This is a great post, Jack. You have looked at this issue from all sides, and the sources you’ve linked to are helpful. While I agree with you that reparations would be really difficult to implement, to push the logic of your argument a little bit, WHY would it be too difficult to figure out who should receive the money and who should pay? Imagine a reparations program that just laid out a date, e.g., 1965 before which if you or your descendants were in this country, you qualify. Why would that be so hard? Obviously, there’s the troubling reality that many Black people do not have much knowledge about their own family history, since slavery and Jim Crow basically erased that history, but a year like 1965, for example, is not so far away that it would exclude a majority of Black people, and it would also have the added effect of partially answering the question of what to do about more recent immigration. (Remember, we had quotas from 1924-1965 that placed heavy restrictions on immigration from everywhere, including African countries.) In any case, given that we live in a multiracial, immigrant society today, it probably makes more sense, as you have argued, rather than try to determine who specifically has to pay/who gets the money, to make major investments in housing, healthcare, education and economic opportunity in historically Black communities and in poor urban neighborhoods. When you look at how much money we spend on other things like defense, the argument that this kind of investment is politically impossible makes no sense.
This is a great post, Jack. You have looked at this issue from all sides, and the sources you’ve linked to are helpful. While I agree with you that reparations would be really difficult to implement, to push the logic of your argument a little bit, WHY would it be too difficult to figure out who should receive the money and who should pay? Imagine a reparations program that just laid out a date, e.g., 1965 before which if you or your descendants were in this country, you qualify. Why would that be so hard? Obviously, there’s the troubling reality that many Black people do not have much knowledge about their own family history, since slavery and Jim Crow basically erased that history, but a year like 1965, for example, is not so far away that it would exclude a majority of Black people, and it would also have the added effect of partially answering the question of what to do about more recent immigration. (Remember, we had quotas from 1924-1965 that placed heavy restrictions on immigration from everywhere, including African countries.) In any case, given that we live in a multiracial, immigrant society today, it probably makes more sense, as you have argued, rather than try to determine who specifically has to pay/who gets the money, to make major investments in housing, healthcare, education and economic opportunity in historically Black communities and in poor urban neighborhoods. When you look at how much money we spend on other things like defense, the argument that this kind of investment is politically impossible makes no sense.