patrick.net

Is it fair to require people who are not descended from slave-owners to shell out? The 1860 census showed that fewer than 394,000 American households owned slaves. Hence, the number of American descendants of slave-owners is a small fraction of the current US population. And a large proportion of all Americans are the descendants of people who came to our country after the Civil War ended. That may be nearly half of the total, and it includes a large share of the present black population, many of whom emigrated from the West Indies or elsewhere. (Almost 9 percent of African Americans are new immigrants, which by itself should raise questions about claims that America is horribly racist.)

Complicating things still further is the fact that many American blacks have ancestry from slave-owners. This may be because, like Beyoncé, they have white slave-owner ancestors, men or women who married their slaves. Or it may be because they have forebears who were black slave-owners. This number was not trivial. Before the Civil War, there were black slave-owners in many Southern states. In New Orleans alone there were more than 3,000 black slave-owners. Take Marie Therese Metoyer. Born in rural Louisiana, she married a white slave-owner, and by 1830 she had gained title to an estate with 287 slaves. Earlier, in South Carolina, the Pendarvis family had accumulated over 155 slaves.

Donald Harris, a Stanford University economics professor,

So maybe she should pay reparations!