When economist Darrick Hamilton, PhD, was growing up in the predominantly Black and poor neighborhood of Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, N.Y., and attending an elite Quaker school that his parents struggled to afford, he experienced firsthand the impact that inequitable distribution of wealth can have on families.
“Having those two environments let me see the humanity and people from those two walks of life and understand the difference was endowment for one group,” he said. “Whereas young adults that came out of Bedford-Stuyvesant might have had some modicum of access to a middle-class lifestyle, they would have familiar pressures and needs and altruistic goals that limited their capacities to generate wealth. Others would have an endowment set up by a parent, some capital that would put them in an asset that would passively appreciate over their lives.”
This experience led Hamilton to develop the idea of baby bonds: publicly funded child trust accounts that provide a nest egg for children to be able to attain financial security in adulthood, addressing the inequitable distribution of wealth. His baby bonds proposal was implemented first by Connecticut and Washington, D.C., in 2021; today, about 20 states and localities have proposed or plan to propose baby bonds legislation.
But Hamilton, the Henry Cohen Professor of Economics and Urban Policy and founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy at The New School, a private college in New York City, said his childhood and the success he has achieved are “far from a ‘pull yourself up by your bootstrap’ ” situation. Instead, his story is one of sacrifice and loss.
“The sacrifice was that my parents struggled in order to afford that education, and they passed away when I was in high school,” Hamilton said. “We are a society that imposes these types of tragic choices on people in order for the children to have better lives. That’s not a tale of triumph; that’s a tale of tragedy.”
Hamilton, the keynote speaker at the University of Maryland, Baltimore’s Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Black History Month Celebration on Feb. 6, says that with policies such as baby bonds, “I’m committed to changing that society.”
In his keynote address, “Fulfilling Dr. King’s Legacy from Civil Rights to Economic Rights: Causes, Consequences, and Remedies to Fulfill Economic and Racial Justice,” he plans to highlight King’s work on inclusive economic rights.
Moving from Vision to Action
Hamilton said there are several ingredients needed to promote inclusive economic rights, “not in a charitable sense, but in a productive sense.”
“The first step is a commitment and articulation of a North Star, uncompromised vision of justice, and it will entail affirmative inclusion, or elements of anti-racism and anti-sexism,” he said. “The default is exclusion in the United States, because our institutions have been built that way. So this vision of what an economy should do and what freedom and justice actually are and how to structure it, we’re naive to think we can just frame it in class and not be affirmatively inclusive.
“In fact, the default in America is that race is implicit. The notion of when government intervenes, it’s always viewed as a lens toward government intervening on behalf of undeserving individuals or in a way that further creates a dependency that makes it worse for them. And the image of that poor person is Black.”
He called this the evolution of King’s Poor People’s Campaign, an effort to get economic justice for poor people that King started in 1968. The idea was that they would meet with government officials and demand better jobs and education, but it did not come to fruition because of King’s assassination.
Hamilton said that to promote inclusive economic rights, the vision also has to have action.
“You need a policy apparatus to support that vision,” Hamilton said. “In the absence of a vision, the policy apparatus is not sustainable and is vulnerable. And you need an active public engagement with a commitment that is uncompromising as to the vision. So strategically, compromises can be made, but we can point throughout American history whenever there was a great compromise, you often, if not exclusively, will find the interest of Black people at the end of that.”
Hamilton’s economic justice work has included crafting policy proposals that have inspired legislative proposals at the federal, state, and local levels, including on issues such as guaranteed income and a federal job guarantee.
In 2021, Hamilton became the founding director of the Institute on Race, Power and Political Economy, which conducts research to understand structural inequalities and works to identify transformational ways to promote equity. Hamilton said the institute’s goal is paradigm change by focusing on conception, policy practice, and public engagement.
“We get to direct public resources in ways that invest in our most treasured and productive resource, which is people in the environments in which we live,” he said. “And then we think that essentially, all of our challenges, whether we’re talking about our climate catastrophes, whether we’re talking about the vulnerability of exploitation from the use of artificial intelligence, have to be viewed with that investment lens of putting people first as not charity but productive agents.”
Inspired by King
Hamilton said he recently participated in a book talk with Jonathan Eig, who wrote “King: A Life,” the 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner for biography. Hamilton pointed out that the book depicts King’s imperfections and vulnerabilities such as infidelities and chronic bouts of depression in which he would seek a hospital stay as a respite.
“That’s deep. We deify King in such a way that diminishes his story. He wasn’t a god. He was a human being that had to make tragic choices in order to fulfill a greater good for society,” Hamilton said. “It’s also inspirational that this person was willing to sacrifice so much for a cause and a movement, which is even more heroic when we get out of the context of deifying him as so exceptional.”
He said he has been inspired by several King writings and speeches, notably “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” because of its continued relevance.
“He calls out moderates, which I think is telling today,” Hamilton said. “Thinking you can sit it out and that’s just. The irony of people that suggest to us to go along with a status quo, they are as culpable with injustice on a structural level than anyone who might espouse white supremacy ideology. It’s a lesson for society, and it also links to pessimism as it gets in the way of actual justice.”
He noted that King had access to the U.S. president, but it did not keep him from wavering from his moral code and commitment to justice, such as speaking out against the Vietnam War even though he knew that would cause a rift.
“That is a person committed to convictions in a way that we all get challenged in varying degrees,” Hamilton said. “It’s inspirational to understand the challenges that we all face in our day-to-day lives and see examples of ways we can overcome those challenges for the greater good.”
— Jen Badie
