Even if the practical defects of the project could be overcome, reparations simply wouldn’t work. They would not make atonement. They would neither settle nor soothe. In short, they would fulfill none of the promises explicit in the language of their proponents.

Like all political ideas unburdened by their likelihood of actually happening, reparations are frequently spoken of in outlandish terms. In 2018’s oft-cited inequality tome The Divide, for example, anthropologist Jason Hickel obliterated all previous estimates by placing America’s debt to the descendants of slaves at a mind-boggling $97 trillion — about five years’ worth of the entire country’s economic output– a figure achieved by applying the U.S. minimum wage to every hour of forced labor performed between the years 1619 and 1865. Sensing enemies to her left, presidential hopeful Elizabeth Warren has argued that Native Americans and same-sex couples ought to be given money, as well. That such one-upmanship is a regular feature of a political culture that rewards rallying the base is no surprise. What is surprising — or should be — is the extent to which recent Democratic remarks about reparations have been allowed, with no scrutiny whatsoever, to take on a cast of quasi-religious utopianism.