Reparations for black Americans

I support financial reparations and an official apology for the descendants of African slaves in America.

Here's why.

1) Significant American prosperity was attained from African slave work in captivity.

2) Programs like the New and Fair Deals were heavily bent by southern Democrats (in absence of a Republican party to let the South more effectively answer 'the Negro question') to exclude blacks from much needed assistance.

3) Their exclusion from significant federal programs to address the Great Depression and subsequent expansion via the Fair Deal was at the hands of local administrators, and the southern Democrats in Congress--because of these inequities, based in racism, that dramatically reduced significant aid to many Americans, I believe that descendants of black slaves are owed a significant, radical redistribution of wealth.

4) It WILL be expensive. But so are wars. If you take the immediate cost of the Iraq War ($1.7 trillion with an additional $490 billion in benefits owed to war veterans) and divide that by the number of current black Americans (45 million), you get about $38,000 per person.

Now, I just used those numbers to get a handle on the order of magnitude (using recent government expenditures on a significant program), but it shows that this is a possible thing to accomplish. I don't know if that number is appropriate, or how it would be disbursed to ensure that the right people get it, but the number is manageable, and would do significant good. In all likelihood, the largest hurdle will be to administer such a program fairly and to those with agreed upon criteria.

The criteria and their application will not be a trivial matter to come to an agreement on.

Much of the time reparations are dismissed immediately by white folks (see statistics in Darity paper, link below). Maybe the thing seems unmanageable or too difficult to do properly, but I think that's garbage. There is historical "evidence" and reason to make financial reparations and based on my (extremely) rough calculation, financial ability.

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I've been reading "When Affirmative Action Was White" by Ira Katznelson, a Columbia professor of political science and history. Premises 2) and 3) are based on this book. I highly recommend it.

Additionally, an academic paper, "Forty Acres and a Mule in the 21st Century," written by William Darity at Duke. Note: he messes up the math pretty hard when he divides 1.3 Trillion by 30 Million to get 'slightly more than 400,000 per recipient' instead of 43,000 per recipient, but the point still stands. And my math is pretty close to estimates that he and other historians have come to! *pats self on back*