Excellent points, all. But I actually would be supportive of reparations in at least one circumstance: where it can be proven that a family’s wealth can be reliably traced back to their owning slaves and the descendents of said slaves could be reliably identified. In that circumstance I would be 100% supportive of wealth being seized from those who profited from slavery and given to those whose wealth was extracted by slavery. I honestly think this would be rare. But blanket reparations from (only) white people regardless of lineage and to African Americans regardless of lineage? Absurd.
See my post; #13.
Not even then.
As Kipling observed, never pay the Dane Geld no matter how trivial the cost may be.
Once you do the Danes never go away.
Do you think paying reparations once would work? Realize that the aggrieved entity isn’t a person but an entity, an abstraction of persons, and persons through that entity claim vicarious suffering and attribute to others vicarious guilt.
The entity doesn’t die just because you pay off some persons. Other persons will come up after them who will have the exact same grievances, the exact same attitudes and the exact same vicarious suffering ... just as they will engage in similar corruptions of blood to demand their reparations in turn. It can never end because the abstraction of persons, the entity, can never forgive or be sated ... and no one can ever forgive on its behalf because anyone can claim its injuries with ease.
So screw them all. They deserve nothing and none deserve to be made to pay them off.
Reparations to those who didn’t personally endure, from those who didn’t injure, are to justice what amnesties are to sound border policy.
No.
No ex post facto laws.
All the people directly involved are long dead.
Perhaps those slave descendants with a grievance could be placed back in Africa in the same circumstance as their ancestors before they were brought to America as slaves. In that way, the descendants could be made whole.