OPINION | Reparations May Be a Pipe Dream but Justice by Geography Could Work

America will likely never pay remunerations for slavery. But it could enact policies that just happened to help Black Americans at the local level. by Marcus Harrison Green (This op-ed has been copublished with The Seattle Times.) Black History Month is as good a time as any to contemplate a Black future. Of course that requires an unflinching reflection on the past. But with one presidential candidate unable to identity slavery as causal to the Civil War, another claiming it was a nuisance that could have been negotiated around, and books depicting the horror of the “peculiar institution” bound for bans in certain school districts, how can a mass appeal to examine painful American history not be anything but futile? I’ve come to believe that we will never have a serious conversation about reparations in this country. At least we’ll never have one resulting in meaningful remuneration for the descendants of enslaved people — people who helped generate the wealth of a burgeoning nation. Fewer than 20% of white people support any type of reparations for descendants of enslaved Black Americans. White Americans are far from alone. Other than the Black community, there is no racial category where a majority...