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comment by OftenBen
OftenBen  ·  3230 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bernie Sanders and Reparations - The Atlantic

So, if someone is mixed race, how much do they get? Half? A quarter? Do only 'Pure' blacks get reparations? Who decides how 'black' someone is?

Addendum* What if someone like Rachel Dolezal identifies as black?

Also, some basic math. There are roughly 45 million Black people in the United States. If we were to give all of them a one time payment of 1.5 million dollars (which some people believe is about right) the total cost would be in the ballpark of 67.5 trillion dollars. To put that in perspective, the Gross World Product of 2014 was approximately 107.5 trillion. These are absurdist estimates, but I want to illustrate how easy it is for us to lose track of scale in this kind of discussion.