While I don't know if reparations are the right solution, I think it's a bit rich to suggest that descendants of slaves aren't "people affected" given the enormous disparity, in almost all metrics, between black and white wellbeing.

But in calculating reparations, wouldn’t you want to compare the wealth disparity between descendants of slavery and the average per-capita wealth of the African countries from which the slaves originally came? As opposed to average white American wealth? Isn’t the former more indicative of the damage caused by slavery? After all, had there not been slavery, the descendants of slaves would certainly have very different economic outcomes, right? But it’s probably not even so simple since many descendants of slaves also have some European ancestry by way of mixing with white Americans, so maybe we would need to figure out the degree to which mixing occurred and weight the calculation accordingly? I don’t know the answers to these questions, but surely they must be answered before the reparations conversation could be advanced.

We can talk about reparations for colonialism too.

Did you know Haiti was paying back it's "debt" to France for Haitian bodies "expropriated" from French slavery until 1947?

That’s pretty sad, but I don’t see what that has to do with my questions.

Interestingly, for you in particular, pretty much all of the evils of European colonialism throughout the world are in scope.

That's because you downthread hazarded the argument that perhaps (compared, implicitly, to Africans on the African continent) African Americans were better off as a result of slavery.

That's a reprehensible argument, but at least it puts you on the hook for points like these.

African Americans are economically better off as a result of slavery than their African peers. And without slavery, there would be far, far fewer African Americans than there are today. These are facts; no serious person disputes them. It’s not a big jump to suggest that slavery was economically advantageous for the current generation of African Americans.

This is simple reasoning; nothing reprehensible here. However, it would be reprehensible if I used this one positive outcome to justify slavery, which I’m very clearly not doing. Slavery is bad even if it did have a positive outcome.

Of course, none of this “puts me on the hook” for other other unrelated arguments, nor do they make Haitian slavery relevant to the subject of US reparations.

You've missed my point. The comparison you're drawing between African Americans and Africans in Africa (or, very obviously, for that matter in Haiti) is confounded by the fact that European colonialism set the course for all those people. You're comparing the experience of people oppressed by Europeans and Americans with the experience of people oppressed by Americans.

I certainly don’t understand your point. Where did I compare the experience of people oppressed by Europeans with anyone? Is your argument something like “Africans in Africa would be as wealthy as white Americans if not for European colonialism and therefore reparations should be computed accordingly”? This is the only interpretation that I can come up with, but it still doesn’t make the Haiti comment relevant.

There is simply no way to know what Africa, or the rest of the world, would be like in 2018 without hundreds of years of history of European colonialism -- with the settlement of the Americas and mass enslavement of Africans being part of this. To imagine what things would be like in Africa without, is just science fiction alternate history. European colonialism changed the planet. And not for the better for most non-Europeans.

I agree about it being impossible to make reasonable determinations about alternate histories. This is one of the more compelling arguments against reparations.

ridiculous. It is not difficult to make a determination that enslaving millions of Africans for hundreds of years, and the continued history of oppression against their descendents, has caused real harm which requires reparation.

What is ridiculous is you trying to detract from this history by pointing to an Africa that has _also_ been obviously and inarguably harmed by imperialism. It is absolutely indefensible.

Thanks for sharing your opinion. Since you didn't put forth an actual argument, I guess we'll just have to agree to disagree. Have a good day.

This of course ignores that a sizeable portion of inherited white American wealth and associated living standards was built from slavery.

It ignored lots of things. I have no idea how we could even get in the right ballpark even if reparations were morally desirable.

Pay enough to even out the black-white income difference (about $8,000 per person per year).

That doesn’t make sense. Without slavery the current generation of African Americans wouldn’t have incomes equal to white amAmericans. You’re shortchanging other races, not to mention everyone who has to pay for the reparations but never meaningfully benefitted from slavery.

While I agree in principle, how far back do we go? 10? 100? 1000 years? Or somewhere in between?

The focus would not be on the damages suffered by those who are dead, but the residual effect on those who are alive. You don’t need to pick an arbitrary time scale, you can just look to the magnitude of the residual effect (which will attenuate over time). Right now, about two generations after the end of legal segregation, blacks make 1/3 less per capita income on average than the national average. So it seems like the residual damage is still very strong.

Agreed. One might hope the 'residual effects' would attenuate over time, but the jury is still out. In large part because our society still has plenty of white supremacist social structure baked in, it's not just residual effects but ongoing harm.

I think Coates' concept of reparations would be for the Jim Crow and later practices that crippled African Americans' ability to build wealth like white people have. Things like housing discrimination, job discrimination, etc. Perhaps also things like the Tulsa Race Riot and other efforts that wiped out black business districts.

Consider the problems Jackie Robinson, first black player in Major League Baseball, had in trying to buy a house in the suburbs of Manhattan (Westchester County, NY and in Connecticut)

http://www.newenglandhistoricalsociety.com/jackie-robinson-b...

For these things, the perpetrators and/or their children are likely still alive, as are the beneficiaries.

Contemporary young people should find it easy to understand how this worked and how housing discrimination prevented wealth building. That's because the same thing is now kind of happening intergenerationally via older NIMBY homeowners restricting supply and driving prices to unattainable heights. "Generational redlining" is of course an unintended consequence rather than an intentional policy, but the nature of the effect is illustrative and could serve as a teaching moment.

Good or bad, homeownership is a major way people build wealth in our society. Being excluded from it prevents you from building wealth.

Take the outrage that many younger people feel about generational exclusion from homeownership and then realize that until relatively recently blacks were systematically excluded in much more explicit ways: exclusion from loans, red lining, etc. The effects were the same: no equity, no ability to escape increasing rent, family instability.

Good thing then that Ta-Nehisi Coates argues by more recent events.