Last month, the first in what promises to be a series of reparations lawsuits was filed against FleetBoston, Aetna, and CSX. And last week, UC-Berkeley held a two-day symposium entitled "Reparations for Slavery and Its Legacy." The tenor of the symposium reflected the disproportionate support reparations has on U.S. campuses. As of last year, only 11% of U.S. citizens supported slave reparations while 40% of Ivy League professors did. Berkeley's reparations symposium--held at Boalt Hall School of Law--did not debate whether reparations is a right, or even a viable, thing. Instead, it assumed that it was, and focussed all its attention on how reparations might best be made. Some argued for direct payments. Some argued for improved health care for blacks. Others argued that our history books ought to give abolitionists a larger role than they now do. A major goal of the symposium was to discover how best to present the argument for reparations to an American public that is not convinced of the need for them. "To think that we can enslave a people for centuries and after they have been freed have a century of discrimination, and then say a few years of 'sort of affirmative action' is enough, is not rational," argues Mary Louise Frampton, who directs the Center for Social Justice at Boalt. "And yet, that is what a majority of this country has concluded." Boalt Hall has become notorious for its one-sidedness on race issues, especially in the wake of Proposition 209, which made it illegal for California's public schools to use racial preferences in admissions (see the The Diversity Hoax in the blog sidebar if you want to read more about that). So we should not be surprised that Boalt would bypass debate on an issue that is still extraordinarily controversial, and move straight to the ideological project of figuring out how to make America swallow a dubious political agenda.

Polls show that the reparations movement is gaining momentum. A year ago, only 11% of Americans thought it was a good idea. Now 25% do (although only 10% of white Americans do). So, on the off chance that America may lose its mind, I've been trying to figure out what I might owe. I think of my cogitations on this subject as consummately patriotic. And I urge all Americans to perform similar cogitations. Together, we will create what might be called a Reparations Calculus, a fully integrated mathematics of our relative rights and wrongs that will supply the government with the data it needs to bill us all according to who we are and what our forebears have done to one another.

Baseline data: I am a white female of European extraction. Very, very bad. I should totally owe money.

Baseline counterdata:

Gender: I am female. That's good for me, since women are totally oppressed. Women shouldn't have to pay as much reparation as men. After all, how could women have been responsible for slavery when they couldn't even own property, and when the law defined them as property? I have never been so psyched to be a woman.

Class: I am from an upper middle-class background, the eldest child of educated parents. I grew up in the suburbs of the midwest, went to college, then to grad school, and now teach English literature at an elite Ivy League institution. But I think I should get some credit for my parents' struggle. My father and his sister were the first in their family to go to college. My mother was the first in hers to go beyond college, and managed to make it through medical school during an era when women were routinely denied admission because their proper role was to stay home with the kids. So mine was not your typical snotty rich white kid childhood by a long stretch. I witnessed my parents' pain. I saw them tightening their belts and pulling up their bootstraps and being all they could be. My parents triumphed over class and gender oppression. That should count for something.

Race: While I have some English blood, I also have a good bit of Irish blood. English blood is bad: the English were imperialists after all. But Irish blood is good! The Irish totally got crapped on by the English for hundreds of years (longer by far, by the way, than Americans held slaves). So that cancels out my English-imperialist blood (sorry, Great-Grandfather Reginald), and makes me Irish. I have the name to prove it, too. So I am not only of Irish extraction, but marked as Irish. This is not an insignificant point. Africans weren't the only people regarded by Victorian science as sub-human. The Irish--or the "white chimpanzees" as we were affectionately called--were, too. Everyone from anthropologists to political cartoonists drew comparisons between apes, Africans, and the Irish. So, really, my skin is darker than it appears. I may look white, but I'm actually black. Or I was, at one time.

History: If you trace back through my mother's side, my roots go all the way back to America's roots. We were here during the Revolution, and we fought in it, too. That's bad, because it makes me totally American and complicit with the lame racism of our founding fathers, who did not think their highminded belief that "all men are created equal" applied to their slaves. But some of my ancestors were Pennsylvania Dutch, which is good. Pennsylvania Dutch did not believe in slavery, refused to live off its profits, and formed the first anti-slavery society in the US in Philadelphia in 1774. So that should count in my favor. I also think I should get a few points for the anti-technological bent of this branch of my family. Everyone knows how bad technology is, because it leads to industry which leads to capitalism which leads to the exploitation of workers and the imperialist appropriation of distant land and non-white people. My rustic forebears were therefore more pure than the industrialists of early America, and there is no doubt that some of that counter-hegemonic anti-technological moral superiority has been passed down to me. I don't even know how to program my VCR.

True, some members of my family fought for the South during the Civil War. But other members of my family fought for the North. So they cancel each other out.

And true, a distant, very distant relative of mine would be one General George Armstrong Custer. But his main thing was killing Native Americans, so it doesn't count in the logic of Reparations Calculus. Plus, we're all kind of embarrassed to be related to the guy, which makes us good.

Meanwhile, the Irish part of the family was still in Ireland, having somehow survived the famine, and had more pressing issues to think of than U.S. race relations--staying alive, for instance. When Michael O'Connor did make his way over to the U.S. sometime around 1900, ties to the family in Ireland were broken and lost. This was really common among Irish who felt forced to abandon their homeland and ashamed, in the environment of rabidly anti-Irish America, to maintain a strong connection to their past. So I can't trace my family back to my country of origin (the name "Michael O'Connor" is to Ireland what "John Smith" is here). I am dispossessed, homeless, without history. Maybe I should be getting reparations, too.