Now that we're finally purging America of the Confederacy's toxic remnants.....

[Warpy]

55. Thank you. I was going to reply with something similar but erased it four times

The problem is that too much time has passed. Who pays? Only the descendants of soldiers who fought for the Confederacy? Most of them didn't own slaves and were poor whites who were often forced to fight at the point of a gun. The whole non African population? You're only going to increase resentment with that one, since the majority had ancestors who fought on the Union side and/or had been ardent abolitionists in the northern states. Even more had families who immigrated more recently and had nothing at all to do with the slave trade, like many Asians and Mexicans.

And where do you stop? It seems to me the Native American tribes deserve this even more, but some of them are now getting rich off our stupidity, since legal loopholes allowed them to open casinos on tribal land. Women of all colors have labored without pay for generations and are still doing it, their labor essential but considered to have no value, and if they are doing paid labor, they are systematically and universally underpaid for it. And there are other major injustices out there, it is an unjust country.

Personally, I'd rather put money and effort into pursuing a more just system, something that would be delayed by giving one group a small cash windfall at the expense of everyone else.

The time for reparations was during Reconstruction and should have been paid in the form of real land reform in the south, putting the complete onus on the large plantation owners who'd caused all the trouble in the first place.