> I understand, but do not agree with, the logical hoops many jump through to justify indebtedness to all current Americans. I also do not think direct reparations are the best approach to resolving the continuing racism in America.
There's no "logical hoops." It's a concrete and straightforward argument. Black and Native Americans are differently situated in a way that shows up starkly in the data: https://academic.oup.com/qje/article/135/2/711/5687353
Most distinct subgroups of Americans are converging with whites in terms of income over generations:
> White and Hispanic children have fairly similar rates of intergenerational mobility.... Because of these modest intergenerational gaps, the income gap between Hispanic and white Americans is shrinking across generations
> The changing patterns of intergenerational mobility for Asians make it more difficult to predict the trajectory of their incomes, but Asians appear likely to converge to income levels comparable to white Americans in the long run.
The two exceptions are Black and Native Americans:
> In contrast to Hispanics and Asians, there are large intergenerational gaps between black and American Indian children relative to white children.
> The large intergenerational gaps for blacks and American Indians relative to whites lead to disparities in earnings for these groups that persist across generations. If mobility rates do not change, our estimates imply a steady-state gap in family income ranks between whites and American Indians of 18 percentiles, and a white-black gap of 19 percentiles. These values are very similar to the empirically observed gaps for children in our sample, suggesting that blacks and American Indians are currently close to the steady-state income distributions[.]
We tend to think of equality for Black Americans getting better over time, and while that has happened in the legal arena, it hasn't happened at all economically: https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2020/06/09/872402262/what...
> While there have been some gains in income since the Kerner Commission, "in terms of the wealth gap, there's been almost no progress," says UC Berkeley economist Gabriel Zucman, who studies wealth inequality. "The average wealth of African Americans was 15% of the average wealth of whites in 1963 — and it's still around 15% today."
In 1963, the schools in my Maryland county were still segregated. They were desegregated in 1966. But half a century later, Black-white income and wealth gaps haven't changed at all. The founder of BET, Robert Johnson, has made a good capitalist case for reparations: https://www.cnbc.com/2020/06/01/bets-robert-johnson-calls-fo...
> “Damages is a normal factor in a capitalist society for when you have been deprived for certain rights,” he said. “If this money goes into pockets like the [coronavirus] stimulus checks ... that money is going to return back to the economy” in the form of consumption. There will also be more black-owned businesses, he added.
Arguments about whether white people today, or immigrants who came here after a certain time, should pay are misplaced. The United States, an entity that is legally distinct from its people, was culpable for enabling slavery and segregation. It can be held liable and forced to pay for its part. The United States government is still paying pensions owed to children of civil war veterans: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-costs-of-us-wars-have-li....