However, the main outcome is to acknowledge the crimes against humanity, like South Africa did, like Turkey refuses to do with Armenia.

General public conversations about race are frequently reductive and literal. We move first to the most difficult questions, which are not necessarily the most important questions. Whether someone who's bi-racial gets a check presumes all kinds of things about the nature of the discussion and models for compensation, which could certainly be in the form of community investment, something that we neglect now as it is.

And in the US, we're obsessed about the financial side. The Japanese internees got something like $15,000. Do you think that this compensation was really about the money? Would you be willing to be imprisoned in a camp, lose your land, have your family separated, for $15,000? The purpose for the payment is symbolic, an attempt to acknowledge a wrong, officially, for the historical record and for the sake of survivors and the rest of the public alike.

As I mentioned before, in some ways we are barely prepared for this conversation, because we're more concerned about who gets paid than the nature of acknowledging a crime against humanity, discussing the harms that have occurred, and working out a strategy for going forward as a more unified nation. While I wholeheartedly disagree with you that it's a late date (the Constitution was written in 1787 - does it sill apply? The treaty/fishing rights issues in Wisconsin and Minnesota in the 1990s were based on treaties from the 1830s - they still apply!), I wholeheartedly agree that we as a country are challenged to find the wisdom, interest, and commitment to grapple with an issue of this weight and complexity.