Wendy Kaminer

About the author: Wendy Kaminer is a senior correspondent for the liberal political magazine the American Prospect and is a contributing editor at the Atlantic Monthly. She also serves on the national board of the American Civil Liberties Union, a legal organization that defends free speech and individual rights.

Calls for slavery reparations are based on the assertion that the institution of slavery and the era of racism that followed it have led to widespread African American poverty. The problem with the appeal for reparations is that it relies on a belief in the justice of inherited guilt—that in order to achieve equality in the present, Americans whose families had nothing to do with slavery should pay for the sins of centuries-dead slaveholders. Equality...