Thoughts on white people having to pay slavery reparations?

First of all, I'm going to steelman this by assuming you meant, "Should the [i]government[/i] pay slavery reparations to descendants of slaves." The idea of all white people paying is broadly incoherent, because not all white people's ancestors perpetrated slavery, and also you can't inherit debt from your ancestors. The government, however, did perpetrate slavery, and has continuously existed from the Civil War to the 21st century.

There are two dominating perspectives on this and both of them are brain damaged. The first perspective is that no descendants of slaves should receive any money because they, themselves were never treated unfairly, and that the crime of slavery essentially died with its victims over the years. This perspective is flawed because it ignores the existence of generational wealth.

If a person's parents are wealthier, then those parents are more likely to buy a good education and a stable and healthy environment for their child's development, as well as things like high-end clothing and transportation which are important for getting a good job. In addition, when those parents die, they will pass on their remaining wealth as inheritance. All of this means that parents of rich kids are more likely to be rich themselves. Slaves were dirt poor at the time of their liberation, so generational wealth has worked against those people and their kin, all the way to the current day. It is preposterous to ignore the fact that slavery hurts contemporary black descendants of slaves in this way.

The second dominating perspective is that descendants of slaves should be given either a lump sum payment or an annuity to make up for this generational wealth divide. This idea is brain-damaged because it legitimizes the institution of generational wealth, itself. Black people have definitely gotten the short end of the stick here on average, but obviously, wealth varies more within a race than between races (i.e. difference between the richest white person & poorest white person is greater than the difference between the average black person & the average white person).

Imagine three children -- one is the child of an impoverished former slave, one is the child of an impoverished gambling addict, and one is the child of a wealthy doctor. Obviously among the three parents of the kids, the first is clearly the most mistreated by society. But is the second child any more deserving of his plight than the first child just because his parent was dumb? He didn't do anything to deserve it, himself. Clearly, the most fair situation would for the two impoverished children to both be uplifted... and perhaps, the third child to give up some of his advantage over the other two.

Moreover, the idea of simply giving people money to fix the gap really underestimates the scope of the problem. White people own the vast majority of stocks, [i]wildly[/i] disproportionate to their population size, hiring decisions in businesses overwhelmingly favor white people over black people, and majority-black areas suffer chronic underinvestment and inadequate government representation. Black people are also less likely to have a higher education, and are less likely to own a home than white people. If you give black people a lump sum of cash without first fixing the systemically racist social systems we live under, they'll be forced to spend it on consumer goods, in turn transferring the wealth the government just handed them back to white people. Within a few decades, the world goes back to normal, with a "lucky" generation having gotten the social equivalent of a lottery win. Also, any black person who wasn't a former slave will totally get the shaft because their ancestors will have also lost wealth as a consequence of things like redlining and Jim Crow.

If we want to fix the scars that slavery & other policies have left on our country, we need a more transformative, and frankly, less Liberal solution. We need to roll back all these exclusionary housing rules that are driving up rents in the inner cities, route more government money into majority black areas, change our electoral system to give black people more of a voice (D.C. statehood would help with this a lot), set stricter standards for police use of force, open up the process for class action lawsuits on employment discrimination, and so, so much more.