However, when researchers ask participants to imagine a situation in which they could be part of a reparation lawsuit that would compensate them $5,000 for an event that occurred 150 years ago to a wealthy ancestor of theirs, 61 percent agreed to be part of the lawsuit.
This is the same percentage of Blacks today that support reparations for slave descendants.
“[The] surveys show that 90 to 96 percent of White Americans are against slave descendant reparations. It is nearly impossible to get that many people to agree on anything, so it is an issue that really deserves attention to see why this is,” says Mazzocco. “We need to take a heated and emotional issue and look through a scientific lens.”
The study, titled “The Cost of Being Black: White Americans’ Perceptions and the Question of Reparations,” was facilitated by a postdoctoral fellowship to Mazzocco from Ohio State’s Kirwan Institute for the Study of Race and Ethnicity. The study appears in the fall 2006 issue of Harvard’s Du Bois Review, a journal on social science research on race.
Georgia Southern University associate economics professor Gregory J. Brock, one of the study’s co-author’s, says the idea to do the study came after viewing media coverage of reparations struggles for groups wrongfully interred during wars.
--Margaret Kamara
There are currently 6 comments on this story.
Click here to post a comment.
© Copyright 2005 by DiverseEducation.com
