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Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: There is no fair and practical way to pay reparations for past crimes like slavery or what happened to the Native Americans.

**Edit: I also meant to say that I don't mean this as a way to look down on people who might call for reparations. I think 98% of the time people call for it it's well intentioned, and their heart is in the right place. It just doesn't seem viable as an actual policy.** 

The way I see it it would be more or less impossible (in a practical sense) to determine who is owed how much and who should pay for it.

In regards to who should be paid, it seems like one would have to do rather extensive DNA testing and historical lineage tracing on every individual American in order to determine who is eligible for payment, and how much. For example, would a Native American whose ancestors helped Europeans kill off other Native Americans be owed as much reparations as Native Americans who were solely victimized by the Europeans? Doesn't seem like that would be fair. Is a black person who moved here last week and who is descended from the slavers who took and sold slaves during the transatlantic slave trade owed as much in reparations as a black person who has been here for ten generations and whose lineage is on the salve, not slaver, part of that equation? Again, doesn't seem fair to pay them the same amount. And if race and ethnicity accounts for prejudice and a need for reparations, presumably a person who is 95% African and 5% white is owed more than someone who is 50/50, or 30/70, right? So then the government would need to maintain an ethnic DNA database for the entire country which, on top of not seeming all that practical, strikes me as rather dystopian.

And then theres the issue of determining how much they are owed. I don't see any fair or practical way to do this, either. For African Americans, for example, I've seen people say that we should pay them the total estimated number of hours slaves worked x the national minimum wage and just distribute it evenly... but not everyone's ancestors worked the same amount, and again you're running into the same problem as before - black people who never had slave ancestors and in fact had *slaver* ancestors would end up getting paid for the work slaves did. I've also seen people say we should just look at how blacks as a demographic are doing compared to whites or the national average and just pay them the difference, but this seems to run under the faulty assumption that sans any historical discrimination blacks and native Americans would be making exactly what the national average is. We know that this cannot be the case because two historically discriminated groups, Jews and Japanese people, actually do disproportionately well compared to the national average, indicating that culture impacts overall success as much if not more than past discrimination.

Who should pay is another problem that runs into a lot of the same issues as who should be paid. Are you just going to get the money from rich people? So then that would include rich blacks and native Americans, who would be bankrolling reparations to their own people and for injustices that their ancestors also suffered? Doesn't seem fair. Just take the money from white people? So then whites who have no slaver ancestors and who never harmed natives in any way (and indeed perhaps never benefited from American colonialism at all - perhaps they moved here last year from some other country) would be responsible for paying? Just make people pay who had slavers and genocidal killers in their ancestry? Well that group wouldn't just include whites but also Hispanics, blacks, and Native Americans. Do you think reparations would fly if we did all the calculations and found that the Comanche actually come in owing money (rather than getting paid) because of past injustices they committed against other tribes? Or how would it go over if we figured everything out and certain individual natives actually ended up having to pay white people because their ancestors massacred and raided white settlements and took whites as slaves? You don't think people might flip shit if certain black folks who might be poor today get dinged for being on the slaver side of the slave trade? And for that matter there's no assurance that the descendants of white slavers hundreds of years ago are doing well enough to be able to cough up what they "owe" anyways. They might be broke as shit, what do you do then? And all of this is operating under the assumption that it's fair to make someone pay for what someone they didn't know and are only vaguely related to did perhaps hundreds of years ago, which is not a given.

And what about other marginalized groups? If you trace things back far enough in US history, basically the only group that hasn't been at the short end of the marginalization stick is a small caste of direct British descended wealthy white landowning men. Everyone else is fair game for possible reparations. Women, LGBT, Asians, Jews, basically every other European nationality/ethnicity that came over later, etc. If we're gonna hand out reparations to blacks and native Americans there's no reason we shouldn't be handing them out to people descended from non-landowning men, or women (so... everyone), Irish who dealt with NINA, Jews who were discriminated out of Harvard, Chinese forced into bonded servitude, Japanese interred during the second world war, all the discrimination, both legal and social, that the LGBT community has suffered. It goes on and on and on.

So, how the hell does anyone look at all the complications and confusion and work that would be required to do something like reparations even somewhat fairly and think that it would be a good idea to try? CMV.
gpt
You could just avoid the problem by not paying individuals. Communities exist. Build schools in underserved communities. Give grants to historically black colleges. Build communities centers in Harlem and other historically black communities. Improve living conditions on native American reservations. 

There is no need to get bogged down in making sure that people who are 64 percent Cherokee get more money than people who are 62 percent Cherokee. If the community has been historically oppressed, give that community funding that it can use to build structures that will improve that community.