On substance, here’s where I disagree with you. You came up with a nice little example in a box of two particular families, one that benefited from theft and one that suffered on account of it. If that’s what we had here, this would be easy, of course.
What we have, instead, is a messy situation where many generations after the fact of slavery, we are a diverse population of descendants of slaves, black immigrants from the Caribbean and Africa, descendants of slaveholders, descendants of non-slaveholding white Americans, other whites, like myself, who are either immigrants or children of immigrants who died fled here from other kinds of suffering and oppression in foreign lands and increasingly many people with competely mixed ancestry. This is why when you use the pronoun “we” to refer, presumably, to us white people, I have no idea whom you’re really talking about. To make your example more closely analogous, you’d have to imagine that we decided to assign guilt for the robbery to everyone who happened to share the original thief’s skin color. Such universal racial identifications are absurd. I don’t feel any particular solidarity or commonality with all white people (nor should people feel such superficial racial solidarity in a healthy society), nor is such solidarity or commonality justified objectively or historically.
In addition to this conundrum, tracing the amount/extent of any particular individual or family’s benefit or loss on account of slavery, Jim Crow, housing discrimination, etc. is also near-impossible.
And, finally, as I’ve discussed in this article, many people today seem to have somehow forgotten entirely that the whole suite of Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” programs that went on for decades and that still persist to some extent were expressly conceived as a massive wealth transfer from disproportionately wealthy whites to disproportionately poor blacks in order to even the odds and make up for all those years of slavery and discrimination. In other words, we already had decades of reparations in this country. They failed to even the odds because they merely created dependency, led to the breakup of the black family and brought the cycle of poverty into being.
All of these are the kinds of problems we face and traps we fall into when we try to assign collective guilt to people on the basis of race long after the fact. We should be focusing on fixing the very real current economic plight of too many black people in America, but these kinds of efforts to assign blame on the basis of race only drive the rise of white supremacy and fuel further cycles of endless racial animus.
