Slavery Reparations: A Dead Issue, and Well-Deserved

Clayton E. Cramer " There’s plenty of shame and horror to go around. Slavery has been the norm for most of human civilization, and while the horrors of the Middle Passage and the cane fields of the Western Hemisphere are remarkable, there is no shortage of horrors across the centuries. At a certain point we need to inform and educate, while recognizing that seeking reparations for crimes committed by persons now dead, against persons also now dead, will lead us to reparations claims against Italy for Caesar’s crimes in Gaul."  Clayton E. Cramer is a software engineer and historian. His sixth book, Armed America: The Remarkable Story of How and Why Guns Became as American as Apple Pie (Nelson Current, 2006), is available in bookstores.