Black American descendants of U.S. slavery represent about 12 percent of the nation’s population but possess less than 2 percent of the nation’s wealth. Reparations — recompense for the cumulative effects of white supremacy — are direct payments from the federal government to American descendants of U. S. slavery calibrated to eliminate the gulf in black-white wealth, now estimated at $11 trillion. Certainly, a separate case can be made that additional compensation is due from the countries whose traders sold their fellow Africans into slavery, but it is the specificity of the experience of black people in the United States that supports the case for African American reparations.