The Five Ultra-Woke Economists Who’ll Decide Californian Reparations

The five economists who will determine just how much the state will pay black Californians for historic injustices include a professor who has called for nationwide reparations of up to $14trillion.

Other members of the expert panel advising California’s Reparations Task Force on what they believe would be a fair amount repaid to the descendants of racial discrimination have said there is no such thing as a black middle class and argued the plight of Native Americans is ‘irrelevant.’

Woke professors William Spriggs, Thomas Craemer, Kaycea Campbell, William A ‘Sandy’ Darity Jr and his wife, lecturer Kirstin Mullen, are charged with quantifying the past economic injustices African Americans faced and determining how much compensation black Californians should receive for those crimes.

The controversial task force now has until the end of June to submit its final report outlining just how much black Californians are owed and how many residents would be entitled to the funds.

The five-members of the so-called expert panel have previously presented a report outlining the ‘five harms or atrocities’ the state of California has committed against black people and made ‘rough estimates’ of how much their descendants should be rewarded.

Using historical data, the expert panel calculated that black Californians who lived in the state between 1933 and 1977 experienced a housing wealth gap of $223,239 or $5,074 for each year, ABC 10 reports.

They also determined that the potential income lost by incarcerated black Californians from 1971 — the beginning of then-President Nixon’s War on Drugs — through the present to be a total of $124,678 or $2,494 per year.

And, the five-member expert panel argues, because black Californians face disproportionate health outcomes with shorter life expectancies than white Californians and black mothers four times more likely to die in childbirth than other groups, they are entitled to $127,226 each year.

But these are just ‘rough estimates,’ Campbell said at a recent meeting, and the total amount paid out to black Californians could be even higher. It will ultimately be up to California state legislators to approve the payments.

DailyMail.com has now taken a closer look at these so-called experts coming up with these figures.

William Spriggs, a professor and former chair of the Economics Department at Howard University, has said economic models inherently include racist ideals.

Speaking to CNBC at the height of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, he said that basic economic principles perpetuate inequality.

‘We ignore the constructs that our society has created,’ he argued. ‘The purpose of those constructs are to create inequality.’

More recently, Spriggs suggested people applying for unemployment insurance should not have to prove they are searching for a job as he said that any reductions in unemployment insurance would further the income disparity between black people and white people.

Despite his views on the field, Spriggs has made a name for himself in the field of economics.

He was appointed by then-President Barack Obama in 2009 to serve as the assistant secretary for the Office of Policy at the Department of Labor, and was a former president of the National Economics Association, an organization of black economists.

Spriggs now works as the chief economist for the AFL-CIO and serves on the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Thomas Craemer, a German ex-pat who teaches public policy at the University of Connecticut, made a name for himself in 2015 when he released his formula that black Americans are owed $14 trillion in reparations.

He arrived at that figure, he said, by tabulating how many hours all slaves worked in th US from when the country was officially established in 1776 to when slavery was abolished and multiplied that by the average wages at the time.

‘For me, the model calculations help us to wrap our minds around the magnitude of the injustice,’ he told the UConn Magazine in 2019, noting that the amount owed has since increased to $19 to $20 trillion.

He went on to argue to the Connecticut Mirror that even though that is a large amount of money, ‘the United States has never shied away from a big project.

Craemer later put his words into action by partnering with Georgetown University to repay the descendants of 272 slaves.

William Darity Jr and his wife, lecturer Kirstin Mullen, literally wrote the book on reparations, arguing cash payments are the only way to move forward in American society.

They have said the costs of slavery run too deep in American society, with Darity once suggesting that there is no such thing as a black middle class — only slightly wealthier people of a marginalized group.

And, together, they have argued that the injustices committed against black people outweigh all of the injustices committed against other racial groups.

They acknowledge in their book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the 21st Century, that while Native Americans ‘could make a far more costly claim on the American government than black Americans,’ potentially including the entire territory of the United States, their claims are ‘irrelevant’ to the urgency of the claims made by black people.

Darity now works as the director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity at Duke University and a professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics.

His focus, according to his online bio, is on inequity by race; class and ethnicity stratification economics, schooling and the racial achievement gap; North-South theories of trade and development; skin shade and labor market outcomes; the economics of reparations; the Atlantic Slave Trade and the Industrial Revolution; the history of economics and the social and psychological effects of exposure to unemployment.

Mullen, meanwhile, is a lecturer traveling across the country to talk about the need for black reparations.

Not much is known about Kaycea Williams’ views, but a lot of her work seems to be focused on economic issues in her home country of Jamaica, according to her LinkedIn.

She has previously written about public corruption and its effects on economies.

Williams now works as an economics professor at Chapman University and at Los Angeles Pierce University and runs a firm called Strategic Economics Analysis.