The problem with reparations is not why, but how

In the war to out-woke each other, the 2020 presidential hopefuls have began to entertain embracing reparations, and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., keen to recover from her 1/1,024 Native American scandal, has emerged as the vanguard of the movement.

Unlike many of Warren’s pushes for more federal power and money grabs, the case for reparations, from a moral perspective, is a fairly conservative one. At one time, the various governments over what is now the U.S. did allow people to own and sell other human beings like chattel, solely on the basis of race, for 246 years. Not only that, but the U.S. government botched Reconstruction and spent the next century allowing legal discrimination against black Americans.

[Also read: R-word dodge: 2020 Democrats avoid saying ‘reparations’]

Sure, the law in writing embodies egalitarianism today, but the cumulative effects of everything from slavery to redlining have reverberated into contemporary racial disparity. The system at large may not be racist today, but centuries of racism have still percolated into modern society.

This is a fairly uncontroversial premise, and most people who agree with it can probably see a moral case for paying back those affected. But the looming question for any 2020 contender who seriously wants reparations is a matter of practicality.

How to pay for it is a problem of who, not the price point. Democrats are touting a Green New Deal that’ll cost nearly $100 trillion in its first decade and are calling to nationalize one-fifth of our economy with “Medicare for all.” Paying some 30-odd million Americans some severance is hardly beyond the pale.

But if this is an ethical argument, it’ll have to be paid for ethically. Will Democrats call for all nonblack Americans to pay into our reparations funds? It hardly seems fair to demand a Japanese-American descendant of someone unconstitutionally locked up in an internment camp to give a dime to the government in the name of racial justice, nor does it make sense for any immigrants to pay into reparations.

What about Italian- or Irish-Americans? Perhaps the Left thinks they have white privilege, but they were socially discriminated against for a century. Many of these people would not even have been in the U.S. during slavery. Some Irish immigrated just to fight for the Union in the Civil War, and most Italians didn’t arrive until decades later.

Could the government only demand funds from descendants of slave owners? That doesn’t sound morally egregious in a vacuum, but how much money would be spent solely on ascertaining who those Americans are? And would they have the money to pay? Would vast swaths of them protest, arguing they did not commit the sins of their ancestors and cannot be blamed for them? Would they not have a point?

Proponents of reparations often cite Germany’s reparations to compensate victims of the Holocaust. That’s a fair equivalent from a moral perspective, but not at all from a practical perspective. Holocaust survivors are still alive today, and the entire nation of Germany was directly responsible for the genocide. Slavery, on the other hand, ended more than 150 years ago, and many Americans lost their lives trying to end it. Even if we can agree on how the proceeds of each uncompensated slave’s labor would be calculated, how would it be divided between descendants in each subsequent generation?

This exercise in working out how to atone for our nation’s original sin should not be immediately dismissed or mocked by conservatives. But any Democrat seriously entertaining reparations is going to have to treat its potential pitfalls with the seriousness that a topic so morally loaded deserves.

[Related: Times columnist David Brooks endorses reparations]