Doug Henwood:
> What inidividuals? The possibility of big checks would probably
> double the black population overnight - which would probably be a
> good thing, but still, an administrative nightmare, no?
>
> I think the practical problems aren't just some detail, but emerge
> from the whole notion of how race is defined. Just as the
> "multiracial" category on the Census is leading us away from the
> one-drop rule, reparations would lead us back to it.
If one stuck to compensation for slavery, then compensation could be assigned according to the proportion of slave ancestry one could reasonably prove -- a sort of _per_stirpes_ approach. This method would lead to an intense interest in genealogy, which, like the computation of the bill for slavery, would be all to the good, in my opinion, a public investigation of (1) what was stolen and (2) how the victims (and perpetrators) are woven into the American population. At the same time, the method excludes any need to create races and assign people to them; except for the necessary stage of considering the bill for slave labor collectively, it deals with persons as slaves or descendants of slaves, not members of racial categories.