There's lots of talk going on about reparations from the US government to Americans of African descent.

I'm foregoing the myriad of tangential logistical problems because I have 1 question. It's a big one.

Will paying out "X" $$$ solve the problem?

Fair enough fka, but will equalization subsidies and grants solve the problem?

ie: no more racial divide, no more us vs. them (barring the obvious nutjobs that will always exist no matter what happens)

I think you need to be more definitive about what problem you're trying to solve, and even then, there are a huge amount of variables. African-Americans were formally excluded from certain forms of wealth accumulation long after slavery ended, resulting in a massive lag in access to the United States' collective assets (despite black labor being used to create those assets). Putting a precise economic value on this is very difficult, though, and the fact that formal exclusion no longer exists renders many people unaware of the legacy problem. Then you have all the issues about who would actually qualify for any benefits, which help to kill the conversation before it really gets started (Should reparations be means-tested? How strong does your ancestry claim have to be?). There have been attempts to work through these issues but a lot of people view the topic of reparations very simplistically (as the government taking money from white people and giving it to black people) so the efforts don't get very far.

A lot of people don't know that in 1988 the US government paid $20,000 each to surviving detainees of Japanese-American internment camps, over 80,000 people in total.
 
https://www.nytimes.com/1988/04/21/us/senate-votes-to-compensate-japanese-american-internees.html

Germany has also paid nearly $100billion in reparations to Holocaust survivors.

Logistical problems aside, it's pretty grim that no similar gestures were made to African-Americans. Even if it had been limited to  surviving victims of Jim Crow discrimination in the South, it would have been better than nothing, and could have helped to narrow the wealth gap in those states.

These days, the success of any policy would depend on a whole range of complicated variables, and I don't think anyone can speculate with confidence. As for my own position, it's evolved from "That's unfair to white people who had nothing to do with slavery" / "That will never work" to "There might very well be some sensible options on the table, but it's logistically complicated and politically toxic, so I'm skeptical that anyone will ever reach an agreement about it."

I don't think that's the goal of any reparations proposal that I've seen, so no, probably not. We still talk about the Japanese internment camps and the Holocaust, and with good reason.

Modern-day slaves working the UAE should thank their lucky stars that their descendants will live somewhere with such high per capita income.

We cannot change things that happened in the past, things were acceptable back then that are not now. Let's look forward instead of back. Reject racism, reject race-baiters, we are one.

I'll add to this, if the first thing you notice about someone when you meet them is their skin colour, you are part of the problem.

"Slavery happened a long time ago" is a really great example of how more serious attempts at addressing the legacy of structural inequality get derailed.

It's also indicative of how shallow the general engagement with this topic actually is. Imagine feeling confident enough to comment on it in a public forum, while thinking it's about "being pissed your ancestors (who are not you) were enslaved ages ago".

L I.  I know the point you're trying to make, but Jesus, man.

That's not............. not how it works.

It's like if a woman was raped and the kid that came out cured cancer or something.

"See, getting raped wasn't so bad, your kid cured cancer! High five!"

CO2 ,Thank you. I'm at a complete loss for words right now.

Don't be such a drama queen.  It's a poster on waygook.org  It's your kind of comments that add nothing to the discussion.  His comments were pretty clumsy but his ham-fisted point was that these people were going to be slaves anyways so they might as well have been slaves in the US.  Insensitive and certainly debatable but nothing there should get your blood boiling unless you're one of those type that read things hoping it will get their blood boiling.