The whole idea behind reparations is to leave the plaintiff in a position of financial indifference relative to the presence of the event (slavery). This requires the counterfactual of measuring income with or without the event. I collected US black income data and compared it to what blacks would earn in their alternative employment in the absence of the event. That means gathering black income data from Guyana, The Republic of the Congo, and Senegal, as that's where most slaves came from. I then did a present value calculation for just over 150 years. In the end, each black in the US owes non-blacks slightly over $640,000. I'd really like to know the methodology behind their numbers.
There was an article yesterday that made that exact point. If the slaves had stayed in Africa, their descendants alive today would have an average life expectancy of 30 years and many would die in unsafe, unsanitary conditions or by the warlords.
Not only that, but many of them would have been sold into slavery by the muslim slave traders in North Africa and the Middle East. So their life of indentured servitude would have been the same in either case.
I keep waiting for people to go after the AFRICAN slave traders who sold their countrymen into slavery in the first place.