same age range with similar education
The proportion of Black people living in poverty has stayed at relatively three times that of white people
In 2022, white households in the U.S. had 15x more money in total assets than Black households2
Median net worth of white people in the bottom 20% of the nation’s income distribution is higher than the median net worth of all Black Americans
I find it hard to read statistics like these without coming to the conclusion that some sort of federal, structural change needs to be implemented in order to address the situation. I think Robin Rue Simmons, the chair of the Evanston Reparations Committee, put it succinctly when she said during an interview, “The Black experience in this city and in this nation has been in a state of emergency since we were kidnapped from West Africa and brought here and so it is time to do something radically different than we’ve done in the past and reparations is that answer.”
My goal with ACTS OF FORGIVENESS was to try and write about reparations in a way that wasn’t satire but also wasn’t didactic. I wanted to imagine what conditions would have to be true for the United States to move closer toward a federal reparations program. And if those conditions were met, what might it actually look like for one family? What might it mean for the safety of certain groups? For businesses, for schools? What might it mean for how a daughter relates to her parents or grandparents? For how friends relate to one another?
Writing about reparations is tricky. It’s become a sort of trope or cliché (which I think is interesting in and of itself but that’s a post for a different time) especially for Black artists. I didn’t really think about the messiness of having to market a book about reparations, I just wanted to see if I could do it.
Then while I was working on the second draft of the book, George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor were murdered, and reparations went from a far-fetched policy idea to one more politicians finally thought worthy of consideration. (So I guess that was partly the answer to my question: a global pandemic in which more people stopped to actually see the violence inflicted on Black people.) And yet a federal reparations policy is still far from reality.
ACTS OF FORGIVENESS focuses on reparations at the national level. Essentially what would happen after H.R. 40—the bill that has been introduced in Congress every year since 1989 to establish the Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African-Americans—has run its course.
Federally, we might not have made much progress toward reparations. But, locally, we have:
Since 2019, Evanston, IL has awarded 16 recipients with $25,000 each. They have to prove that they were a resident between 1919 and 1969, the direct descendent of a Black resident during that time period, or submit evidence they suffered housing discrimination due to the city’s policies after 1969. Over 100 local communities since then have taken a step toward reparations
LA returned a portion of land called Bruce’s Beach to the Bruce family after Manhattan Beach seized it from the family because they were Black. This allowed them to sell it back to LA County for $20 million
The Philadelphia Reparations Task Force was created to study and develop reparations proposals for Black Philadelphia descendants of enslaved Africans in the U.S. Similar proposals are happening in other cities across the U.S.
I didn’t think these local policies would be enacted when I first started writing AOF. And yet, I think it’s also interesting to think about what is gained and what is lost when we pass them at the local level instead of the federal level. At the local level, you’re able to take a very targeted approach to discrimination, and use funds from that community to address the wrongs committed by that community. But what I explore in the book is what might happen if the whole country accepts responsibility for previous injustices. What is the psychological healing that can happen when, on a national level, we choose to acknowledge our mistakes? Local communities can’t apologize for the whole nation.
While I was writing I read a book called From Here To Equality by William A. Darity and A. Kirsten Mullen. I also interviewed Professor Darity for The Atlantic piece and had him read a portion of the book. The authors view the racial wealth gap as “the most robust indicator of the cumulative economic effects of white supremacy in the United States.” As some of the logic flows in the book, the gap in mean household wealth by race was $795,000 in 2016. The mean shortfall of wealth for individual Black Americans would be $240,000. Multiplying $795,000 by 10 million Black households yields an estimate of a total reparations bill of $7.95 trillion. (They use mean instead of median so as to purposefully capture the outliers.)
Of course, there’s a lot more involved that I didn’t cover in this post, like eligibility requirements and whether there should be cutoffs based on the current amount of wealth in a family. If you’re interested in learning more about the nitty gritty of different reparation proposals, their book is a good place to start.
Also, the newsletter wouldn’t be complete without another plug, so please preorder ACTS OF FORGIVENESS and spread the word. I appreciate it.
And as always, thank you for reading.
Maura