Slavery? It’s over.

Reparations? Fat chance.

But here’s what few seem to understand: History will keep sabotaging our “post-racial” present until the debt owed to black America gets squared away.

Yes, I’m suggesting reparations — mostly thanks to “The Case for Reparations,” Ta-Nehisi Coates’s 2014 cover story for The Atlantic, which reanimated the once-stale debate when it hit the web. I agree with his measured call to action: Congress should pass HR 40, a bill to create a commission to study reparations proposals. But to piggyback off that conclusion, I first need to recap the argument behind it.

Coates insists that the piracy of Jim Crow housing policies is a crime for which restitution is needed. It goes like this: In 1934, Congress set up the Federal Housing Administration to make home-buying easier by insuring mortgages — but not everyone could receive help. The FHA deliberately flagged black neighborhoods as financially unstable and, therefore, ineligible for insurance. According to Black Wealth/White Wealth, blacks were “locked out of the greatest mass-based opportunity for wealth accumulation in American history.”

Appreciating home values helped whisk white homeowners up the economic ladder while redlining and restrictive covenants kept blacks languishing at the bottom. Meanwhile, interstate highways and other public works projects interacted with exclusionary zoning rules to aggravate segregation and suburban sprawl. Whites fled cities for suburbs, planting the seeds of commercial development while most blacks—both priced out and selectively shut out of the real estate investment market — lost an easy shot at upward mobility.

But that’s not to say that blacks were snubbed by Realtors—quite the opposite, in fact. Coates accuses mid-century Chicago of having “two housing markets — one legitimate and backed by the government, the other lawless and patrolled by predators.” These predatory charlatans were contract sellers: They’d spot ambitious blacks desperate for middle-class security, con them into signing high-risk contracts, then use loopholes to bilk them for fortunes. Having beaten their client into financial ruin and reclaimed the deed, the seller would “bring in another black family, rinse, and repeat.” For decades victims had no sturdy legal recourse to challenge this.

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Participants held hands during an open housing march through south Louisville on April 9, 1967. (Photo: Michael Coers, The Courier-Journal.)

Add to these two private markets an equally pernicious tool of black degradation: public housing. The New Deal tackled poverty with safety net programs like subsidized housing, but due to their unpopularity with the middle and upper classes, public housing projects have historically been discouraged or outright blocked in zones that aren’t already home to minority communities. In effect, that quarantines public and Section 8-friendly housing in inner city areas, thereby creating a layout in which concentrations of poverty and congregations of black people seem to naturally overlap. But very little is natural about it: It’s the successful outcome of white supremacist housing policies by the U.S. government.

The fluid continuity from slavery to segregation shows that blacks were systematically robbed and abused for a whole century after the Civil War. I agree with Coates that our government’s pathological need to trap blacks in poverty clusters and artificially depreciate their assets well into the 20th century warrants a Congressional investigation into reparations proposals. Hence, HR 40.

But how much is black America actually owed? That’s still an open question.

Matt Yglesias at Vox recommends we start by closing the black-white wealth gap. It would cost Uncle Sam about $1.38 trillion — a conservative estimate next to other proposals. As Yglesias notes, crunching numbers on the actual cost incurred by slavery can quickly send the invoice spiraling into quadrillions of dollars.

Bernie Sanders, who recently caught flack from Coates for pooh-poohing the suggestion of reparations, wants to fix racial inequality with a grab bag of race-ignorant democratic-socialist policies that bleed the rich. But he and his coalition need to realize that even if Congress miraculously passed some dream cocktail of colorblind redistribution programs — steeply progressive taxes, offshore tax haven crackdowns, free higher education, universal health care — that the quality of life for blacks would continue to lag. Anti-black racism is in the bone marrow of American life.

Just look at our prison industrial complex, otherwise labeled “the New Jim Crow:” Minorities are 46.6 percent of the people killed by police, 62.7 percent of the unarmed people killed by police. Blacks are 13 percent of the population but 31 percent of the people killed by police. Blacks and whites use and sell drugs at the same rate but blacks get arrested for it more. Blacks get longer sentences for the same crimes. Death row inmates are likelier to get executed if they’re black.

It’s not just criminal justice, either. Before the housing bubble popped black buyers were likelier to get steered into dodgy subprime loans. Voting age blacks are three times likelier not to have a required government-issued photo ID. And affirmative action policies are getting dismantled root and branch.

Judging by wealth distribution and housing patterns, you can’t deny that slavery and Jim Crow have been grandfathered into modern life — especially in Louisville, America’s fourth most segregated city. Over half of our public housing units are stuffed into one Metro Council district. Blacks are likelier to get their mortgage applications denied and twice as likely to face foreclosure.

And wealth? Of the world’s 1,800 billionaires only a dozen are black. Even in the “meritocratic” U.S. — where the top 0.1 percent has 22 percent of the wealth — exactly 3 of the 536 billionaires are black. Maybe it’s because 40 percent of household wealth is inherited. And yet, Gov. Bevin wants to sunset Kentucky’s estate tax. How many black families will that help? Forget dynastic wealth: What good is entrepreneurship for a population that lacks startup capital?

Even our corporations are tainted. Did you know that a slave owner in the 1850s could take out a life insurance contract on his human chattel? Aetna — the same Aetna that plunked down $37 billion last summer to acquire Louisville’s second biggest employer, Humana—sold these slave policies.

In a 1995 Supreme Court decision, the late Justice Antonin Scalia denied the existence of “a creditor or a debtor race… In the eyes of government, we are just one race here. It is American.” That’s a convenient out for those of us who benefit from white supremacy. I prefer Coates’s credit metaphor—it sheds more light on our situation:

“It is as though we have run up a credit-card bill and, having pledged to charge no more, remain befuddled that the balance does not disappear. The effects of that balance, interest accruing daily, are all around us.”

Black America is owed something.

And while money alone can’t fix inequality, it’s a good place to start.

Simon T. Meiners is a graduate student at the University of Louisville. He has previously written for The New Republic.