Should America Pay Reparations for Slavery?

“You cannot reject inherited responsibility while accepting wealth and advantages inherited from slavery. In 2000, the U.S. helped negotiate a $5 billion settlement requiring Germany and German companies to compensate victims of slave labor, forced labor, and unpaid insurance policies. Many perpetrators were dead, but the debt remained because governments and companies benefited. America recognizes that stolen labor creates a debt that survives generations. Why should that apply to Germany’s slavery but not America’s? If benefits can be inherited, so can debt.”

“Reparations have direct legal precedent in American law. Congress paid Japanese American internment survivors $20,000 each under the Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Germany has paid over $80 billion to Holocaust survivors. The US government honors tribal treaty obligations to this day. The principle that governments bear financial liability for documented historical injustice is operative, not abstract.”

“Individual Americans who were not alive during slavery, whose ancestors were not slaveholders, and who have discriminated against no one cannot justly bear financial liability for crimes they did not commit. Collective racial liability — assigning payment obligations by race — violates the same principle of individual accountability that makes the original injustice condemnable.”

“Reparations by ancestry create new racial classifications under federal law — exactly the kind of racial taxonomy the Civil Rights Movement explicitly tried to dismantle. Courts will strike them down as equal-protection violations, and the political backlash will set back the cause of racial justice by a generation.”