"We're 400, 500 years late with this conversation around reparations," says Denver Mayor Michael Hancock. "We've got to be committed to moving towards action at this point in time."

Here's a question for Denver Mayor Michael Hancock as he champions a national effort to pay reparations to the descendants of African slaves: Shouldn't the compensation be means-tested — a cap on the payments, based on income — so the rich don't take advantage?

Otherwise, some fabulously wealthy people could qualify.

For example, there's chemical engineer-turned-investor Robert Smith, the founder, chairman and CEO of private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. His estimated net worth in 2021 was $5 billion. World Wide Technology founder and Chairman David Steward is worth $4 billion. There's beloved talk-show persona, author and philanthropist Oprah Winfrey ($2.7 billion); rapper-producer-fashionista Kanye West ($1.8 billion); NBA legend Michael Jordan ($1.6 billion); rapper-music mogul Jay-Z ($1.4 billion), and actor-moviemaker Tyler Perry ($1 billion).

It's a diverse lot that shares a common thread: All are descended of Africans who were abducted centuries ago and forced into the horrors and misery of slavery in the New World.

Yet, if these stratospherically wealthy Black Americans — as well as those who are mere millionaires or even those who are comfortably upper-middle class — received reparations, wouldn't it make a mockery of the proposed initiative? It is, after all, intended not only to atone for slavery itself, abolished in 1863, but also to offset the "systemic racism" presumed to be its legacy — and that is said to hinder Black American economic progress to this day.

Let's skip the next logical question — how self-made Black billionaires were able to amass their fortunes in a systemically racist society — in favor of another question for Mayor Hancock:

What about the rapidly growing number of African-Americans who aren't the descendants of slaves? They are part of the modern-day African diaspora — those seeking opportunity in a more prosperous economy, or perhaps asylum from war or persecution. Ethiopians, for example, have established a prominent and flourishing African culture on the Front Range.

These latter-day African-Americans don't trace their ancestry to slavery, yet they share many common physical characteristics with other Americans of African origin. That, sadly, can expose them to the same old prejudices that still turn up in society from time to time. Should they receive reparations?

And speaking of systemic, or "institutional" racism, what of others whose predecessors also encountered and endured the ill effects of prejudice in bygone eras? In a Gazette profile last week of Hancock's leadership role in the national movement Mayors Organized for Reparations and Equity, he says he's open to Native Americans or others receiving reparations.

How about the millions of Irish Americans, whose 19th-century Catholic ancestors arriving on U.S. shores initially were greeted with scorn and ridicule — and were denied jobs, service in shops and housing in Protestant neighborhoods? Or Italian-Americans of the early 20th century who were routinely presumed by neighbors and local law enforcement to be up to no good? The list goes on, of course.

Meanwhile, who will be expected to repay society's debt to slavery's descendants? In theory, it would be Americans of European origin whose ancestors were the slave traders and slave masters. The ones who benefited economically from slavery.

What about the majority of Americans of European origin whose ancestors settled in free states — and derived nothing from slavery? Or the many Southerners whose forbears were impoverished and had no connection to the slave-holding Southern gentry? What of the many, many Europeans or other Caucasians who arrived in the U.S. in the 20th or 21st centuries — long after slavery or even after segregation?

Reparations in the final analysis could turn out to be the opposite of the woke set's current buzzword of choice, "equity." Where is the equity in handing the bill for reparations to the myriad Americans of every race, ethnicity, creed and origin who never benefited from slavery or subsequent racist policies and who in fact suffered terribly themselves, at some point?

Can't they rightly lay claim to some of the assistance Hancock told The Gazette he hopes to direct to Black Americans in order to "give not only a lift, but a sustainable rise to a more level playing field for decades to come"?

Where is the justice in collective guilt, or collective punishment, in a society that believes in justice for each individual, as Americans do? A just society cannot pay for the sins of the past because it cannot do so without in some way repeating those sins in the present. Wouldn't we be a lot better off celebrating our victories over the past, and all our progress in the present?

Hancock laments how, "People ask 'why aren't you doing better?' It's just an unfair situation and expectation. The systems are not designed for you to catch up."

Yet, Black Americans are doing just that. The list of Black billionaires strongly suggests that. So does the fact that Colorado's largest city — once a redoubt of the Ku Klux Klan — is now being led by its second Black mayor, in his third term in office.

REPRINTED FROM THE COLORADO SPRINGS GAZETTE

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