The Push for Payback: Robert Wood Johnson and 80 Other Foundations Make a Case for Reparations
A philanthropic movement to redefine reparations aims to advance policy changes in public health, education, criminal justice, and business development.
Over the past three years, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has made a $5 million foray into efforts to get federal, state, and local governments to pay reparations to descendants of enslaved Black Americans.
At first glance, this may seem far removed from the foundation’s signature health-care grant making. But Robert Wood Johnson leaders point to extensive National Institutes of Health research that correlates the impact of America’s history of discrimination and the major health problems Black Americans disproportionately face.
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Over the past three years, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation has made a $5 million foray into efforts to get federal, state, and local governments to pay reparations to descendants of enslaved Black Americans.
At first glance, this may seem far removed from the foundation’s signature health-care grant making. But Robert Wood Johnson leaders point to extensive National Institutes of Health research that correlates the impact of America’s history of discrimination and the major health problems Black Americans disproportionately face.
“We will never close the health gap in America if we do not close the wealth gap that stems directly from the atrocities of slavery and centuries of racist policies and practices in the United States,” said Richard Besser, Robert Wood Johnson’s president, in a statement. “Reparations must be part of the solution. It is impossible to understand the present or build a more inclusive, equitable future without a deep comprehension of this history and its long-term impact on people’s health.”
Other foundations also believe that to advance their missions, they need to support organizations advocating for reparations. At least 80 national grant makers including the Ford, MacArthur, and Hewlett foundations and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, have made grants to nonprofits working to advance a range of reparations efforts, according to a 2023 report from the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit consultancy. (The Ford, Hewlett, and MacArthur foundations are financial supporters of the Chronicle of Philanthropy.)
Some of the foundation money has gone to funding collaboratives, including Liberation Ventures, which has received support from the Robert Wood Johnson, Amalgamated, Ford, Hewlett, and MacArthur foundations. Liberation Ventures has made $6.5 million in grants over the past three years. Another effort, the Decolonizing Wealth Project, has committed $20 million over the next five years to groups including the Chicago Torture Justice Center, which aims to provide recompense for people who have been victims of police violence.
Foundation support for organizations working on ways to compensate descendants of American slaves are varied. Some goes to organizations seeking to advance policy changes in public health, criminal justice, and business development, among other areas. Others are supporting research, education, and communications efforts they hope will result in concrete policy achievements. The issue has gotten more heated in the wake of June’s Supreme Court decision barring colleges from using race-conscious admissions policies.
The foundation interest comes as more Americans back the idea of reparations than they did two decades ago, and many states and cities have started formal efforts to consider the idea.
Still, passage of legislation that actually directs payments remains confined to modest efforts such as those in Amherst, Mass., and Evanston, Ill.
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The effort has not gained traction at the federal level, either, where reparations estimates total $14 trillion. And in places where commissions have developed a slate of proposals, some elected leaders have either shown ambivalence, like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, or declined to fund city reparations offices, like San Francisco Mayor London Breed.
In large part that might be because two thirds of Americans don’t back the idea of reparations, according to a 2023 University of Massachusetts Amherst poll, and neither do all foundations and nonprofits.
James Piereson, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former president of the William E. Simon Foundation, believes that reparations payments would stir resentment among people who don’t receive payments. And he says that candidates for public office make big promises to push for reparations but balk when they are in office and see the price tag.
“I don’t know where the money is going to come from,” he says. “It would probably have to come at the expense of other programs, and what good would that do?”
Robert Woodson, a veteran of the civil-rights movement and founder of the Woodson Center, a conservative nonprofit that supports leaders in low-income neighborhoods, calls the whole notion of reparations “insulting” because it assumes that Black people need a gift rather than succeeding on their own merit.
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Trillions of dollars, he says, have poured into federal anti-poverty programs since the Great Society effort of the 1960s, which has “separated work from income” and left people dependent on federal support. Philanthropy, says Woodson, should help provide opportunities for poor people to get better jobs rather than focus on their race.
“Reparations are just a way of assuaging white guilt,” he says. “It’s a lot of elite whites seeking out solutions for crimes they never committed and elite Blacks seeking out solutions for the injustices they never suffered,” he says.
Other Alternatives
Robert Wood Johnson’s work on reparations is among the boldest and most expansive of those under way. It also illustrates the challenges that philanthropies encounter when they try to sway government policy.
The foundation has put $2.2 million of its spending on reparations work into an effort in New Jersey, its home state, after a bill to create a state task force on reparations died in the New Jersey legislature.
Robert Wood Johnson paid to create a separate group, the New Jersey Reparations Council, to conduct research on the state’s history of racism and develop proposals to redress harms.
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In addition to direct payments, the council is exploring policy ideas that would find remedies to the cascading effects of four centuries of racism that don’t involve direct cash payments. Those could include increasing the number of Black teachers and administrators in public schools, instituting a tax on the rich to pay for college scholarships for Black students, and allowing a portion of the state budget to be determined by Black community groups.
In a series of public events, the council plans to delve into the economic and educational disparities among the state’s racial and ethnic groups and investigate policies that have suppressed the Black vote and disproportionately punished Black people in the state’s criminal-justice system. The council, which includes academics, nonprofit executives, and faith leaders, plans to issue a final set of recommendations on Juneteenth in 2025.
The failure of the state commission — and the need for a private one — was a setback for Robert Wood Johnson, which first tried to advance reparations by funding the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, a nonprofit that has received nearly $1 million in general operating support from Robert Wood Johnson.
To make its case in the legislature for a statewide effort, the institute in 2021 launched a campaign called “Say the Word,” which generated 13,000 emails to New Jersey legislators pushing for a reparations study.
The goal was to remove negative associations with the word reparations by explaining the effects of slavery and Jim Crow on Black residents of the state and connecting past injustices with current disparities in health, income, and homeownership, says Laurie Beacham, communications chief at the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice.
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The effort helped persuade 18 cities and towns in the state to approve resolutions supporting the task force, which eventually ran aground in the legislature.
Beacham said it was hard to persuade lawmakers that New Jersey played a big role in slavery. A lot of people, she says, think that as a northern state, New Jersey has a “halo of progressivism” that makes it immune from accepting responsibility for slavery and the decades of racism that followed.
Because traditional letter-writing advocacy didn’t move legislators to act, Rev. Charles Boyer, director of Trenton’s Salvation and Social Justice, another Robert Wood Johnson grantee, says that the council needs to take a more aggressive approach.
Boyer, who, along with Robert Wood Johnson’s Besser, sits on the council, says to make reparations politically attractive, lawmakers “need to be shamed enough into doing it.”
Because legislators were cool to the idea of making direct payments, the council will consider other options.
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Kiki Jamieson, president of the Fund for New Jersey, which supports several nonprofits represented on the council, believes that policy alternatives to cash payments could have a more lasting effect. Jamieson led a Princeton study that made a set of recommendations, including forgiving student debt among New Jersey students, increased monitoring of emissions, and instituting penalties to be paid by polluters to individuals for past and current environmental harms.
“Checks and direct cash reparations are important,” she says. “But direct cash reparations without making the structural changes will do nothing to stop the compounding of harms.”
Changing Perceptions
Robert Wood Johnson’s support for reparations goes far beyond the $2 million it has put behind the New Jersey Reparations Council. Over the past few years, the foundation has provided a total of more than $5 million in grants to university researchers, policy advocates, and communications experts to change public perceptions of reparations at the state and national levels.
For instance, the foundation provided $600,000 to the Harvard FXB Center for Health and Human Rights to gather research to help make a case for the health benefits of reparations, which have long relied on economic and moral arguments. And through a grant of more than $400,000, the Canopy Collective, a project that works to shift how people talk about reparations, produced a podcast series with Vox that spotlighted reparations projects globally, including payments and the return of tribal land to the Maori by the government of New Zealand.
Perhaps the most striking grant Johnson has made was to a scholar at Duke University who argues that philanthropy is making a mistake when it supports efforts to help Blacks that don’t put financial reparations at the center.
Johnson provided $750,000 last year to William “Sandy” Darity, the Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy at Duke, to support his research team’s study of reparations efforts in states and cities. Previous support for Darity’s work on reparations came from the William T. Grant Foundation, which provided $300,000 in 2021.
In Darity’s view, state and local policies that aim to help Black people by canceling student debt or getting rid of environmental hazards in neighborhoods that are predominantly Black could make a difference.
But, he says, they shouldn’t be considered a substitute for reparations, which would be an official atonement for the wrongs done to enslaved Black Americans. Only the federal government, he says, is both culpable for allowing slavery and in a position to disburse the at least $14 trillion Darity estimates is the total bill for making amends.
State and city “initiatives are alternatives to biting the bullet and making the monetary payments,” he says. “Many of the organizations supported by philanthropy are taking a detour from the fundamental task of getting Congress to do the right thing.”
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Darity noted that the federal government has quickly made trillions of dollars in expenditures, such as Covid relief payments.
How strongly Robert Wood Johnson will push for direct payments will depend on where grassroots racial-justice leaders land on the issue, says Maisha Simmons, the foundation’s assistant vice president of equity and culture. While the shape and size of any reparations policy is open to debate, Simmons says the foundation is committed to some sort of payment.
“It’s a moral and practical imperative to confront the atrocities of slavery, colonization, and decades of structural racism in the United States,” she says. “The pathway to that is through reparative policies and practices.”
‘Recipe for Real Divisiveness’
Darity’s approach has plenty of detractors.
Take the case of California, where advocates of reparations developed a proposal to provide $800 billion to residents who were descendants of enslaved people.
Michael Tanner, who led the Project on Poverty and Income Inequality in California, an effort supported by the libertarian Cato Institute, calls broad-based reparation payments a “recipe for real divisiveness” because they will siphon money from other government programs and encourage fights over who qualifies for payments. Reparations, he suggested, are appropriate for very specific instances of harm and should be considered on a case-by-case basis rather than by making blanket payments to large populations.
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The cost of the proposed California payments, which are twice the size of the state’s annual budget, were “performative” and shouldn’t be given serious consideration, says Tanner, who is now a senior fellow at the Foundation for Research on Equal Opportunity.
“There comes a point when the proposals become silly,” he says. “The California task force diminished its own value by proposing something that is so ridiculous that it’s never going to happen.”
That doesn’t dissuade Aria Florant, who co-founded Liberation Ventures and is its CEO. But she says gaining enough support for reparations at either the state or federal level will take a big mind shift.
Floriant’s group supported the Reparations Narrative Lab, which created a guide for activists and philanthropists to learn about successful and unsuccessful efforts to provide reparations and develop art and messages conveying their benefits. The idea is to “saturate U.S. culture across movies, sports, food, fashion, religion, and art” to change attitudes.
While a lot of foundation staff are “reparations curious” and want to push the idea with their boards, Florant says, there is a lot of skepticism at the top levels in philanthropy and among voters.
“Reparations are a stepping stone along the way to get to a true, just multiracial democracy,” Florant says. “But in order to believe that reparations are possible, you have to open to your open your heart to this country doing something different, to going a different way than it has in the past.”
Correction (March 11, 2024, 4:53 p.m.): This article has been corrected to clarify Rarity’s views on reparations. He does not believe that a reparations should be paid by the federal government to give the economy a boost but, rather, makes the argument that the federal government has the capacity to make such payments.
Update (March 14, 2024, 6:17 p.m.): This article has been updated to say that Liberation Ventures has made $6.5 million in grants over the past three years. An earlier version said $3.2 million.
Before joining the Chronicle in 2013, Alex covered Congress and national politics for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. He covered the 2008 and 2012 presidential campaigns and reported extensively about Walmart Stores for the Little Rock paper.