Everyone who was involved in institutional slavery in the United States is long dead.
(I have just lightly discounted the moral and political case for reparations.)
And I join you in lightly discounting any moral or political case for reparations. In fact, I go beyond discounting and proceed directly to accounting funds expended since 1965 in efforts to conduct a “war on poverty” as applied to any possible debt that may have ever existed by those already deceased, both white and black. When that accounting is complete, I believe the American taxpayer is due a refund for the lack of results. All those funds did was prove what was said two millennia ago: “You shall always have the poor with you.”
Reparations for historical wrongs (by our standards today) are by their very nature impossible to value. However, the effects of those injustices are plain to see. That’s where the confusion occurs. Those who wish for some form of “reparations” are just grasping for straws, just as those who are denying the effects of those wrongs are often blind to the disadvantages caused by those wrongs.