Reparations is “the making of amends for a wrong one has done, by paying money to or otherwise helping those who have been wronged.”
In this case, we are talking about reparations for slavery and it's cumulative after-effects. Many of the candidates in the Democratic Party's upcoming presidential primaries have announced that they are in favor of reparations in some form or another.
From 1619 until 1865, this country transformed itself from a colonial outpost into the biggest economy in the world. A lot of that was because of free labor. We like to think about the riches we received from industries like cotton, but even people who didn't own slaves benefitted from slavery. Northern shipbuilders made fortunes building boats for exporting cheap American products. Retailers profited from the goods that slaves produced. America enjoyed cheap food and clothing because slavery made labor costs zero.
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