No amount of A.I. can save white America’s soul, or restore Black Americans’ long-foreclosed-upon and deferred dreams.
. Its themes rang virtually every note of my twentysomething-year-long career. In 1998, I made my first digital footprint with a signed online petition in support of reparations for the Tulsa race riots. I endured countless run-ins with Oklahoma good ol’ boys while crisscrossing the state, working for candidates representing a perpetually losing political party.
America has never seen an acceptable way forward on the question of reparations. If we even get past the “whys,” we get twisted and tangled up in the “how-tos.” But in “How to Pay Reparations,” REPAIR Project Team statistician Wendy Guan says that’s precisely what algorithms, A.I., and machine learning are good for: showing us. And that is where the hope, the wonder, the fantasy comes from in Onyebuchi’s story. We learn that a team of data scientists, statisticians, politicians, and lawyers have finally developed a “reparations algorithm.”
Some view reparations as white America’s ticket to redemption from its original sin and Black America’s salvation from a 400-year-legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and structural racism. But no amount of computational power can save white America’s soul, or restore Black Americans’ long-foreclosed-upon and deferred dreams. The belief that it can is at best a delusion.
Throughout the story—particularly beginning when Mayor Bobby Caine said: “Imagine that. A white mayor. Spearheading a citywide reparations scheme?”—I was reminded of James Evans, the patriarch of the Black family on the ’70s sitcom. If Evans had walked in at the beginning of the show with a fat check, his ticket out of the ghetto, you’d best believe the family would be back to eating cold oatmeal in the same damned housing project by the end of the episode.
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