Editor’s note: Twelve months on from the killing of George Floyd, The Economist is publishing a series of articles, films, podcasts, data visualisations and guest contributions on the theme of race in America. Among them is a piece offering a different view on reparations. WE MUST BEGIN with a disclaimer: we enthusiastically support reparations for black American descendants of persons enslaved in America, but we cringe at the phrase “slavery reparations”. We begin the case for redress with slavery, but we extend it to include the near-century-long era of legal segregation and white te...