The Reparations Playbook

It was never just the forty acres. It was the flywheel.

No federal reparations program has been enacted. This book is about what an African American Descendants of Slavery (AADOS) household can build now - and what a properly designed program would make possible if enactment came.

The first volume argued that the debt is owed. This one is the architecture.

The Federal Reserve's 2022 Survey of Consumer Finances puts median wealth at $285,000 for White households against $44,900 for Black households - about six times. That gap has not closed in a hundred and sixty years. It was not produced by accident, and it will not be closed by a check alone.

What this book does

It follows real household work across thirteen chapters and five families: a Chicago grandfather passing a manila envelope to his sixteen-year-old grandson; a Cleveland bus operator and schoolteacher at a planner's kitchen table; a retired Charleston teacher tracing her line back five generations to a woman recorded on a Combahee River plantation in 1827.

Around them, it builds:

• The Financial Wellness Ecosystem - ten components with the household at the center, from banking and debt through risk, investment, tax architecture, and estate planning
• The Ancestral Blueprint - the documented lineage chain, walked at household scale over eighteen months, that establishes descent from a named enslaved ancestor
• The Six-Component Reparations Framework - cash, granted property, child-care credits, college head-start, STEM completion, and the advisor pipeline that makes the rest usable
• Compass sections - product-neutral reference companions naming where independent information actually lives, so the household can evaluate an advisor instead of being sold one

What it refuses to do

Name products. Take a commission. Pretend a payment is coming. The standard throughout is fiduciary, conflict-free, and product-neutral: the household as evaluator, not customer.

Written by James Morris Robinson - CFP®, CLU®, ChFC®, CRPC®, AFC®, MSFS - across four decades in financial services, with every figure traced to a named primary source in the endnotes.

• Book Two of The Reparations Series · The How
• Book One makes the case. This volume hands you the plan.