One cannot claim that all "black people" are entitled to reparations, since people like my daughter's father did not arrive from Haiti until several years ago, the same is true of my son's wife, who arrived from Zimbabwe twenty years ago and has lived quite well since arriving, or even my niece's husband, who is a vascular surgeon who grew up in Nigeria. Similarly, people like Obama whose father came from Africa and whose mother was descended from slave owners cannot claim a history of discrimination. So, reparations based on skin color would be racist on its face.

Because discrimination was not illegal in the past, a lawsuit is unlikely to win, so one would need to frame reparations as an entitlement for people that can prove they were victims of discrimination directly or indirectly.

If one argues that the laws discriminated against blacks as the basis for the entitlement, then nearly every American can point to some ancestor who was a member of a "class" that was discriminated against by our country.

Why exclude them from reparations? I wonder if most Americans realize that Jim Crow laws were not passed to discriminate against "black people" but rather all "colored" people (I do not intend to offend anyone, but that is the term used at the time).

So, if reparations apply to anyone that can show an ancestor that was discriminated against based on race, ethnicity, skin color, religion, etc. then most of the country has someone in their ancestry that was victim. At which point, most Americans have an argument for reparations.

Discrimination in the past was broad based and legal, before our country evolved to make it illegal. Discrimination impacted Catholics and Jews and Asians, Native Americans and Hispanics, and even some "whites".

So, once you move away from slavery and you focus on laws that discriminated against African Americans, you open the door for every identity group that can show they were discriminated against to have a basis to claim reparations. No one is saying such claims are "equivalent", but rather such claims are based on the same legal argument.

So, the case for reparations if based on discrimination rather than slavery becomes a very difficult one, since it cannot be limited to a group based on skin color, but rather must be based on a specific "cause" of harm... like discriminatory laws and apply to anyone who was a victim of those laws.

Furthermore, such a claim would need to take the form of an entitlement, since the laws were not "illegal" at the time, and it becomes questionable whether you could exclude or include "victims" based on their skin color.

Finally, at a more practical level, it is hard to see how government which would need to approve this new entitlement would pay for it.

California will be an interesting test case. Newsom commissioned a task force to make a recommendation regarding reparations. The task force recommended as much as $1.2 million per citizen. Even if approved by the state legislature and signed by the governor, where would the money come from?

The citizens have had enough. With the highest taxes in the country, they are pushing for an amendment to our state Constitution limiting the ability of the state to raise taxes without taxpayer approval.

Presently, the state is also staring a $68 billion budget deficit with a bailout from the Federal government unlikely. And taxpayers are fleeing the state along with businesses. My guess is if reparations were passed, it would trigger a "state" bankruptcy and the reparations would be lost as part of the restructuring of the state's finances.

So, both the legal basis for reparations is sketchy since it ignores groups similarly impacted by discriminatory laws and uses skin color to discriminate between who is entitled to reparations and who is not. Likewise, whether one is looking at state finances or the federal government finances, I simply don't see taxpayers with only 29% supporting them.

My guess is "free college" something like "free college" to poor students in as "settlement" for any and all claims American citizens have against their states and nation has a better chance to pass. Acceptance of this offer terminates and subsequent claims by the person and their descendants. This would not be "racist" since it applies to everyone who meets the financial criteria, but more importantly it lifts families of all races and ethnicities out of poverty. Our country does not have money for reparations, but converting poor children into productive middle-class citizens is a win win for them and society and as a side benefit, addresses generational poverty some of which arose from discriminatory laws in the past.