I'm a White guy, and while I don't care for the term "White privilege", I fully support building, creating, restoring, protecting the RIGHTS denied Black (and other POC) Americans - the right to not be brutalized by the police, the right to not be discriminated in employment, housing, health care, and many others.

I also support reparations. What form, can be debated, but we did provide such to native Americans in Alaska in the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act in in 1971, and it has helped that community greatly. The only thing we have done for continental IAs is give them rights to build casinos, which I think is pathetic.

Freed slaves were promised 40 acres and a mule, which was never paid. A back of the envelope calculation of a comparable money payout today would be a cost of about $150-200 thousand per Black American, costing about $5 trillion (not looking for exact numbers yet, just magnitudes). I would be willing to pay that.

I didn't read your article about reparations TO slave owners, but it was covered well in Capitalism and Ideology, a book examining the history of income inequality by Thomas Piketty, one of the foremost scholars on the subject. These kind of reverse reparations were common in the 17th, 18th, 19th centuries in Western European societies. I imagine you covered that. It is frustrating that we started reparations with Affirmative Action and quotas. It is a stain that these were abandoned.