What’s Wrong With Reparations?

The imperative for America to pay reparations to Black people

Jeffrey Kass
Momentum
Published in
4 min readJun 26, 2024

--

Close-up of a cotton boll with cotton field and barn in the background in the South. Black slaves picked cotton and drove the entire economic engine of the South during slavery. Many of those enslavers’ families remain wealthy today.
Image: Shutterstock/PT Hamilton

What Germany did to the Jews is well documented and even videoed.

The mass murder. The enslavement. The medical experiments. The looting. Starvation. All told, 6 million Jews dead, and nearly a million and a half survived the torment and torture.

On top of the overwhelming physical and mental trauma, the survivors and their children and descendants had to start over financially as well. Some of the 245,000 remaining survivors and their families are still struggling today.

From 1945 to 2018, the German government paid approximately $86.8 billion in restitution and compensation to Holocaust victims and their heirs. Germany has also identified Nazi-looted art works, books, and objects and returned over 16,000 of them to survivors and their heirs over the last 20 years. Some very valuable.

In addition to the German government, dozens of private German companies who enslaved Jews during the Holocaust paid into a fund to pay compensation for the free labor and the harm they caused.

As a result, the Jewish community was largely able to grow and rebuild. Germany helped homeless Jews resettle. To pay survivors and heirs compensation for Germany’s wrongs. The world Jewish…

--

--

Jeffrey Kass
Momentum

A Medium Top Writer on Racism, Diversity, Education, History and Parenting | Speaker | Award-Winning Author | Latest Book: Black Batwoman V. White Jesus | Dad