The moral case for reparations is undeniable. The United States is a country built in large part off the labor of black slaves. Their coerced labor was turned into capital. That capital was appropriated by planters, filled the coffers of merchants, and fueled industrialists. Meanwhile, the descendants of slaves were stuck of the lowest rung of an incredibly violent and exploitative society.

Even after the tremendous gains of the Civil Rights movement and the election of a generation of black leaders, black Americans have to settle for the worst schools, the worst health care, the worst jobs, and the worst end of the worst justice system in the democratic world. Yet at the same time, they’re told by politicians – white and black, Democrat and Republican – that their woes are the product of a “culture of poverty”, that they need to just “pull up their pants” and try a little harder.

Far from there being talk of redress for slavery, black Americans have been portrayed as “welfare cheats”, dependent on government and unwilling to change their ways.

In this context, the discussion of reparations, sparked by Ta-Nehisi Coates’ 2014 essay “The Case for Reparations” and revived in the early days of the 2020 Democratic primary, is welcome. It’s good that the distribution of wealth is being discussed as a way to fight racism, rather than merely battles over representation or interpersonal biases.

But reparations can’t adequately address racial inequality, can’t be effectively administered, and there is still no mass base of black Americans pushing for it. We have more effective and popular ways to finally turn America into an egalitarian democracy.

Today, the most prominent mainstream demand for reparations comes from John Conyers’s HR 40. It calls for a “commission to study and develop reparation proposals for African Americans to examine slavery and discrimination in the colonies and the United States from 1619 to the present and recommend appropriate remedies”. Candidates from across the Democratic field have been asked if they support it, and more generally, reparations. So far the response has been mixed.

Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren have embraced the rhetoric of reparations. But both of them seem to just mean they back policies that will disproportionately help black Americans, like tax credits or aid to the victim of housing discrimination. Warren refuses to say she supports direct cash transfers to the descendants of US slaves, but does say it’s time for a “full-blown conversation about reparations”, including HR 40.

Booker does something similar, he proposes “baby bonds” for every child to address the racial wealth gap, and calls that a “form of reparations”. (It isn’t.) Sanders says the universal programs he’s popularized will help disproportionately marginalized groups but has avoided the reparation rhetoric of other candidates.

His stance is an admirable one, in part because his political brand is based on being straightforward and offering comprehensible solutions to American workers. Supporting a committee just to discuss an issue, or calling policies that aren’t reparations “reparations”, is the opposite of that approach.

Though he’s careful to not say any of the other candidates are a better option for black Americans than Sanders, Coates questions whether Sanders and his staff “understand the illness which they think they can treat through class-exclusive solutions”.

I think they do, and that what they’re proposing instead represents something radical — a third Reconstruction to finally finish the job of creating democracy in America. The first Reconstruction, which followed the American civil war, was an attempt to use the power of the federal government and the victorious Union army to smash the remnants of planter power and create a new order in the south.

Congressional efforts by radical Republicans took on Lincoln’s reactionary successor Andrew Johnson and created the conditions for the newly freed to assert voting rights and win public office. Wealth was redistributed, public schools were erected, and an incredible democratic experiment thrived. A black civil society and politics was created, showing the latent power of those who had been denounced as inferior for generations. This wasn’t a cash transfer, it was a revolution.

With this backdrop, figures like the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass foresaw the emergence of “a party in the southern states among the poor”, and believed that instead of endless racial animosity, a conflict was brewing “between the wealthy slaveholder and the poor man”.

It was a dream stomped out, not by the permanent racist psyche of white Americans, but by a brutal counterrevolution led by powerful southern elites and the terrorism of groups such as the Ku Klux Klan.

But some of the spirit stayed alive, from the multiracial organizing of the Knights of Labor to Populist leaders such as Tom Watson who challenged white and black farmers to “see how this race antagonism perpetuates a monetary system which beggars all”.

In time, a second Reconstruction emerged during the civil rights movement of the 1960s that finally won formal equality for black Americans and changed the United States for the better. It fell, however, short of Martin Luther King Jr’s hope of not just integrating the lunch counter, but making sure that there was “money to be able to buy a hamburger or a steak”. His route to fulfilling this dream was through a labor-based coalition and the fight for an expansive welfare state.

But even if we agree this is important work must be finished, that we must have a new Reconstruction, why not include reparations as part of it? The first case is the technical difficulty of administrating such a program. When it comes to the necessary reparations for the victims of colonialism, we know how to identify those affected and administer redress. The state of France can pay the state of Haiti for its historic crimes, and the state of Haiti can use that wealth (or debt forgiveness) to help spur development that imperialism stunted.

But what kind of bureaucratic process would be necessary to identify who gets to receive the reparations Coates supports? It can’t simply be race, because recent immigrants from Africa wouldn’t qualify, nor would the descendants of slaves held in former French or British colonies. Would we need a new bureau to establish ancestry? Is that overhead and the work it will involve for black Americans to prove that they qualify worth it compared to creating a universal program that will most help the marginalized anyway?

Or consider this dilemma: money for reparations will come from government expenditure, of which around half is funded by income tax. Could we be in a situation where we’re asking, say, a black Jamaican descendent of slaves, or a poor Latino immigrant, to help fund a program that they can’t benefit from? Reparations wouldn’t be quite such a zero-sum game, but it would hard to shake the perception. Is this really the basis that we can build a majoritarian coalition?

We have a real alternative: solidaristic policies that, unlike reparations, are actually the mass demands of African Americans.

When polled, most black Americans agree that “our society should do whatever is necessary to make sure that everyone has an equal opportunity to succeed” and that government should spend money to tackle poverty. The vanguard of American social democracy, they’re joined now by millions of others, commanding majorities that support Medicare for All, a jobs guarantee, free public education, and more.

These are the types of measures that can unite the many against the tiny minority that benefits from their exploitation and continued racialized division.

Are universal programs enough? No, we need to defend affirmative action from right-wing attack and there also needs to be a wider cultural reckoning with slavery. It is outrageous that we live in a former slave state in which there is not a single federal holiday celebrating emancipation. Juneteenth must be enshrined on that basis.

It’s also reprehensible that children in American public schools are often given “lost cause” accounts of history that downplay the brutality of slavery or valorize those, like Confederate general Robert E Lee, who murdered to defend it. The education curriculum, by federal mandate, should as rigorously guide the study of slavery in our primary schools as Holocaust studies is guided in Germany. And of course, no statues of Confederate leaders, or those that served the rebel cause, should exist on public land.

But even while we reckon with the history of racism and exploitation, we need to remember that we have a shared destiny. There is still much to do, but through generations of struggle, progress has been made. Racism might seem permanent, but it is an invention of man, not something always to be embedded in our psyches.

HR 40 is a call for a conversation. But what we need more than ever is action. We’re closer than we’ve been in decades to creating the political coalition that can win power and create an egalitarian social democracy in the United States. Such a republic of freedom can’t be our final step, but it’s the necessary foundation for the world we desperately need, one without race, or class, where life outcomes aren’t left to accidents of birth.