Reparations Talk

Thanks to our co-blogger Kevin Maillard, the New York Times' Room for Debate is talking about the case for and against reparations for slavery and the decades of "Jim Crow" segregation that followed it.  There are a lot of discussants, including University of Pennsylvania history and law professor Mary Frances Berry and Michigan State Univeristy law professor Matthew Fletcher.  (My piece asks who should pay and why.)  As I've been saying for some time, talk of reparations has been making a come back -- and recently we've been hearing about the Caribbean countries' impending lawsuit against Great Britain and payments to victims of North Carolina's sterilization program, as well as for slavery and Jim Crow here in the US.  A lot of the talk in the US was set off by Ta-Nehisi Coates' powerful story in The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations."  (And then there's David Frum's response, "The Impossibility of Reparations.")  We'll see where this all heads.