Reparations are a federal societal obligation, not a punishment of individual whites

Evidence

Darity has been studying and advocating for reparations for thirty years, and in 2020 he and his partner, A. Kirsten Mullen, published From Here to Equality: Reparations for Black Americans in the Twenty-first Century. Both history and road map, the book answers many questions about who should receive reparations and how a program would work. I will not spend much time on that here, except to make these few points: 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 amount to 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 would pay. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1381

Categorization

• DEFINE: Distinguishes the reparations-as-societal-obligation framing from the common misreading of reparations as individual punishment.