Here’s the point

Re “Reparations don’t buy justice, dignity or freedom” (Other Views, Feb. 26): “Buying” is not the purpose or intent of reparations, and the qualities listed are not for sale. Compensation (payment for harm, injury or suffering caused) is the purpose of reparations.

In addition to the psychological harm caused by the brutality of enslavement — rapes, lynchings, murders, beatings, loss of fingers for learning to write and more horrors — federal, state and local laws based on a system of racism that allowed such physical abuses also contributed to a substantial wealth gap between African Americans and white Americans. According to a recent study by the Institute for Policy Studies and the Corporation for Economic Development, it will take 228 years for average African American to amass the same level of wealth that average white American had in 2016.

So in 2244, average African Americans, with no intervention, may be able to have the same level of wealth that average whites had in 2016. There is definitely something wrong with this scenario. Further, the Institute on Asset and Social Policy reported that “for each dollar of increase in average income that African American households saw between 1984 and 2009 just $0.69 in additional wealth was generated, compared with the same dollar in increased income creating an additional $5.19 in wealth for a similarly situated white household,” according to Inequality.org.

Addressing these many harms and inequities through compensation is what reparations “can” do.

Barbara Tuck Lovell, Portsmouth