Good morning, Quartz readers!
In addition to sparking protests across the globe, the killing of George Floyd revived the national conversation about how to repay Black people for centuries of state-sanctioned racism. Political will for reparations, long too weak to ignite any substantive change, shows signs of shifting: While a 2019 survey found that 15% of white Americans supported reparations, a July 2020 poll put that number at 39%.
In our latest series, we asked how, exactly, reparations could work.
That big question quickly breaks down into little ones—who should receive them? How should they be paid? Where’s the money going to come from? Contributor Rodney Brooks reports that reparations can take many forms, such as cash payments and a pool of money to help Black homeowners and entrepreneurs. The “who” should include all Black Americans, and any payment should come with a formal apology.
The onus for making reparations happen doesn’t just lie with the federal government. US corporations have enriched themselves from racial inequality—some have simply upheld it, while others were directly complicit in the slave trade. Annalisa Merelli addresses how companies can reckon with their role in perpetuating systemic racism, from radical truth-seeking into their own practices, to offering payments to those who they treated unjustly, or lobbying for a federal reparations bill.
Slavery and systemic racism aren’t uniquely American, either. The UK, a country deeply complicit in the slave trade and carrying a brutal history of colonization, is being held to account as well, Hasit Shah writes. With a populace unmoved by moral arguments and (until recently) undereducated about its country’s role in slavery, the UK has little political will around paying financial reparations to those the British once colonized. Instead, activists are focusing on justice and working to change extractive policies.
Together, this batch of stories (we’ll be publishing two more this coming week) paint a picture of a reparations movement that’s far from impossible. “Will it happen? I have no idea,” William Darity, a professor of public policy and reparations scholar, told Brooks. “There are more grounds for optimism at this moment than any time in my lifetime. This is the moment.” —Alexandra Ossola and Oliver Staley
Five things on Quartz we especially liked
What’s good enough for Europe… The US’s image has collapsed in Europe since Donald Trump became president, dragging its reputation down to levels last seen during the invasion of Iraq. Yet counterintuitively, Trump has bolstered the European Union by forcing its technocratic believers to step up and reform. Annabelle Timsit details how the emergence of a noisy Euroskeptic American president has inspired Europeans to push through years of crises to get stronger. —John Detrixhe, finance reporter
A double-cap on opportunities. Immigration is a major issue for the US election, but H-1B visas will be affected no matter who wins on Nov. 3. Ananya Bhattacharya’s thoughtful and comprehensive analysis goes into great detail about what’s at stake for H-1B workers and their families, especially the people in the IT industry from India and China. It’s a great explanation of the wider economic impacts and how difficult it can be to change policies. —Karen K. Ho, global finance and economics reporter
A name reclaimed. For almost 30 years, JT McCormick successfully navigated his career with a name that revealed little about his identity. No longer. In the aftermath of an epic reckoning on race in corporate America, the Scribe Media CEO writes in Quartz at Work about why he’s once again going by JeVon. —Heather Landy, executive editor
The great pivot. For the uninitiated (like me), the spreadsheets of Excel and its ilk can inspire fear and dread. But for aficionados like data editor Dan Kopf, they are old friends that can help corral unruly datasets. In this piece, Dan demystifies the pivot table, and explains how it is the key to unlocking treasures of information. —Oliver Staley, culture and lifestyle editor
I am a printer. Won’t you buy me? Sarah Todd’s life-affirming piece for unsexy appliances finds that remote workers who have “already outfitted their homes with the high-priority basics: desks, computer monitors, noise-canceling headphones” are now getting around to all-in-one printers. It’s not an intuitive purchase, I know. You have to accept that you may never see that clunker from the office again. On the upside, I’ll be all yours, and I can totally do the thing you need me to do about 60% of the time! —A printer
Fun fact about comic cons
Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin is the #1 comic book fan. We mean this quite literally—not only did Martin attend the very first New York Comicon in 1964, but he allegedly received the first attendance badge, labeled with the number one. Follow comic cons in their quest to stand up to the supervillain Covid-19 in the latest issue of the Quartz Weekly Obsession.
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10 ways industries are changing in response to Covid-19
Covid-19 is transforming the global economy, halting some industries temporarily and changing some for good. We’re covering those changes every day, but in our latest presentation we’ve collected 10 that are particularly important:
🚚 E-commerce got a huge boost
🇨🇳 Supply chains are moving out of China
💻 Online education has gone from niche to essential
💊 Health tech has seen a surge of investment
⛅ It’s a good time to be in the enterprise cloud business
💵 Ditto, digital payments and banking
📈 Venture capital is still investing, contrary to early reports
😷 Companies are spending big on PPE—but less than in the spring
🏢 We’re rethinking the office
🤖 And automation is likely to speed up
✦ Start your free trial today to read the presentation, or—why not!—read all of our presentations, and experience the rest of Quartz, paywall-free!
Five things from elsewhere that made us smarter
Google “back to the drawing board.” This week Google rolled out a “reimagination” of some of the icons for Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, and Meet, and the collective name for these tools changed from G Suite to Google Workplace. They’re all bad. At TechCrunch, Devin Coldewey explains how the icons went wrong through a deft discussion of color, shape, and brand. It’s also an indictment of decision-making at Google. How did this get out the door? – Max Lockie, deputy news editor
Liberals for Trump? To most people, US president Donald Trump is the very opposite of what we would describe as a “liberal.” So how does that explain the apparent conundrum of China’s liberals being loud cheerleaders for him? Qin Chen explores this question for Inkstone, speaking with human rights activists and scholars to understand how Chinese liberals’ deep dislike of Beijing, as well as the trauma that they’ve endured, can color their perception of American politics. —Mary Hui, reporter
Meet up on the quad. The Quadrilateral—or simply, The Quad—is an alliance of the US, India, Japan, and Australia, which met over the past week to discuss sundry trade, security, and defense cooperation issues. India has been shy about openly criticizing the group’s shared post-Covid-19 nemesis: China. As Tara Kartha notes about the other members in The Print, “not all are yet on the same page, though they’re clearly reading the same book.” —Manavi Kapur, Quartz India reporter
When gentrification is on the menu. Anecdotally, a neighborhood’s changing restaurant scene can be an obvious indicator of gentrification. But in this deeply reported, data-driven feature, Eater’s Vince Dixon investigates how the number and nature of a city’s food and drink establishments reflect its transformation. For example, there is a strong correlation between housing prices and the number of cafes in a neighborhood. And once restaurants start closing—as many have since the start of the pandemic—it’s likely the community’s long-time residents will be priced out for good. —Liz Webber, senior news curator
Cosmic realism. In the New Yorker, Casey Cep examines the novelist Marilynne Robinson’s life, stories, and political philosophy. Robinson’s way of looking at the world is attentive, forgiving, and immensely challenging. There’s a critique of capitalism here, and a lot of history relevant to our fractious, precarious moment, but most importantly there is this: the idea “that existence is miraculous, that at any moment the luminousness of the world could be revoked but is instead sustained.” —Katherine Bell, editor in chief
Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, toner, and ink to hi@qz.com. Get the most out of Quartz by downloading our app and becoming a member. Today’s Weekend Brief was brought to you by Alex Ossola, Oliver Staley, Susan Howson, and Lila MacLellan, who speaks for all home printers, everywhere.