Reparations and Financial Justice: with Enith Williams of the Reparations Finance Lab

Healing Black Futures

Financial justice is an important element of the movement for reparations, given this country’s history of slavery and the many years of Black codes and Jim Crow laws, which effectively blocked Black economic progress for generations. As a result, Black wealth is now just 1/10th that of white wealth.

Now, financial advisors are developing reparative strategies to heal our capital markets of these structural inequities.

Repairing what’s broken requires both an understanding of current finance, banking and credit policy as well as grounding in an afro-futuristic vision of what’s possible.

Our guest today is Enith Williams, Founder and Managing Director of the Reparations Finance Lab, a financial service non-profit that seeks to engage capital markets to design innovative financial products and processes that will deliver Reparative Capital to the descendants of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.

Enith Williams founded and manages the Reparations Finance Lab after an international career in economic and social development and finance. She has held senior positions as an international banker with Merrill Lynch in New York City and with the Government of Jamaica, where she worked with the Planning Institute of Jamaica and the Jamaica Investment Promotions Agency, Jampro. Early in her career, she was a program associate, with the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation where she worked on a multi-stakeholder program to address homelessness in New York City. She then moved on to work with the New York City Housing Partnership in its groundbreaking program to engage with local entrepreneurs to secure their participation in the economic revitalization that was underway in Central Harlem and the South Bronx in the early 1990s. As a native of Jamaica, and an immigrant to the United States, Enith has lived and worked in both countries throughout her professional career and has seen and experienced first-hand the impact of the capital markets and financial decision making on economically disadvantaged individuals, communities and countries.

She hopes to utilize this unique insight into crafting a new area of exploration at 17 Asset Management around closing the Black-White wealth gap by reconnecting the history and economics of the African Slave Trade, and the involvement of the global financial markets in that endeavor.