“What gives urgency to debates about race in America today — and what drives the reparations movement, are two basic facts,” Walter Russell Mead writes in the Wall Street Journal.

The first, he says, is that “the median white household has a net worth of $171,000, roughly ten times the median net worth of black households.” The second is that that gap “is essentially unchanged from the levels of 1962.” Like Mead, I find the case for reparations unpersuasive, and for reasons that go beyond those he mentions.