How To Reparations

This evening I watched a PBS documentary on the 1898 Wilmington coup. Repulsive history, but it left me thinking about a mechanism.

One of the men whose two banks were destroyed in the riots had a great granddaughter who was able to establish what those banks would be worth today. Cases like this call for reparations delivered individually: a claims process where a family argues, and proves, what they are owed. Someone whose family's bank was shut down by an unlawful coup should get bank charter training, free, with a guaranteed charter at the end. Someone whose family lost land could be owed equity in what gets built on it now, especially if that land ends up under something like a data center.

IP grants are another way to account for this. Lots of manufacturing, finance, and construction businesses would exist today if not for white supremacy motivated destruction and theft of value across American history. The same logic that justifies the bank charter and the land equity applies here. If I want to start a steel mill, I should face zero barriers doing it, given that there would likely be a Black owned steel mill today if America had actually behaved as a free market.