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.

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.

canada, australia and new zealand also abstained

Which part? That Africans captured other Africans? Definitely not a lie... Europeans didn't go to the interior. They showed up at the western coast, anchored offshore, and bought captives from mercenaries or tribal warlords who had brought conquered Africans from the interior to the coast specifically because there was a customer (horrible I know) to buy them -- the European slavers waiting in their ships. Port towns grew wealthy and powerful as the "portal" to African slaves.

Slave Ship is a good (and brutally dark) book about this.

I don't understand why people just knee-jerk reply like this without actually researching what they're denying. It's a pretty well-known fact that most of the slaves in the Atlantic slave trade came from African warlords and slavers (or at least I thought it was). I don't thin that's a particularly strong argument against reparations though.

Educate yourself

Americans fought a war over slavery, so obviously they very much weren't all ok with it. Also, look at stats of where most slaves went. Brasil had the most, USA wasn't in the top 5. Any number of slaves is too much though.