This article reflects the view of the Cernunnos Foundation and its founder, Robert Smith. The Blue Ribbon Team webzine endorses it fully. It is also an example of how Bright Meadow Group approaches hard problems: strip the issue to its core, resolve the matter that can be resolved, then observe the system honestly to see what happens next.
I came to this framing as a former insurance adjuster. I’ve tried to look at reparations as a disinterested party—while also acknowledging I’m not perfectly neutral. Like most Americans, I’m “tainted with interest” in more than one direction on this issue.
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a labor leader as well as a church leader—and, of course, a Black leader. So on the day we remember him, here is a middle-aged, average white guy’s view on reparations.
Enjoy.
An Accounting Problem, Not a Moral Riddle
From a systems standpoint, the question of reparations is not complicated.
It has been made complicated to avoid paying a debt that is both measurable and overdue.
Should the United States pay reparations to the descendants of enslaved people?
The answer is yes.
The wealth, infrastructure, and institutional stability of this country were built in significant part on uncompensated labor extracted through slavery and sustained through law. That labor was never paid for. The benefits were never reconciled. The debt did not disappear—it was simply carried forward.
In any functioning system, we would call that what it is:
a liability left on the books.
On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, it is worth stating plainly: justice delayed is not abstract. It accrues consequences. And delayed obligations do not evaporate with time—they spread.
Who Is Owed?
Reparations should be paid to the descendants of enslaved African Americans, defined pragmatically and inclusively using U.S. census records from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
Records prior to that period are incomplete, destroyed, or unreliable—often by design. Records after 1900 are sufficiently accurate to establish lineage at scale.
Yes, this approach will include some African Americans whose ancestors arrived after slavery formally ended. That risk is acceptable. It is far outweighed by the injustice of excluding rightful descendants because records were erased, neglected, or never created by the same system that caused the harm.
Reparations are not a purity test.
They are a settlement.
Who Pays?
Everyone.
Not because every American personally committed a crime.
Not because guilt is hereditary.
But because citizenship conveys benefit.
Every American benefits from a nation whose early capital accumulation, land consolidation, infrastructure, and global position were built in part on enslaved labor. That advantage is inherited collectively, regardless of personal ancestry or belief.
When a country carries a debt, the country pays it.
There is no moral or mathematical justification for exempting beneficiaries of the balance sheet.
This includes African Americans living in the United States today. That is not injustice; it is civic reality. Reparations are not charity from one group to another. They are a national act of accounting.
We clear the books together—or we don’t clear them at all.
What Is Owed?
General William Tecumseh Sherman had the correct instinct in 1865:
forty acres and a mule.
This phrase is often treated as symbolic. It was not. It represented the minimum economic unit required for autonomy at the time: land, productive capacity, and the means to sustain a family without dependency.
Translated into modern terms, that package equates to roughly $900,000 per eligible recipient, accounting for land value, capital equipment, and a viable economic starting point.
Not luxury.
Not dominance.
A life.
That number makes people uncomfortable. It should. The harm was not small, and neither was the benefit extracted.
And even that figure is only an accounting approximation.
The true price—paid by millions of human beings tortured, brutalized, and worked to death—cannot be repaid in this life, or priced in any currency.
Reparations are not meant to be painless.
They are meant to be final.
What Happens After?
After the debt is paid, the argument ends.
Not because inequality disappears.
Not because exploitation ceases.
Not because America becomes virtuous overnight.
But because the specific historical liability of slavery and its direct aftermath will have been settled.
The next day, we can return—honestly—to debates about taxes, markets, labor, and policy. That is politics. That is civic life. But we will be doing so on cleared ground, without pretending an unpaid debt isn’t distorting every conversation.
This is not about rewriting history.
It is about closing an account left open for far too long.
We do the right thing.
We clear the books.
Then we move forward.
Appendix: Scale, Interest, and Eligibility
(The boring part—on purpose.)
This section exists to address the most common objections raised whenever reparations are discussed seriously. None of these objections are new. All are solvable with basic accounting.
1. “Why not compound the debt with interest?”
Because the debt already compounded—demographically.
Unpaid value did not remain static. It was carried forward across generations. The appropriate accounting method is not abstract financial interest applied to the long deceased, but distribution across their living descendants.
This is how multi-generational harm is modeled in every serious system. The principal is translated forward through population growth, not multiplied endlessly through time.
Had the debt been settled in 1865—or even by 1910—the number of recipients would have been far smaller, and the per-person cost dramatically lower. Delay increased the number of claimants.
That is not a flaw in the model.
It is the cost of deferral.
2. “Why pay millions now when far fewer were enslaved then?”
Because descendants are how obligations persist.
If roughly one million formerly enslaved people were alive in the early 20th century, and tens of millions of descendants exist today, that is not inflation of the claim. It is the natural outcome of unpaid inheritance.
If critics object to paying more people, the honest response is simple:
the debt should have been paid earlier.
Failure to settle does not erase obligation. It redistributes it.
Time does not absolve debt.
It reallocates it.
3. Eligibility and Proportional Compensation
Reparations compensate for a specific historical harm. That requires boundaries.
Full compensation should be paid to individuals who can demonstrate:
- direct descent from enslaved African Americans (based on presence in the US by census prior to 1910), and
- a verified genetic ancestry of 50% or greater African descent.
This threshold reflects the reality that the harm being compensated was embodied, inherited, and socially enforced across generations.
Individuals with documented descent below that threshold should receive proportional compensation, based on verified lineage.
This avoids both exclusion of legitimate claimants and abuse through trivial ancestral connection.
This is not racial essentialism.
It is claims precision.
4. Why This Is Not “Divisive”
This framework does not punish anyone.
It does not assign guilt.
It does not moralize ancestry.
It resolves a debt.
Once settled, the account is closed—fully and finally.
If we want to argue about inequality afterward, we can. We will. But we will no longer be doing so while standing atop an unpaid obligation and pretending it does not matter.
Closing Note
Every objection to reparations eventually collapses into the same admission:
“This would have been easier if we had done it earlier.”
That is true.
But difficulty is not a defense against responsibility.
