The central thesis of slavery reparations is that white majority countries owe money to ethnic minorities as their ancestors may have enslaved others or benefited from a slave-system economy.

There is a problem with this though: ultimately, the great evil of slavery was practiced by all inhabited continents and all races. And there will be almost no one alive today in the world who doesn’t have an ancestral link to the slave trade. This fact collapses the modern-day reparations argument. …

So why is this devastating blow to the reparations argument often ignored? Politically, it seems that although we generally accept that slavery was universal in ancient history, we often pretend that only European powers practiced slavery from the sixteenth century onwards, when this is clearly not the case. Meanwhile, the voluntary role that many Africans played in the transatlantic slave trade is also ignored.

[One does not need to go this far to recognize that it’s nonsense, although the argument is solid. The reparations movement demands wealth transfers from people who never owned slaves to people who never were slaves. I am no more liable for the damage done by slavery almost two centuries ago than a modern Brit is liable for the Great Famine in Ireland that drove my ancestors on my father’s side of the family to this country. The entire structure of reparations is nonsense. Its antecedent, reparations to Japanese-Americans for their internment during World War II, at least made some sense because (a) the government itself imposed it, and (b) the reparations went to those who got interned. — Ed]