Tough Questions for Kamala Harris’ Reparations Plans

Vice President Kamala Harris supports reparations, but Democrats’ presumptive presidential nominee has yet to publish her plan to get them done. Whatever her plan, it will have to answer a bunch of thorny questions. First, who gets reparations? Harris has left open the possibility of reparations to black Americans for both slavery and what she calls “systemic racism in the system.” Slavery reparations, by definition, may go only to people who suffered because of slavery. Of course, no one alive today has suffered under legal slavery (although human trafficking is a serious problem). So supporters of reparations for slavery say that payments should go to the descendants of those who were enslaved before the Civil War. But how would Harris figure out who those people are? She can’t use the racial category “black” as a proxy for descendants of slaves, because a large and growing percentage of black Americans are recent African and West Indian immigrants or their descendants. What’s more, according to Pew Research, only 41% of black Americans say that their ancestors were enslaved in America. Most of them must base that conclusion on family lore, because we have few reliable family records of slaves from so long...