It’s an interesting hypothetical question, because I really feel zero understating of why any government or organisation has entertained the concept of reparations for people whose ancestors were slaves. It’s not in that individual’s living memory and they’ve never experienced it, so it’s not compensation for any kind of suffering.
The only thing it could relate to is the idea that the OP is suggesting…this historic inequality is still having an impact on the current generation, yet with the slave issue that doesn’t make much sense. This relates to people who have been raised in the developed world with good/reasonable access to education, healthcare, employment opportunities and lived in democracies that, overall, protect equal rights. These people,
are not clambering to be returned to their ‘homeland’, many of these people wouldn’t want to visit a country where there is visible poverty and a lack of basic modern facilities such as wifi. Their ancestors suffered, that’s not disputed, but they themselves…are very likely better off as a result, as its directly the reason they weren’t born in a developing country. When people campaign for reparations, they are just asking for a cash payout in their pockets, but what they aren’t asking for, is for the money to be directed to either helping those still in their homeland or to be used as a fund to help people who want to move back there whose ancestors caused their displacement.
If there are a reparations due, in my opinion,, they should be directed to the countries that were negatively affected, not the descendants. So for example, where a country took slaves from another country, presumably they mostly would take the strongest people, leaving the weak behind to struggle further, and also this would have stunted the development of those countries by taking away the a significant proportion of their manually strong workforce. The consequences of that may still be being felt by people living in those countries today…and they are the people who deserve the help from the country who caused the damage.
As for OP, I’m assuming you have asked the question of reparations tongue in cheek, but you have a very fair point in a way…becuase there are people in developed countries today who are not meeting their full potential due to the class system, historic lack of aspiration in families, from cost barriers to high education, from lack of opportunities due to not having the contacts that elite schooling open up. There are many adults in the UK who left school at 16 and went into a minimum wage job, just because that’s what everyone around them expected them to do, and they couldn’t see past that expectation.
It shows the ludicrously of the whole idea of reparations…because who would really be more deserving of a government payout…a black person whose ancestors were slaves but was never directly exposed to slavery, who has been to university, qualified as a doctor and owns a large home, has nice holidays and new cars and has never suffered any real deprivation in their lifetime….or, would it be more deserving to pay reparations to the white person who has come from a family without aspiration and without any examples of relatives breaking out the generational mould, who has been in the care system, who was not supported financially or encouraged to meet their full potential, who has drifted from one low paid job to another, and who has never had a career path, and will never be in a position to own their own home and goes through times of struggles with the heat or eat dilemma in the winter months?
Who has actually suffered more?