3. The Beneficiaries: Who Qualifies For Redress?
III. THE BENEFICIARIES: Who Qualifies for Redress?
(The Cheated Players Who Are Due Correction)
Just as in Monopoly, where only the players directly cheated get their money back, reparations are owed to the specific group of players who suffered the rigged game. This hybrid approach ensures the correction goes to those demonstrably impacted.
A. Lineal Descendants of Enslaved African Americans: These are the direct descendants of the original players who started the game with literally nothing and whose labor was stolen. Proving this lineage links directly to the foundational theft.
Legal Basis: Relies on the established legal definition of "lineal descendant" used in U.S. law (e.g., inheritance law's "issue," direct descendants like children, grandchildren, and so on). Precedents include the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) of 1990, which mandates the return of remains and items to "lineal descendants" or culturally affiliated tribes. The Japanese American Internment Reparations (Civil Liberties Act of 1988) implicitly recognized familial continuity in some contexts. The California Reparations Task Force recommendations give "special consideration for African Americans who are descendants of persons enslaved in the United States" , and local reparations initiatives (e.g., Los Angeles County) explicitly define eligibility for certain programs as "a lineal descendant of an African-American Chattel enslaved person".
B. African Americans Directly Affected by Systemic Discrimination Post-1870: These are players (or their immediate ancestors) who directly played through the later rounds where Jim Crow, redlining, and other explicit discriminatory "rules" were in effect, systematically preventing them from accumulating wealth. This criterion ensures that eligible individuals were directly exposed to the specific U.S.-based systemic discrimination stemming from the legacy of slavery, thus generally excluding recent Black immigrants not tied to this specific historical causal link to U.S. chattel slavery and its immediate, legally enforced legacy.
Legal Basis: Supported by the 14th Amendment's Equal Protection Clause and Civil Rights Acts (e.g., CRA 1964, FHA 1968), which implicitly validate historical discrimination and aim to remedy lingering effects. International human rights law (UN Basic Principles on Reparation) defines "victims" broadly as "Persons who individually or collectively suffered harm...through acts or omissions that constitute gross violations of international human rights law" , and explicitly includes descendants for injustices affecting family well-being ("Descendants of victims also have rights to reparations for injustices that affected the emotional and financial well being of deceased family members"). Precedent for collective victimhood based on shared experience exists in International Criminal Court (ICC) Reparations, which has sometimes adopted a collective reparations approach where it's impossible to identify every individual victim, or where a group suffered similar harms, often based on shared experience of the crime. General principles of causation (ICC Rule 85) also support the idea that even indirect victims of crimes' continuous effects can be beneficiaries. International human rights law also emphasizes a victim-centered approach to reparations, meaning the process and criteria should primarily serve the needs and rights of the victims.
Clarification on Black Fatigue: While widespread, Black fatigue serves as the descriptor of the collective harm for which reparations are sought, not the sole individual qualifier for eligibility.
No Disqualification by Individual Success: Personal or family success does not negate qualification, as reparations address systemic deficits and inherited burdens, not individual financial status. Even a Black billionaire, despite their individual success, comes from a lineage of players who were systematically cheated; their family did not accumulate compound interest on stolen labor or have access to opportunities available to white families for generations. They still bear the unique mental and emotional toll of playing a rigged game (Black fatigue) that white players do not. Reparations are about correcting the systemic debt owed to a group for specific historical theft and oppression, not a poverty alleviation program based on current individual wealth.
Monetary Cap: A direct individual payment, capped at $400,000 per person and $1 million per household, serves as a substantial partial restitution for this systemic cheating. It's like giving players a significant amount of the money they were owed, but recognizing that the rest of the debt will be repaid through other means (like collective investments). This cap makes the plan more politically viable while still providing significant individual restitution. This will be part of a tiered payment system that acknowledges different levels of historical connection.
