So why don't you feel this way about the reparations that were paid to the Japanese American citizens that were interned during WWII by our government? Did not at least a portion of that money come from every single one of us?
Six times victims have received reparations
....
Japanese internment
The forced internment of 120,000 Japanese-Americans in camps during World War II
resulted in about $3.1 billion in property loss and $6.4 billion in income loss, in 2014 dollars. If you account for the possibility that that money might have been invested and gotten above-inflation returns, the economic losses are even larger.
Congress made two attempts at reparations, the
Japanese-American Claims Act of 1948 and the
Civil Liberties Act of 1988. Between 1948 and 1965, the former
authorized payments totaling $38 million (which comes to somewhere between $286 to $374 million in 2014 dollars), which didn't come close to matching the economic loss. The latter offered survivors $20,000 each in reparations. By 1998, 80,000 survivors had collected their share, for a
total payout of $1.6 billion (between $2.3 billion and $3.2 billion today). There is no accounting by which either measure adequately repaid internees for their economic losses, let alone compensated for pain and suffering.
Forced sterilization
Most Americans states practiced one or another form of eugenics during the 20th century, with forced sterilizations of "unfit" people being a prime instrument. The targets were largely but by no means entirely mentally or developmentally disabled; poor black women on welfare were especially likely to be victimized in this manner. The Supreme Court gave the practice a green light with 1927's
Buck v. Bell, and eventually 33 states
adopted the practice, forcibly sterilizing about 65,000 people total through the 1970s. Oregon forcibly sterilized people as late as
1981, and its Board of Eugenics (renamed the "Board of Social Protection" in 1967) was only abolished in
1983.
Very few states have acknowledged or apologized for these policies, and only one, North Carolina, has set up a reparations program. The state sterilized about 7,600 people, most of whom are no longer living, but last year
passed a $10 million reparations program that should give the more than 177 living victims somewhere
in the range of $50,000 each. The payments should be made within a few years. Some victims have
objected, saying this doesn't come close to remedying the injustice. As one victim, Elaine Riddick Jessie (who was sterilized at age 14 after being raped and giving the resulting son up for adoption), put it, "If I accepted it, what kind of value am I putting on my life?"
California, which
sterilized by far the largest number of people of any state, has yet to pay out reparations.
Tuskegee experiment
After the end of the Tuskegee experiment — in which 399 black men with syphilis were left untreated to study the progression of the disease between 1932 and 1972 — the government
reached a $10 million out of court settlement with the victims and their families in 1974, which included both
monetary reparations (in 2014 dollars, $178,000 for men in the study who had syphilis, $72,000 for heirs, $77,000 for those in the control group and $24,000 for heirs of those in the control group) and a promise of lifelong medical treatment for both participants and their immediate families. According to the
CDC, 15 descendants are still receiving treatment through the program today.
Rosewood
In 1923, the primarily black town of Rosewood on the Gulf Coast of Florida was destroyed in a
race riot that, by official counts, killed
at least six black residents and two whites (though some descendants of the town's residents have claimed many more were
killed and dumped in mass graves). In 1994, the state of Florida
agreed to a reparations package worth around $3.36 million in 2014 dollars, of which $2.4 million today would be set aside to compensate the 11 or so remaining survivors of the incident, $800,000 to compensate those who were forced to flee the town, and $160,000 would go to college scholarships primarily aimed at descendants
