I think at this point it would be better to focus on providing things like universal healthcare, education, and retirement, to everyone, keeping the cost of living in check, and working on ensuring opportunities for dignified labor and fair compensation are available to everyone, regardless of race or ethnicity.

That alongside rigorous policy measures to reduce (with a mind towards eliminating) things like workplace discrimination, redlining, racial profiling, etc.

There are some examples where the descendants of enslaved people can trace their heritage to their enslaved ancestors, and identify the descendants of their enslavers (often generationally wealthy business tycoons who own factories that pollute the neighborhoods of the enslaved people's descendants...). The people of Africa Town near Mobile, Alabama are a prime example, and there's a pretty good documentary about it.

In those cases, where there is a demonstrable chain of ancestry, yes, civil law should require the descendants of the enslavers to pay reparations to the descendants of the enslaved.

But so many times it happens that everyone wants to paint with a broad brush, where there's no room for nuance, and say things like "all white people should pay reparations to black people." And that's just too clumsy and would never work.

One, because not all white people are generationally wealthy descendants of enslavers, so such a blanket policy of collective punishment meets the definition of racism. Two, because there's no way to quantify in abstract terms how much money "every white person" owes to "every black person."

It's better to focus on making society better as a whole, filling in the gaps where racial disparity still exists (by lifting up the disenfranchised, not by tearing down the privileged), making the wealthy pay their fair share to the government's coffers, making the government ensure robust social safety nets which benefit everyone who needs them, and only demanding reparations in specific cases where there is a direct link between the descendants of enslavers and the descendants of the particular people they enslaved.

How do you determine who is descended of enslaved and enslaver? How do you identify who is benefitting today for something that happened 500 years ago? How do you deal with people that descend from both enslavers and enslaved? There is a long thread about this. Ultimately it is not possible to do what you are asking. Should a farmer in Turkey pay for the benefit the ottoman empire got from slave trade to a white looking mixed american of west african descent? You realize how stupid that sound?

That is easy because the Holocaust was between 1941 and 1945 and reparation were between 1952 and 1953. It is the same government, the same people, the same generation. The atrocity is clearly defined in time and space, and can be somewhat measured. Nonetheless, even in a "clear as day" situation, lot of opposition came to be part of this process, with this being a very difficult agreement to reach. Doing that 200 to 600 years apart, across multiple nation, multiple people, multiple culture, is borderline impossible and would settle anything. You cannot make it just for the hebrews with that reparations, you cannot with slave trade either. Same apply to WW2 reparation, Mongol conquest reparation (sound silly just to think about it), or induced famine in China and the Soviet Union.

While I agree in part with the sentiment, I think is totally unfair to consider ancient slavery in Greece or Rome as less cruel. It was not less cruel depending on the slave in question. Slaves in mines and agricultural estates were in worse conditions then anything in American south. But if you were an educated slave then your life was indeed better. That also means that was common for slaves in ancient Rome to be able to buy freedom. Slavery was everywhere in society, so the comparison is really hard to make.

There is indeed a racial component in colonial slavery that was not present in ancient Roman slavery. A slave could be from Germany or from Syria and there was no difference in treatment.

I would say that both late trans-atlantic slavery and nazism share a philosophical root in the eugenetic movement, but both grew in parallel with different motives: in one case a justification for economic exploitation, in the other an ideological tool to enforce unity in nationalism.

The transatlantic slave trade started before the concept of race and the eugenetic movement. During the 15th century the justification was more routed in religion and the idea of having prisoner of war being better then to kill the enemy. Still and excuse for economic exploitation, but maybe more akin to what the greeks and romans were doing.

The only reason they didn't have an Atlantic slave trade earlier was that they didn't have the technology to do so earlier, there was virtually no transatlantic trade beforehand.

I don't think it was a particularly cruel time. My ancestors didn't have transatlantic trade, but they were among the cruelest people on Earth of any time. They certainly would have been Atlantic slave traders if they were able to, no doubt.