In the United States we continue to wrestle with issues of racism and the economic, political, and cultural implications of that curse on our democracy. For the most part we have done it to ourselves, and we will not solve it in my lifetime, or maybe even that of my children. Nevertheless, we need to accelerate a national effort to heal that scar for the generations to come.

Regardless of your political philosophy or ideology about democratic governance, ask yourself if systemic racism does not still exist why does the average black American have one-tenth of the wealth of the average white American. Why is life expectancy for blacks in America significantly less than for whites. Why is the killing of unarmed blacks by police dramatically higher than the same kind of killing of their white counterparts? And why is the incarceration rate for blacks twice that of whites?

If one recognizes and considers those statistical realities and it’s not racism, then what explains the disparity of standing between blacks and whites in our society? Are blacks just lazier than whites? Less intelligent? Are they simply less civilized than whites, and/or naturally more violent? Or could something more systemic be at work here after all?

There is little valid contrary argument that conditions for the black electorate are substantially better in America than they were in the Civil War era, or even 50 years ago. Blacks can now be found in all the centers of power and authority – academia, government, corporate governance. But their numbers in those positions don’t match their share of the general population. In many cases they even seem to be a necessary token presence. Given all that, I would argue that systemic racism is alive and well in America and as a liberal democracy we must more aggressively address it before it may be too late.

One area of serious political tension is in what, if anything, we owe the black community for their historic unfair treatment by white society, as well as the continued, though more subtle, disparity that historic (and maybe current) mistreatment still causes today. I have written about systemic racism in the past. But in this piece I specifically want to address the concept of reparations.

The idea of the American government paying reparations to freed slaves has been around for about as long as slavery itself, long before the Civil war and the official freeing of slaves. There have been many ideas floated about how to address it, but the problem is always lack of political enthusiasm or consensus on the need to address it as well as the critical issues – how to figure out who would be entitled, how to decide what might be fair, how to administer a rational program, how to pay for it, and how to get public buy-in to what would likely be a very large financial obligation.

The right way to address such a fundamental issue in a liberal democracy would be for the federal government to launch a major research and analysis project to study the scope of the challenge, the likely effectiveness of alternative solutions, and the relative cost/benefit of those alternatives. Once a comprehensive study and analysis is completed, then plans for and develop of an implementation strategy can be assembled.

As it turns out such a strategic approach has been proposed in Congress several times over the years. The current proposal is outlined in HR-40, officially titled “Commission to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act”. Unfortunately, though frequently introduced, it never goes anywhere. It’s easy for politicians to discount the need and/or public value of such an approach, as well as just claim we can’t afford it. That is likely to be the story for my lifetime, which leads me to consider and offer a compromise alternative. It is not nearly as good as HR-40, but eliminates some of the nebulous elements, and could be packaged to be easy for Americans to understand. I call it the African-American GI Bill.

Not sure what people know about the WWII era GI Bill. But two elements of that law (low cost home loans and free higher education) effectively created today’s “white” American middle class. Sadly though it was intentionally written and implemented to exclude the vast majority of black veterans. My idea is simply to write a new “GI Bill” with similar subsidized home loans and education for the current descendants of those black veterans who were excluded 75 years ago.

My idea will not lift up every black American. But it will cover a fairly large segment of the black population, and over time would dramatically expand the black middle class. I want to believe that if executed well it would have a positive knock on affect that would elevate the black community as a whole. It also seems to me an honest compromise approach that the electorate can understand even if there is not universal buy-in. It likely would also avoid some of the pitfalls of other abstract theoretical alternatives. And with an aggressive marketing campaign we might sell the idea to the electorate as a legitimate effort to right some of the racial wrongs white America has committed. It might change minds and reduce racial tensions over the long term. But even if none of that occurred it is one of the right kinds of things to do in a liberal democracy.

My personal “back of the envelop” calculation is that there would be about 3 generations of descendants that could qualify for this form of reparations. There were about 1.2 million black Americans who served in uniform during WW2. Assuming the US fertility rate during the past 75 years plus the death rate of descendants, particularly of the first generation after the veterans, my semi-educated guess is that we are talking about the order of 8 million potential Americans qualified for this kind of reparations payments.

The benefits of this approach I see are:

• It avoids trying to figure out who might be entitled to participate in the program. We have fairly complete records of who the WWII black veterans were. And we can easily determine with a high level of confidence who those soldiers current descendants are. Similarly, we can eliminate those descendants whose veteran ancestor did in deed get the opportunity to take advantage of the original GI Bill, as well as those descendants who already have sufficient wealth where additional subsidy would not serve a useful public purpose.

• While the cost will be high we can easily identify what those cost will be for planned implementation. We also have much more geographically distributed academic and financial institutions than we had during the original GI Bill implementation; that will make administration of a new Bill more efficient. And the qualifying population is much more centrally located in urban areas where those institutions are.

• The expected federal funds required for the program would be spread out over several years, thus reducing an immediate severe budget impact. Of course the federal government can negotiate with financial and academic institutions for favorable financial terms, and incentivize them to participate. And through business incentive and public pressure we should reasonably expect competition among academic and financial institutions for this large influx of potential students and home buyers.

• The influx of these students and home buyers will substantially stimulate the local and national economy just as it did in the late ’40s and early ’50s, with new tax revenues offsetting, probably over time even erasing, the US government investment in these reparations. It will also virtually over night massively increase the racial diversity in educational achievement and home ownership which most economists, politicians, and Americans in general think is a desirable stabilizing influence on our democracy;

• As another rationale for justifying this new spending, though fairly technical, is the future costs the US government will avoid paying through public assistance systems as more black Americans move into the middle class.

• Finally, by excluding black veterans from the GI Bill after WWII the US government probably saved the order of $20,000 per black veteran at the time. If we had spent that amount on those veterans, it is easy to extrapolate that 75 years worth of economic growth would have created thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of veterans with accumulated wealth of $1M or more, and substantially more tax revenue and reduced public assistance. Handing down that wealth to subsequent generations would have been the economic engine to dramatically expand the black middle class just as it did for white veterans. We should expect the same thing going forward with this kind of public investment.

I am not naive about the matter of reparations. I know most Americans don’t think the current generation should pay for mistakes of the past. I get that. But that is why I am suggesting a case that is literally so black and white, and relatively recent, at least in the lifetimes of most WWII veterans’ children.

I have the sense that most Americans are fair minded. And if they knew and understood how the original GI Bill was specifically designed and implemented against black veterans they would be more willing to consider righting that wrong. Regardless, I know it would be a hard sell requiring imaginative “marketing” by federal politicians. Presumably that would not be Republicans. But who knows? Maybe if either of the two parties made a major effort to “educate the electorate” about the original travesty and was willing to spend political capital on a solution something might happen. At least I want to be optimistic.