Dr. Phil has folks on social media dragging him to hell after he said providing cash reparations for slavery would be an “absolute disaster” during an episode of his talk show on April 18.
The talk show host made the statement after economist and Duke University Professor William A. Darity Jr. said that $14 trillion should be distributed evenly to the 40 million Black descendants of slavery in America, or $350,000 per person.
The payments would be an attempt to help eliminate the wealth disparity between Black and white Americans, which he said is about $840,000. Darity co-authored the book “From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century.”
Related: ‘This Ain’t It’: San Francisco NAACP Creates Twitter Firestorm After Rejecting City’s Proposal of $5M Payments to City’s Black Residents, Calls for ‘More Practical’ Reparations Plan
Darity noted that the government could pay the funds in a way similar to how federal payments were distributed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“It would be paid by the federal government in the same way in which the federal government has met the expenses that were, uh, that were paid out for the purposes of trying to deal with the great recession and also, most recently, with the economic downturn associated with the great pandemic,” he said.
Civil rights activist Bob Woodson also appeared on “Dr. Phil” and disagreed with Darity.
“When you go into slavery, it’s much more complex than all white people were the oppressors, and Black people were the victims,” Woodson said. “If you dissect it, you will find there were about 3,700 free Blacks who owned 12,000 slaves — Black slaves. The question is, do the descendants of those free Blacks who owned Black slaves, do they pay?”
“Blacks really benefited more the first 100 years after slavery than we have in the last 50 years,” he added.
Darity responded that the federal…
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