[MisterBastahrd]

Figure out how much the labor was worth. Throw on punitive damages for having enslaved them against their will their entire lives. Now calculate for having invested that money at the time that slavery ended.

That's a good STARTING point.

Japanese-American citizens got locked up for a few years during WWII and the result was that Reagan signed a bill allowing for their descendants to receive $20K for each incarcerated person.

Now consider how many LIFETIMES were wasted in slavery.

Turns out that the same people who always complain about others having their hands out are just upset at any situation that doesn't personally enrich them.

[qwytw]

> their descendants

Or themselves since plenty of the victims were alive. This was a single event that lasted ~4 years with comparatively very good records.

Slavery lasted for several hundreds years, there are not records for most slaves and even cases where they can identified good luck tracking down all of their descendants. That's several magnitudes more complex, to an incomparable extent.

> Figure out how much the labor was worth

So do you need to find specific ancestors who were slaves and the payout would be based on how long did they work for? So... somebody who's great-great-great-great-grandfather died when he was 72 years old would receive twice as much than someone who's ancestor only lived to 36?

Of course you'll be especially lucky if you can find any ancestors who were shipped to the America in the 1600s. I bet slaveholders kept perfect record, especially back in those days.

Then you have to figure out how to split the payout between 50 to 1000 (un)verifiably descendants of the same individual or will be on first come first serve basis?

All this just seems so bizarrely impractical that I can't believe anyone would seriously suggest it after spending more than 2-5 minutes thinking about how would it work.

[MisterBastahrd]

Your argument is that we should never do anything because attempting to do the right thing to people who have had their pasts and futures stolen is hard.

Meanwhile we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math. It's not that difficult to come up with a minimum standard unless you're in the "do nothing" category.

[qwytw]

I also have some more "ideological" objections. .e.g why don't we just focus on creating opportunities for all presently disadvantaged people regardless of who their ancestors 150-300 years ago were?

> is hard

Not hard, objectively infeasible to accomplish in a sufficiently equitable way.

> we've got censuses going back hundreds of years. Do the math

What math? And what would you do with those censuses? There are no individual records... Could you at the very try least try clearly define who would receive these "reparations"? Would any descendants of black slaves or enslaved Native Americans (or are we not thinking about the natives at all?) get the same share? Would it depend on the proportion of your ancestors who were enslaved? Would your current financial circumstances affect this? Would you have to do a DNA test measuring the proportion of your genome coming from Africa, Europe etc. and use that to calculate the payout?

[slashdev]

I think it would be extremely impractical and impossible to apply fairly.

Maybe that’s not an argument by itself for doing nothing.