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Really? I think the resistance to reparations comes from folks like me who don't see a reason we should pay anything. Most of my ancestors are German immigran

Really? I think the resistance to reparations comes from folks like me who don't see a reason we should pay anything. Most of my ancestors are German immigrants to the northeast US who arrived after slavery was abolished. The remainder were poor Scotts Irish who continued to live in poverty in northern Appalachia. I understand, but do not agree with, the logical hoops many jump through to justify indebtedness to all current Americans. I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America.

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
A reparations law suit would most likely involve a court of law in which victims and benificiaries are identified, damages are calculated, and assets change hands. This fantasy where you just have to give up your personal property for no good reason is just a fantasy. It's not the way the law works. There will be a reason, it will be documented by a trail of papers and professional judges and attorneys will agree that it is fair. If there is no paper trail saying that you are a beneficiary of human trafficking, you will not pay reparations. In order to understand this, you and also the justice system need to evolve to see the world more granularly than just "race". Slaves had names, they had families, they had descendants. Those descendants have legal standing in the most basic sense: they have been deprived of property. Justice demands that those stolen assets be returned to the rightful, legal owners. Forget "resolving racism". That's a red herring. Just return the stolen property to the rightful owners. That's a much more concrete, actionable goal. Edit: please post response instead of downvoting. Why should this comment disappear?
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  > benificiaries are identified, damages are calculated, and assets change hands The assets changing hands will be the federal government paying descendants some sum of money taken from its tax base. And federal taxes are paid by everyone, even those of us whose families arrived after slavery and Jim Crow was abolished. This is why some people are adamantly against reparations.
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    I already told you that's just a fantasy. There is clearly a strong opposition to that, to the point where it would never make it through congress. A real investigation is needed to separate beneficiaries from those who were uninvolved.
- elefanten 6y ago
  How does this work when no one alive today stole any of the property? When none of the people it was stolen from are alive? What is the (broadly consistent) legal doctrine for expropriating living people's property on the basis of their ancestors sins? How do you draw the line around legitimate grounds for litigating a criminal grievance from the past? How do you establish the appropriate damages? I ask these important contextualizing questions not to imply that reparation aren't possible or are necessarily a bad idea, but rather to illustrate that the attitude of "this is easy, just do the obvious thing" is not going to be sufficient here. And when the comment begins with asserted speculation about what enacting reparations "would most likely" involve... I get very suspicious.
  - jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
    You're thinking about the situation upside down. First we find the stolen property, then we return it to the legal owner. One cannot legally own stolen property. The law is very clear: no one gives what one does not have. If for example "Leslie" inherits assets from human traffickers, those are not Leslie's assets; they are stolen assets. Leslie is not a criminal being prosecuted for crime. No one is being punished. Stolen property is being returned to the rightful, legal owners. This has nothing to do with sin, or morality, or emotion, or even race. This is just about accounting and following the law. It really is as simple as it sounds.
- aptwebapps 6y ago
  If reparations for slavery ever happen in the US, it will be a political decision, not one resulting from a lawsuit. That isn't to say they courts won't be involved at one or more points, as you can certainly imagine challenges, but for it to happen it will have to come from Congress first.
iaHN 6y ago
What year is the correct cutoff year where the effects of slavery should be ignored?
tunesmith 6y ago
That's pretty similar to the arguments of why you should not have to pay part of your taxes because you don't agree with part of how it's spent. It might not have been "your" fault, but we all live in a society that bears the fault.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  Do you accept fault for the atrocities committed to Native Americans? Why aren’t you paying them reparations, too? And while we are at it, what about the descendants of the Japanese Americans who were imprisoned during World War 2 in Colorado and other states? What about the children who worked in sweat shops and coal mines during the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of whom died young? Their relatives should be compensated. What about the descendants of the Tuskeegee Syphilis experiment? What about people affected by lead in drinking water pipes? Lead solder for drinking water wasn’t banned until 1986, so there are generations of people and their descendants who have suffered. I can go on and on and our country will be bankrupt before we’re done. But hey, at least you’ve taken responsibility for the actions of others.
  - tunesmith 6y ago
    There's this old scene in the Simpsons where Grampa Simpson stands up and says, "Sure, we COULD fix up main street," and everyone in the town hall meeting cheers, and he says, "shut up! I'm just saying we COULD blow all our money on a stupid little street," and the townspeople cheer again and lift him on their shoulders. Anyway, your comment reminded me of that. I'm less familiar with lead in water. If that was just lack of science knowledge, that's different than, say, deliberately putting lead in water to make it easier to profit off the people drinking it.
    - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
      Thanks for the funny reply. Good to laugh. Lead pipes and lead-based solder is just one example and if you don’t like that example because it happened due to “lack of science”, I can come up with others. My point is that there are countless atrocities in America’s past, recent and not so recent. How can we compensate everyone who deserves it and how can we prioritize one group (e.g. descendants of slaves) over another (e.g. descendants of Native American civilians who were slaughtered at one of the many massacres)? We can’t and shouldn’t.
runako 6y ago
> direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America This conflates two separate issues. One is about a financial debt owed to people. This is owed for forced labor and land thefts which continued into the 20th century. Like the OP said, for the most part this is well documented. Debts are repaid in cash or like goods. Racism is a separate topic, which I agree should be approached differently. Conflating the two issues is not helpful for understanding best approaches. If you ask, many Black families will tell you about these thefts, which again are in the public record as title transfers. Here's an example from the 20th: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%27s_Beach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%27s_Beach . Events like this were common for decades in the 20th century. Even if you just limited to quasi-legal property theft via eminent domain, there's billions of documentable dollars owed and easily tracked. There's absolutely no reason not to give the land back to those families, or a cash payment for its fair market value.
- TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
  What about the treaties we broke with Native Americans, stealing their land after we agreed they could have it in perpetuity? This happened dozens of times in different parts of the country. Do we repay them as well? And how many trillions (since that’s there value of such land now, with or without interest)
  - runako 6y ago
    I know this is supposed to be a gotcha, but I would suggest the burden is on the thief to justify why a documented theft should stand. Put it in writing. Codify it into law. How long does one need to hold stolen property before it conveys under the law? Was this a one-time allowable theft? Was it only allowable to steal from certain people during the applicable time? During what time period? How do we define precisely who it was acceptable to steal from? We live in a legal regime where it's not even permissible to take sunken treasure that's near countries, even after centuries at sea. But somehow land stolen from indigenous people and Black people more recently is somehow unrecoverable? We need to at least write down in our laws the rationale for this. More immediately pertinent: why were these thefts substantially different from those the Supreme Court ruled against in Oklahoma? If we're not willing to at least do that much, yeah we should just give it back. The alternative is choosing lawlessness, which is not something we are bound to do. We don't have to worry about converting to dollars because we can just return title to the land itself. The Supreme Court did the same this year in Oklahoma, so it wouldn't even be unprecedented. https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-court-oklahoma/us-supreme-court-deems-half-of-oklahoma-a-native-american-reservation-idUSKBN24A2BE https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-court-oklahoma/us-suprem...
rayiner 6y ago
> I understand, but do not agree with, the logical hoops many jump through to justify indebtedness to all current Americans. I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America. There's no "logical hoops." It's a concrete and straightforward argument. Black and Native Americans are differently situated in a way that shows up starkly in the data: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 Most distinct subgroups of Americans are converging with whites in terms of income over generations: > White and Hispanic children have fairly similar rates of intergenerational mobility.... Because of these modest intergenerational gaps, the income gap between Hispanic and white Americans is shrinking across generations > The changing patterns of intergenerational mobility for Asians make it more difficult to predict the trajectory of their incomes, but Asians appear likely to converge to income levels comparable to white Americans in the long run. The two exceptions are Black and Native Americans: > In contrast to Hispanics and Asians, there are large intergenerational gaps between black and American Indian children relative to white children. > The large intergenerational gaps for blacks and American Indians relative to whites lead to disparities in earnings for these groups that persist across generations. If mobility rates do not change, our estimates imply a steady-state gap in family income ranks between whites and American Indians of 18 percentiles, and a white-black gap of 19 percentiles. These values are very similar to the empirically observed gaps for children in our sample, suggesting that blacks and American Indians are currently close to the steady-state income distributions[.] We tend to think of equality for Black Americans getting better over time, and while that has happened in the legal arena, it hasn't happened at all economically: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/06/09/872402262/what-a-1968-report-tells-us-about-the-persistence-of-racial-inequality https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/06/09/872402262/what... > While there have been some gains in income since the Kerner Commission, "in terms of the wealth gap, there's been almost no progress," says UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, who studies wealth inequality. "The average wealth of African Americans was 15% of the average wealth of whites in 1963 — and it's still around 15% today." In 1963, the schools in my Maryland county were still segregated. They were desegregated in 1966. But half a century later, Black-white income and wealth gaps haven't changed at all. The founder of BET, Robert Johnson, has made a good capitalist case for reparations: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/bets-robert-johnson-calls-for-14-trillion-of-reparations-for-slavery.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/bets-robert-johnson-calls-fo... > “Damages is a normal factor in a capitalist society for when you have been deprived for certain rights,” he said. “If this money goes into pockets like the [coronavirus] stimulus checks ... that money is going to return back to the economy” in the form of consumption. There will also be more black-owned businesses, he added. Arguments about whether white people today, or immigrants who came here after a certain time, should pay are misplaced. The United States, an entity that is legally distinct from its people, was culpable for enabling slavery and segregation. It can be held liable and forced to pay for its part. The United States government is still paying pensions owed to children of civil war veterans: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-costs-of-us-wars-have-lingered-for-more-than-100-years-2013-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-costs-of-us-wars-have-li....
tptacek 6y ago
Did they arrive after redlining ended, early in the 1970s?
- elefanten 6y ago
  This seems like a huge stretch and reeks of taking a tortured argument one major leap too far. How many people in society 1) were in a position to redline or seriously influence redlining, 2) called for and actively supported it, or 3) even knew about it? Even if someone's ancestors arrived post-slavery and pre-civil rights movement (forget a specific overhanging issue like redlining), would you significantly attribute the state and dynamics of American society to them? What about establishing your own sense of how this society works and establishing your own economic beachhead. Are you immediately supposed to jump in to the oldest and thorniest and most contentious issues of your new home country as if you knew what you were doing? Let's extend that argument then. Why isn't there a strong, unequivocal history of latin immigrants fighting hard for reparations for slavery? Or asian immigrants? Do those immigrant communities also deserve part-blame for not fighting redlining in the 70s? Would it be anathema do admit some white people in America had absolutely nothing to do with the plight of black people in America? Can the leftish political discourse bear this weighty notion, or would it break under its bulk?
  - tptacek 6y ago
    I don't understand the question. The socioeconomic structure of many of our largest cities is defined by redlining. Lawndale and Englewood in Chicago? Entirely the product of redlining. The property values of houses in areas cordoned off for white people? Redlining.
    - elefanten 6y ago
      I overinterpreted your response to the previous commenter and jumped the gun a bit. Sorry for the exaggerated rhetoric, it wasn't needed and may not have been correctly aimed (at you). But, to your points, there are historical forces that bring people good/bad fortune - including racism in America. How do you decide which ones are worthy of ex post facto adjustment on a society-wide level? How do you balance and justify that to the orthogonal part of your population; the part that had no role in the history but would still be impacted by the expenditure of communal resources? Keeping in mind here, the wider the net you cast for who need adjustment, the bigger the impact on the orthogonal population.
UncleMeat 6y ago
There are a large number of varied proposals for reparations, many of which do not involve collecting money from all white citizens. I think the knee-jerk resistance to the idea based on wanting to watch your own wallet is just that: a knee-jerk response.
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
> I think the resistance to reparations comes from folks like me who don't see a reason we should pay anything. I agree that individual Americans shouldn't have to pay anything. All former slaveowners are long dead. These claims are properly levied against the government and whatever other institutions still exist (universities and corporations come to mind). > I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America. You'll be relieved to learn that there are proposals for reparations that do not ask for payments to individuals.

jacobwilliamroy 6y ago

A reparations law suit would most likely involve a court of law in which victims and benificiaries are identified, damages are calculated, and assets change hands. This fantasy where you just have to give up your personal property for no good reason is just a fantasy. It's not the way the law works. There will be a reason, it will be documented by a trail of papers and professional judges and attorneys will agree that it is fair. If there is no paper trail saying that you are a beneficiary of human trafficking, you will not pay reparations. In order to understand this, you and also the justice system need to evolve to see the world more granularly than just "race". Slaves had names, they had families, they had descendants. Those descendants have legal standing in the most basic sense: they have been deprived of property. Justice demands that those stolen assets be returned to the rightful, legal owners. Forget "resolving racism". That's a red herring. Just return the stolen property to the rightful owners. That's a much more concrete, actionable goal. Edit: please post response instead of downvoting. Why should this comment disappear?

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
> benificiaries are identified, damages are calculated, and assets change hands The assets changing hands will be the federal government paying descendants some sum of money taken from its tax base. And federal taxes are paid by everyone, even those of us whose families arrived after slavery and Jim Crow was abolished. This is why some people are adamantly against reparations.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  I already told you that's just a fantasy. There is clearly a strong opposition to that, to the point where it would never make it through congress. A real investigation is needed to separate beneficiaries from those who were uninvolved.
elefanten 6y ago
How does this work when no one alive today stole any of the property? When none of the people it was stolen from are alive? What is the (broadly consistent) legal doctrine for expropriating living people's property on the basis of their ancestors sins? How do you draw the line around legitimate grounds for litigating a criminal grievance from the past? How do you establish the appropriate damages? I ask these important contextualizing questions not to imply that reparation aren't possible or are necessarily a bad idea, but rather to illustrate that the attitude of "this is easy, just do the obvious thing" is not going to be sufficient here. And when the comment begins with asserted speculation about what enacting reparations "would most likely" involve... I get very suspicious.
- jacobwilliamroy 6y ago
  You're thinking about the situation upside down. First we find the stolen property, then we return it to the legal owner. One cannot legally own stolen property. The law is very clear: no one gives what one does not have. If for example "Leslie" inherits assets from human traffickers, those are not Leslie's assets; they are stolen assets. Leslie is not a criminal being prosecuted for crime. No one is being punished. Stolen property is being returned to the rightful, legal owners. This has nothing to do with sin, or morality, or emotion, or even race. This is just about accounting and following the law. It really is as simple as it sounds.
aptwebapps 6y ago
If reparations for slavery ever happen in the US, it will be a political decision, not one resulting from a lawsuit. That isn't to say they courts won't be involved at one or more points, as you can certainly imagine challenges, but for it to happen it will have to come from Congress first.

iaHN 6y ago

What year is the correct cutoff year where the effects of slavery should be ignored?

tunesmith 6y ago

That's pretty similar to the arguments of why you should not have to pay part of your taxes because you don't agree with part of how it's spent. It might not have been "your" fault, but we all live in a society that bears the fault.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
Do you accept fault for the atrocities committed to Native Americans? Why aren’t you paying them reparations, too? And while we are at it, what about the descendants of the Japanese Americans who were imprisoned during World War 2 in Colorado and other states? What about the children who worked in sweat shops and coal mines during the 19th and early 20th centuries, many of whom died young? Their relatives should be compensated. What about the descendants of the Tuskeegee Syphilis experiment? What about people affected by lead in drinking water pipes? Lead solder for drinking water wasn’t banned until 1986, so there are generations of people and their descendants who have suffered. I can go on and on and our country will be bankrupt before we’re done. But hey, at least you’ve taken responsibility for the actions of others.
- tunesmith 6y ago
  There's this old scene in the Simpsons where Grampa Simpson stands up and says, "Sure, we COULD fix up main street," and everyone in the town hall meeting cheers, and he says, "shut up! I'm just saying we COULD blow all our money on a stupid little street," and the townspeople cheer again and lift him on their shoulders. Anyway, your comment reminded me of that. I'm less familiar with lead in water. If that was just lack of science knowledge, that's different than, say, deliberately putting lead in water to make it easier to profit off the people drinking it.
  - TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
    Thanks for the funny reply. Good to laugh. Lead pipes and lead-based solder is just one example and if you don’t like that example because it happened due to “lack of science”, I can come up with others. My point is that there are countless atrocities in America’s past, recent and not so recent. How can we compensate everyone who deserves it and how can we prioritize one group (e.g. descendants of slaves) over another (e.g. descendants of Native American civilians who were slaughtered at one of the many massacres)? We can’t and shouldn’t.

runako 6y ago

> direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America This conflates two separate issues. One is about a financial debt owed to people. This is owed for forced labor and land thefts which continued into the 20th century. Like the OP said, for the most part this is well documented. Debts are repaid in cash or like goods. Racism is a separate topic, which I agree should be approached differently. Conflating the two issues is not helpful for understanding best approaches. If you ask, many Black families will tell you about these thefts, which again are in the public record as title transfers. Here's an example from the 20th: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%27s_Beach https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce%27s_Beach . Events like this were common for decades in the 20th century. Even if you just limited to quasi-legal property theft via eminent domain, there's billions of documentable dollars owed and easily tracked. There's absolutely no reason not to give the land back to those families, or a cash payment for its fair market value.

TedDoesntTalk 6y ago
What about the treaties we broke with Native Americans, stealing their land after we agreed they could have it in perpetuity? This happened dozens of times in different parts of the country. Do we repay them as well? And how many trillions (since that’s there value of such land now, with or without interest)
- runako 6y ago
  I know this is supposed to be a gotcha, but I would suggest the burden is on the thief to justify why a documented theft should stand. Put it in writing. Codify it into law. How long does one need to hold stolen property before it conveys under the law? Was this a one-time allowable theft? Was it only allowable to steal from certain people during the applicable time? During what time period? How do we define precisely who it was acceptable to steal from? We live in a legal regime where it's not even permissible to take sunken treasure that's near countries, even after centuries at sea. But somehow land stolen from indigenous people and Black people more recently is somehow unrecoverable? We need to at least write down in our laws the rationale for this. More immediately pertinent: why were these thefts substantially different from those the Supreme Court ruled against in Oklahoma? If we're not willing to at least do that much, yeah we should just give it back. The alternative is choosing lawlessness, which is not something we are bound to do. We don't have to worry about converting to dollars because we can just return title to the land itself. The Supreme Court did the same this year in Oklahoma, so it wouldn't even be unprecedented. https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-court-oklahoma/us-supreme-court-deems-half-of-oklahoma-a-native-american-reservation-idUSKBN24A2BE https://www.reuters.com/article/usa-court-oklahoma/us-suprem...

rayiner 6y ago

> I understand, but do not agree with, the logical hoops many jump through to justify indebtedness to all current Americans. I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America. There's no "logical hoops." It's a concrete and straightforward argument. Black and Native Americans are differently situated in a way that shows up starkly in the data: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353 Most distinct subgroups of Americans are converging with whites in terms of income over generations: > White and Hispanic children have fairly similar rates of intergenerational mobility.... Because of these modest intergenerational gaps, the income gap between Hispanic and white Americans is shrinking across generations > The changing patterns of intergenerational mobility for Asians make it more difficult to predict the trajectory of their incomes, but Asians appear likely to converge to income levels comparable to white Americans in the long run. The two exceptions are Black and Native Americans: > In contrast to Hispanics and Asians, there are large intergenerational gaps between black and American Indian children relative to white children. > The large intergenerational gaps for blacks and American Indians relative to whites lead to disparities in earnings for these groups that persist across generations. If mobility rates do not change, our estimates imply a steady-state gap in family income ranks between whites and American Indians of 18 percentiles, and a white-black gap of 19 percentiles. These values are very similar to the empirically observed gaps for children in our sample, suggesting that blacks and American Indians are currently close to the steady-state income distributions[.] We tend to think of equality for Black Americans getting better over time, and while that has happened in the legal arena, it hasn't happened at all economically: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/06/09/872402262/what-a-1968-report-tells-us-about-the-persistence-of-racial-inequality https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/06/09/872402262/what... > While there have been some gains in income since the Kerner Commission, "in terms of the wealth gap, there's been almost no progress," says UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, who studies wealth inequality. "The average wealth of African Americans was 15% of the average wealth of whites in 1963 — and it's still around 15% today." In 1963, the schools in my Maryland county were still segregated. They were desegregated in 1966. But half a century later, Black-white income and wealth gaps haven't changed at all. The founder of BET, Robert Johnson, has made a good capitalist case for reparations: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/bets-robert-johnson-calls-for-14-trillion-of-reparations-for-slavery.html https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/bets-robert-johnson-calls-fo... > “Damages is a normal factor in a capitalist society for when you have been deprived for certain rights,” he said. “If this money goes into pockets like the [coronavirus] stimulus checks ... that money is going to return back to the economy” in the form of consumption. There will also be more black-owned businesses, he added. Arguments about whether white people today, or immigrants who came here after a certain time, should pay are misplaced. The United States, an entity that is legally distinct from its people, was culpable for enabling slavery and segregation. It can be held liable and forced to pay for its part. The United States government is still paying pensions owed to children of civil war veterans: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-costs-of-us-wars-have-lingered-for-more-than-100-years-2013-3 https://www.businessinsider.com/the-costs-of-us-wars-have-li....

tptacek 6y ago

Did they arrive after redlining ended, early in the 1970s?

elefanten 6y ago
This seems like a huge stretch and reeks of taking a tortured argument one major leap too far. How many people in society 1) were in a position to redline or seriously influence redlining, 2) called for and actively supported it, or 3) even knew about it? Even if someone's ancestors arrived post-slavery and pre-civil rights movement (forget a specific overhanging issue like redlining), would you significantly attribute the state and dynamics of American society to them? What about establishing your own sense of how this society works and establishing your own economic beachhead. Are you immediately supposed to jump in to the oldest and thorniest and most contentious issues of your new home country as if you knew what you were doing? Let's extend that argument then. Why isn't there a strong, unequivocal history of latin immigrants fighting hard for reparations for slavery? Or asian immigrants? Do those immigrant communities also deserve part-blame for not fighting redlining in the 70s? Would it be anathema do admit some white people in America had absolutely nothing to do with the plight of black people in America? Can the leftish political discourse bear this weighty notion, or would it break under its bulk?
- tptacek 6y ago
  I don't understand the question. The socioeconomic structure of many of our largest cities is defined by redlining. Lawndale and Englewood in Chicago? Entirely the product of redlining. The property values of houses in areas cordoned off for white people? Redlining.
  - elefanten 6y ago
    I overinterpreted your response to the previous commenter and jumped the gun a bit. Sorry for the exaggerated rhetoric, it wasn't needed and may not have been correctly aimed (at you). But, to your points, there are historical forces that bring people good/bad fortune - including racism in America. How do you decide which ones are worthy of ex post facto adjustment on a society-wide level? How do you balance and justify that to the orthogonal part of your population; the part that had no role in the history but would still be impacted by the expenditure of communal resources? Keeping in mind here, the wider the net you cast for who need adjustment, the bigger the impact on the orthogonal population.

UncleMeat 6y ago

There are a large number of varied proposals for reparations, many of which do not involve collecting money from all white citizens. I think the knee-jerk resistance to the idea based on wanting to watch your own wallet is just that: a knee-jerk response.

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

> I think the resistance to reparations comes from folks like me who don't see a reason we should pay anything. I agree that individual Americans shouldn't have to pay anything. All former slaveowners are long dead. These claims are properly levied against the government and whatever other institutions still exist (universities and corporations come to mind). > I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America. You'll be relieved to learn that there are proposals for reparations that do not ask for payments to individuals.