The Elusive Specificity of Reparations  By David Frum  An
advocate of reparations should not, in my opinion, disregard the
fundamental question: Who will get them? How much? Who will
pay? Ta-Nehisi Coatesthe author of the Atlantic's cover story on
this issue and my debate interlocutor heredisagrees. Ta-Nehisi
notes that the U.S. has paid ethnically based compensation
before, to Japanese-Americans interned during World War II. It
will therefore be “radically practical” to pay again, this time
to black Americans.   But that’s a deep and dangerous
misunderstanding.   The United States did not pay reparations to
Japanese Americans as an ethnic group. The United States
government paid $20,00 per person to those Japanese Americans
(or next of kin) who were interned during World War II. Japanese
Americans who were not interned (about 15,000 people) received
nothing. The compensation was individual, not collective—a point
I stressed when I wrote in favor of such payments back in the
late 1980s as a fledgling columnis