In the midst of today’s heightened racial unrest, the calls for black reparations have become more insistent. In their recent book, From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-First Century, William A. Darity Jr. and A. Kirsten Mullen write: “Racism and discrimination have perpetually crippled black economic opportunities.” The offenses cited are slavery, legal segregation under Jim Crow, and more contentiously, “ongoing discrimination and stigmatization.” Their book figured centrally in a recent article in the New York Times Magazine by Nikole Hannah-Jones, who launched the highly controversial 1619 Project. In her piece, “What is Owed,” she makes this claim:

Reparations are not about punishing white Americans, and white Americans are not the ones who would pay for them. It does not matter if your ancestors engaged in slavery or if you just immigrated here two weeks ago. Reparations are a societal obligation in a nation where our Constitution sanctioned slavery, Congress passed laws protecting it and our federal government initiated, condoned and practiced legal racial segregation and discrimination against black Americans until half a century ago. And so it is the federal government that pays.