Making Reparations

Henry Louis Gates Jr. writes that Barack Obama has an opportunity to reshape the debate over reparations—”the idea that the descendants of American slaves should receive compensation for their ancestors’ unpaid labor and bondage. … He is uniquely placed to publicly attribute responsibility and culpability where they truly belong, to white people and black people, on both sides of the Atlantic, complicit alike in one of the greatest evils in the history of civilization.”