We are now hearing demands that reparations be paid to the descendants of black slaves. But why slaves only? If the United States should decide to pay reparations to all the groups it has subjected to genocide, starvation, exile from home, slavery and wage-slavery, the list would be a very long one. But the American establishment tolerates, even encourages a penitential preoccupation with black slavery in order to deflect attention from our many other atrocities on which a scab has hardly yet formed.