The Case Against Reparations.

• Author: Reed, Adolph L. Jr.

The notion that white America, however defined, owes reparations to black Americans for slavery and its legacy has been around for some time. Until recently, its most dramatic eruption into public life was in 1969, when James Forman, the former chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), led a protest at New York's liberal Riverside Church and presented a "Black Manifesto" that demanded, among other things, $500 million in reparations to black Americans from white churches and synagogues. The idea lingered on the periphery of the public agenda for a few years. In 1972, Jesse Jackson's Operation PUSH and the National Economics Association, a black economists' group, attempted to reintroduce it around the Presidential election in conjunction with a demand for a $900 million "freedom budget."

For the next two decades, the idea of organizing to demand reparations circulated mainly within politically marginal, nationalist circles. It did not gain much traction even among black activists.

During the last half-dozen years or so, however, the issue has been threatening to come in from the margins. Partly stimulated by the successful pursuit of compensation for Japanese Americans who were interned by the U.S. government during World War II and for victims of Nazi slave labor, talk of a movement to demand reparations for black Americans has been spreading.

I've watched this with curiosity and bemusement. I imagined that the reparations talk would evaporate because it seemed so clearly a political dead end. No such luck.

Publication of The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (E.P. Dutton, 2000) by Randall Robinson, the respected president of TransAfrica, the organization that played a central role in the U.S. movement against apartheid in South Africa, seems to have propelled the reparations issue into the spotlight. Now it seems to be everywhere--in special features on network television, in mainstream publications like Harper's and The New York Times, and all over the black-oriented media.

How has this happened? And what is its significance? To put it more provocatively, how does a project that seems so obviously a nonstarter in American politics come to capture so much of the public imagination? After all, support for affirmative action has eroded significantly, and reparations raises the ante on compensatory policy exponentially. Why has this idea attained currency now?

Answering these questions requires understanding that the call for reparations blends material, symbolic, and psychological components.

The material component is the most obvious, since the call for reparations responds to the actual harm inflicted on blacks during and after slavery. This component...