William A. Darity Jr.

After joining the staff in 1983, Darity became the Cary C. Bohamer Professor of Economics and Sociology at the University of North Carolina[9] He taught economics and was a research professor of public policy, African and African-American studies, and economics.[10] He directed the economics department's undergraduate honors and graduate studies programs.[6][10]

In 2001 he was appointed Director of UNC's Institute of African American Research.[9][10] The institute's stated mission is "to help lead scholarly investigation into all aspects of black life, as well as public and private policies and programs affecting their lives."[10]

As of 2014, Darity is Samuel DuBois Cook Professor of Public Policy, African and African American Studies, and Economics at Duke University.[6] He is the founding director of the Samuel DuBois Cook Center on Social Equity (established 2015).[12]

Darity's research has been wide-ranging, but a central organizing theme of his work has been exploration of multiple aspects of economic inequality. That interest has led him to examine the phenomenon of colorism, discrimination in the labor market and "marriage market" outcomes, parallels between caste inequality in India and racial inequality in the United States, ethnic diversity and conflict, the social psychological effects of exposure to unemployment, and schooling and the racial achievement gap. At the international level, Darity has studied financial crises in developing countries,[6] North-South theories of development and trade, and the relationship between the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the Industrial Revolution. He also has examined the relationship between research in the social sciences on race and racism and African American fictional literature and film.

With Samuel Myers Jr., Darity conducted a series of studies on the statistical measurement of discrimination in labor markets.[14] In 1998, he published his most cited paper with Patrick Mason in the Journal of Economic Perspective where they advanced a detailed critique of the two dominant theoretical approaches to discrimination in economics, the taste and the statistical models.[15] His research with Arthur Goldsmith on the psycho-emotional impact of joblessness led to a companion study demonstrating that taking into account motivation more than offset the negative impact on estimates of discrimination from inclusion of measures of Armed Forces Qualification Test Scores in the analysis.[16] With Major Coleman and Rhonda Sharpe, Darity was a member of a team that found in a paper published in the American Journal of Economics and Sociology in 2008 that white workers tend to grossly over-report their exposure to discrimination in the workplace, while black workers tend to grossly under-report their exposure to discrimination in the workplace.[17]

With economist Darrick Hamilton, Darity has proposed a federal asset building program aimed at remediating the racial wealth gap.[18] Popularly labeled "baby bonds," the program calls for the issuance of a publicly funded trust account for each newborn child accessible when the child reaches young adulthood.[19] The amount of the trust account is to be calibrated on the basis of the child’s family’s wealth position.

A long-time advocate of a federal job guarantee, in 2012, in response to the protracted economic crisis produced by the Great Recession, Darity called for establishment of the National Investment Employment Corps, assuring all U.S. citizens over the age of 18 employed work at a salary above the poverty line as well as the standard benefits package for all civil servants, including medical coverage and retirement savings.[20][21]

In 1989, while preparing the introduction for a volume of essays, edited by Richard America, by economists gauging the size of a reparations fund for African Americans, Darity became convinced that a program of redress of this type is an essential step that must be taken by the nation. He has spent the subsequent three decades doing intensive research on and engaged in advocacy for black reparations. As early as 2003, he published a paper coauthored with Dania Frank Francis in the proceedings of the American Economic Association called “The Economics of Reparations.”[14] Subsequently, in 2008, he published the article “Forty Acres and a Mule in the Twenty-First Century” in Social Science Quarterly.[14] In 2020, with A. Kirsten Mullen, he published From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, a book that synthesized and extended his previous work on the topic.

As a leading voice in the current national conversation on African American reparations, Darity argues recipients must be black Americans whose ancestors were enslaved in the United States, the monetary target must be sufficient funds to eliminate black-white differences in average wealth, the federal government must execute the program, and the major form of outlays must be direct payments to eligible recipients.