Putting a monetary value on compensation for grave historic wrongs and deciding who should benefit is fraught with difficulties. But there may be another way to look at the whole issue.
As the US debates reparations for descendants of slavery, cases in Africa help illustrate the limits of programs focused solely in financial restitution.
Anne C. Bailey, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Former enslaved persons never got ‘forty acres and a mule,’ and their descendants have been denied reparations for the legacy of slavery. Will Joe Biden be the president to change that?
Some calls to resolve racial inequities in the US have raised an idea with roots more than a century old: community land trusts to assemble property for the benefit of Black Americans.