When Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that New York City is “very complicit” in slavery, critics pounced. The Washington Examiner called the logic behind cash reparations — the idea that harm done to enslaved ancestors generations ago creates a debt owed to their descendants today — “historically incoherent and legally perilous.”
The problem with framing reparations about trauma passed down through generations is that they depend on a ledger nobody agrees on. Whose ancestors count, and how far back? How much is owed today for wealth stolen generations ago? Skeptics hear a demand for payment with no clear endpoint — a grievance, not a workable policy.
Yet there is a way out. It relies on a different kind of evidence: one that doesn’t require raising anything from the past, because it’s sitting, fully intact, in the present.
That evidence has a name: “weathering.” Since first proposing the weathering hypothesis in 1992, public health researcher Arline Geronimus has used CDC health survey data to show that Black Americans accumulate a measurably higher “allostatic load” than white Americans. That load shows up as elevated cortisol and inflammatory markers — the same biomarkers that predict heart disease and diabetes.
This is different from “transgenerational slavery trauma” — the theory that slavery left epigenetic marks passed down to descendants today. In a 2025 literature review by Duke University, researchers searched for evidence of such transmission in the five-plus generations the theory requires and found none, but they concluded that no inherited pathway is needed to make a case for present-day intervention: Structural racism experienced directly by Black Americans today is cause enough on its own.
Weathering is one measurable piece of that toll; not the whole of it, not a substitute for fixing the racism itself, but specific enough to test, fund, and treat right now. It’s not history encoded in DNA; it’s sustained racial and economic stress that leaves a measurable mark.
To be sure, many institutions have responsibility for structural racism, and sorting out which ones owe what would just rebuild the same ledger problem that the weathering argument is trying to get past. Instead, it cuts through to a ledger that can be acted on now, without new legislation or a verdict on the past.
New York City’s health department could pick one hospital, in a neighborhood whose history of disinvestment the city’s Commission on Racial Equity is already examining; add a blood-pressure cuff, a blood panel, and a validated needs questionnaire to intake; and bill all three through New York State Medicaid, which already reimburses a comparable childhood-stress screening.
Any city or county could start this practice now, without settling the past first. If the pilot works, expand it hospital by hospital before going statewide.
The version of reparations that can actually happen isn’t the one requiring everyone to first agree on a dollar figure or a family tree. It’s the one that starts by treating what’s already measurable in the people dealing with it right now.
Stephen Narain is a Ph.D. student in English and creative writing with a focus on Caribbean Studies at the University of Miami; a P.D. Soros Fellow; and a Public Voices Fellow of the OpEd Project.
