'Reparations Happy Hour' invites white people to pay for drinks
FOX NEWS - On Monday night, a bar in Portland, Oregon hosted people of color and gave them $10 as they arrived -- a symbolic gift funded primarily by white people who were asked not to attend the "Reparations Happy Hour."
A local activist group, Brown Hope, wanted the event to be a space for people of color in a mostly white city to meet, organize, discuss public policy and potentially plan various actions.
The notion of full-scale reparations -- sought by some as compensation for the horrors of slavery, Jim Crow and the large wealth gap between white and black U.S. households -- was supported by 58 percent of black people and 46 percent of Hispanic people in a 2016 poll.
However, 68 percent of white Americans do not support reparations; when the topic was brought up during the 2016 presidential campaign, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said it was "divisive" and unlikely to get through Congress.
The economist Robert Browne once estimated a fair value for reparations of $1.4 trillion to $4.7 trillion and wrote that reparations should ''restore the black community to the economic position it would have had if it had not been subjected to slavery and discrimination.''
Eric J. Miller, a professor at Loyola Law School, said the case for reparations involves a reckoning with the country's history.
"Part of our history is our grandparents participating in these acts of terrible violence [against black people]," he told HuffPost. "But people don't want to acknowledge the horror of what they engaged in."