In June, The Atlantic writer Ta-Nehisi Coates testified before Congress in support of H.R. 40, a bill that would establish a commission to study reparations: repayment for the wrongs inflicted on people of color in the U.S. through slavery and decades of racial bias and segregation. This was five years after Coates published his blockbuster article, “ The Case for Reparations ,” which cracked open the dialogue around the need to thoughtfully and deliberately compensate for the ways in which black people in America have been systemically disadvantaged.

At the same time this conversation was evolving, another idea—basic income—was gaining momentum. The concept of a basic income revolves around giving Americans living below a certain income threshold a flat payment to supplement their earnings and lift them out of poverty. Because more than one in five black people live in poverty (2.5 times the rate of white people who do), politicians who are now advocating for basic income-like policies say that what they’re proposing is a step toward racial justice.

But could it go further? Could a basic income, designed deliberately, be a way to deliver reparations to people who have faced historic disadvantages in the U.S. economy?

In a new paper for the progressive think tank Roosevelt Institute, Jhumpa Bhattacharya proposes that a basic income program could be rolled out in a way that both boosts the incomes of people living in poverty, while also intentionally closing wealth gaps that have resulted from discrimination. Bhattacharya is the vice president of programs and strategy at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, a research organization dedicated to advancing economic security. In her work, she focuses on understanding why wealth disparities exist in the U.S., and how to close them.

The racial wealth divide in the U.S. is profound. Today, the 400 richest white families in the U.S own more wealth than all black families and a quarter of Latino families combined. Since the 1980s, black wealth in the U.S. has actually declined by half.

Gender is the site of another extreme wealth divide. Women, in general, take home fewer earnings than men, but beyond that, they’re often shouldered with caretaking responsibilities like childcare that are not supported by the economy and consequently are a source of financial strain. Looked at through the lens of wealth—the assets one owns over what one owes—women are particularly disadvantaged compared to men. On average, women own just 32 cents to every dollar owned by men. In this system, women of color are especially disadvantaged.

As the idea of basic income gains popularity, Bhattacharya tells Fast Company it’s a sign that people in the U.S. are willing to confront the fact that many people are struggling to reach financial stability in the economy. But “any new idea like this has to have a reckoning in it around racial and gender inequality,” she says. “We have to be accounting for the way government-sponsored policies have led to the inequities we see today.”