>There is a distinct advantage in basing reparations on slavery
>in that (1) slavery can be fairly precisely defined and its
>worth (as lost wages) evaluated, whereas segregation and
>discrimination cannot; (2) there are surviving parties who
>can be held legally responsible for slavery, to wit, the United
>States government and the governments of the several states
>which supported slavery prior to the Civil War (all or most
>of those then in existence), whereas much of segregation and
>discrimination was (and is) carried out privately by persons
>who are now dead.
>
>
I am not sure that reparations for Jim Crow would be much harder to
estimate. One could take the differential between wages paid to whites and
black in the segregated south, in current dollars, as a rough estimate of
the dollar value. Since official Jim Crow really started after the end of
Reconstruction, one might start in 1877 or 1880, allowing the intervening 15
years to be written off as a period in which Southern Blacks got themselves
up to speed to participate in the labor market in _relatively_ favorable
conditions. After that, absent legal discrimination, there should not have
been substantial wage differentials. The responsible parties are the Jim
Crow states, and, after the Plessy decision in, what 1894, the United
States, which authorized segregation. This is only a rough first
approximation, but it could be refined. --jks
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