How in the hell would you ever calculate reparations? Do you have to find out which slave(s) they are descended from, determine the prevailing wage for the work they were doing at the time, then split up the slave(s) earnings among all the descendants?
How do you determine who pays for this? Most people didn't own plantations or slaves. Do you track down the descendants of slaveowners and make them pay? What about the people who sold the initial slaves from africa? Do we have to figure out how much they were paid and split that among the slave descendants, or do we look at it instead in terms of damages (I'm assuming the damages for being sold into slavery far exceed what was paid for the slaves).
How about mixed descendants? They're both descended from the slaveowners and the slaves. Does that just even out? Or do we need to dig even deeper, and look at how they were treated individually?
To me, that's the only fair way to do it. And even then it's not really fair, nobody can control what their ancestors did. What if a plantation owner's kids blew the family fortune? How are their descendants supposed to pay their share of reparations when they didn't even benefit from slavery?
The other approach, I suppose, is easier. Just create a racial database(somehow), and have everyone register on it. Then all the "white" registered people get to pay some extra tax, and the "black" registered people get some extra tax refund. I don't know if you include some kind of dna testing here to prevent fraud, otherwise we're gonna have a sudden demographics shift from white to black.
Of course, that would piss me right off, since I'm white and my ancestors weren't even in the country during the time of slavery. And plenty of black people's ancestors weren't either.