[gwright]

But presumably the reparations have to be paid from one group to another group. And perhaps there is a third group that pays nothing and gets nothing (recent immigrants?). So if you are in the group that has to pay out the reparations aren't you being punished for the actions of your ancestors?

As complicated as these considerations are, I still wonder about the unintended side effects if there were indeed some sort of substantial transfer of wealth from some subset of Americans to descendants of slaves. Wouldn't that create a terribly animosity between those groups and what if that transfer of wealth didn't actually resolve the disparities? What if 10 years later the metrics used to measure those disparities indicated that they still existed? More reparations? It isn't clear to me that wealth transfer can actually remedy many of the disparities that are observed. I think it is quite a bit more complex than that.