PT  - JOURNAL ARTICLE
AU  - Wrigley-Field, Elizabeth
TI  - Stolen Lives: Redress for Slavery’s and Jim Crow’s Ongoing Theft of Lifespan
AID  - 10.7758/RSF.2024.10.2.04
DP  - 2024 Jun 01
TA  - RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences
PG  - 88--112
VI  - 10
IP  - 2
4099  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/10/2/88.short
4100  - http://www.rsfjournal.org/content/10/2/88.full
AB  - 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.