 The many and various considerations just canvassed conclude that it is too optimistic to suppose that the descendants of the freed people, without reparations, would have achieved parity with the descendants of the white immigrants if only their civil and political rights had been protected. In any case, the issue they raise is a distraction from the central question whether U.S. blacks are owed reparations. Achieving parity with the descendants of immigrants is not the same thing as receiving the reparations one is owed. The point of reparations is not to make people equal to others; reparations is not defined as making the wrongly harmed equal to others. In fact, equality has little to do with reparations. People deserve reparations as a matter of right when they have been wrongfully harmed by transgression but a person may be harmed as a result of transgression and may therefore have a right to reparations and yet be better off than others. Similarly, a person may be worse off than others without having suffered from any harm or disadvantage for which he deserves reparations. If reparations necessarily requires compensation it requires that people be put as far as possible in the condition they would have been in had they not been wrongly injured. This may make them equal to others, but it may not. It can leave them worse off than others and it can also make them better off than others. Some philosophers may protest that we should not allow claims for reparations to get in the way of an ideal egalitarian society, but of course their position is as bad as the utilitarian arguments they disparage that rights may and should be violated in order to maximize utility (Corlett 2010).