Because the House is having hearings on the idea of slave reparations, I thought I'd briefly weigh in on the idea and a bunch of misconceptions about the idea. First off - it's really naive to pretend (as Mitch McConnell does) that we somehow ended racism in 1865. For the next hundred years black people would still be denied basic rights like a fair education and the ability to vote. Even since the passage of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act, black people in America aren't even close to having full and equal protection under the law (which is what the Fourteenth Amendment allegedly guarantees). So while nobody alive *today* was a slave, we're not THAT far removed from it (a couple of generations in some families), and it's not like everything was magically fixed when we ended chattel slavery.
All of that said, reparations aren't about cutting a check to black people and saying "ok we're good right?" It's about the distribution of capital in this country. Because of the effects of slavery and racism on down the years SINCE 1865, black people have a whole lot less capital and a whole lot less wealth than white people. That means fewer black people getting houses (and equity), fewer black people opening up small businesses, fewer black people living in good neighborhoods, fewer black people going to good schools that sets them up to get into college and be competitive in the workplace, etc. There is plenty of information on these issues.
Race and class aren't synonymous and curing the ills of one don't automatically fix the other, but when we talk about reparations we're ultimately talking about how we can invest actual capital in black communities so that they can create generational wealth without, you know, becoming Jay-Z or Beyonce or Barack Obama. And this wealth creation doesn't have to come in the form of "here's free money" - we could establish a government agency focused on providing low-cost loans to black business owners or startup companies. We could expand education access and better fund HBCUs. We could tackle discriminatory housing and lending practices (the one time we DID make a significant investment in black homeownership was...erm, the 2008 financial crisis, where the banks jacked up the rates and then foreclosed on all the people who bought houses, so that didn't go as planned).
Reparations is an overly simplistic term designed to acknowledge that we haven't come close to putting black people on equal footing - not preferential footing, EQUAL footing - since the founding of this country. And investing in those communities - in their education, their housing, their ability to own businesses and achieve middle-class success - are ultimately good for the country as a whole. Most people aren't advocating a straight cash settlement for the entire history of slavery. People are advocating for real investment in underserved communities and giving them the equal opportunity to make their lives - and our country - better.
Which is really just the promise we made when the Civil War ended and we passed the 14th Amendment.