Reparation and Grift. By Nellie Bowles.

A group of prominent Democrats are calling for $14 trillion to be paid as reparations to the descendants of slaves.

The bill was introduced by Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, who said: “The United States has a moral and legal obligation to provide reparations for the enslavement of Africans and its lasting harm on the lives of millions of Black people.”

I’m on board with reparations. At least, I think it’d be better to do a big reparations shebang — cut checks and call it a day — than the strange sort of slow-drip reparations plans we see in liberal institutions. Like, yes, $14 trillion is a lot of money. But if the alternative is Robin DiAngelo trainings till the end of time and making the MCAT illegal and allowing people to self-ID as doctors because that’s more equitable, then $14 trillion is a bargain.

But seriously, why it will never happen:

But here’s why reparations (I’m serious, a good idea!) will never happen: simply cutting checks to the descendants of slaves means shuttering all the thousands of racial justice nonprofits that serve as an employment program for America’s white grad students.

You do not simply give people money. Maybe Cori Bush could propose something where the government cuts a check and then pays a handful of white PhDs to pass that check back and forth, taking 5 percent each time, then when they each have enough money for a brownstone plus enough left over for a very tasteful remodel, the remainder goes to a descendant of slaves?

Still workshopping this one, but I can see us getting somewhere.

Reparations overlook the fact that every society has had slaves, but only white Christian men acted to eliminate slavery — worldwide. Much of the colonization of Africa was driven by anti-slavery, as the only way to convince the black tribal leaders to give up the slave-economies they had run since time immemorial was to conquer them.

Speaking of reparations, the Arabs took far more slaves than blacks who went to America as slaves: