Slavery Reparations Should Be Obama's Next Stimulus

President Obama is taking so much heat from opponents wrongly convinced that he's keen on redistributing white America's wealth to African-Americans that he might as well go ahead and do it, Naomi Klein writes in the Guardian. Obama's administration has been pursuing "race-neutral" policies that do nothing to close the massive gap in wealth between races, Klein argues, so much so that it's starting to look like he's "turned his back on black America."

Obama's never going to win over people like Rush Limbaugh, who accuses him of "deliberately trashing the economy so he could give more handouts to black people," when black people have actually been the hardest-hit by the recession, Klein argues. The president is eloquent enough to make the case for making reparations to narrow the racial divide and make amends for slavery and the Jim Crow days, Klein writes, and he's got little to lose by doing so instead of staying as silent on race as he has been so far. (More race relations stories.)