Stolen Lives: Redress for Slavery’s and Jim Crow’s Ongoing Theft of Lifespan

Abstract

Reparations proposals typically target wealth. Yet slavery’s and Jim Crow’s long echoes also steal time, such as by producing shorter Black lifespans even today. I argue that lost time should be considered an independent target for redress; identify challenges to doing so; and provide examples of what reparations redressing lost lifespan could look like. To identify quantitative targets for redress, I analyze area-level relationships between Black lifespans and six measures of intensity of slavery, Jim Crow, and racial terror. Results reveal inconsistent relationships across measures, suggesting difficulties in grounding a target for redress in such variation. Instead, I propose that policies aim to redress the national lifespan gap between White and Black Americans. The article concludes with a typology of potential strategies for such redress.