"Until we reckon with our compounding moral debts, America will never be whole," reads the subheading of Ta-Nehisi Coates' provocative 2014 Atlantic article, "The Case for Reparations." For some groups, like Japanese Americans, that reckoning has already happened: Roughly 80,000 people who were interned in camps in the 1940s have been paid a total sum of $1.6 billion by the U.S. government, or $20,000 per person in 1988—$50,000 each in today's dollars.
For others, like black Americans who descend from slaves—the group on whose behalf Coates argued—that reckoning has not happened, but may soon: A nine-person task force in California has made preliminary recommendations for what the state ought to pay to its 2.5 million black residents and will finalize these recommendations by the end of June, at which point they'll have to be approved by lawmakers and Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom.
