I am in favor of reparations for all descendants of enslaved African people who were stolen from their homelands and brought to the USA, the Caribbean, etc.
While I can’t say what the criteria would be (that’s out of my lane, as my bloodline is British colonizer on one side and Eastern European immigrant on the other), I would tentatively suggest the one-drop rule. After all, if someone could be enslaved for one drop, it seems fair that that would be the criterion for reparations too.
Or, how about a “one ancestor” rule. Like (for example) the Daughters / Sons of the American Revolution manage to screen people for membership. Prospective members just have to prove that they had at least one ancestor who fought in the Revolutionary War.
It should be no harder for determining slavery reparations. Say, a person has to prove that they had at least one ancestor who was enslaved?
But then again, that might be hard, because there wasn’t necessarily the paper trail. I have heard that it can be very difficult for Black people to determine their ancestry because it was not necessarily written down.
In any case, I’m sure we can come up with something!
Really, we should ask Black people. Rather than just the government concocting some policy, we need to make sure that Black people themselves have the biggest voice in how this is implemented.
If people are worried that it would cost more than we can afford, I would say we can take it out of our massively bloated war budget and prison budget.