Fed's Raphael Bostic Says There is Merit to Reparations for Racism

Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta President Raphael Bostic said there’s merit to considering reparations as a way to counter the impact of racism and inequality in the U.S.

“There are definitely merits to it in the sense that, if people have been harmed by laws, then there should be a discussion about redress,” Bostic told CNN Business in an interview published on its website Monday.

Bostic, the first Black president of a Federal Reserve bank in its 107-year history, has called for a national discussion on racism and its impacts following the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. He wrote an essay on “A Moral and Economic Imperative to End Racism” in June 2020.

Bostic said programs such as one by the Chicago suburb of Evanston, Illinois, which approved a housing-related reparations program for Black residents, are “quite interesting.”

“The legacies of past racism are still present in our society,” Bostic said in the CNN Business interview. “We have to think about what things are necessary to offset the impacts of those old systems that still flow through.”