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To me, this reads like you are saying we can have reparations OR purely need based assistance. Why can't we have both? We currently have need based support, but racial disparity persists. 
Need based support does not seem enough to fill the gaps and ignores that the negative effects of racial discrimination persisted long after slavery was abolished. Sure, no one alive today owned slaves, but many did protest things like : interracial marriage (See Loving v Virginia 1967), desegregation of schools (~1959), etc and many injustices continue to this day.
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What is your goal of your proposed need based financial assistance? Is it to eliminate wealth disparities between races? Or something else? >

I'm thinking like a utilitarian; the goal would be to minimize the suffering of less-well-off people, whether or not they are poor due to past injustices or just due to more run-of-the-mill reasons for being poor.
I don't think I could say that the goal is to eliminate wealth disparities between races.  If you simply take money from the wealthier race and give it to the less wealthy race, then if you end up at the point where you have the same amount of happiness and the same amount of suffering in the world as you did before, except now it's evenly distributed between the races, have you really achieved anything?
I think that wealth equality between races is a symptom of a fair society and therefore one that has probably done a good job maximizing benefits to its people in a utilitarian sense; if we reach Black-white wealth equality, it probably means we've had several generations where everybody who wanted to become a doctor had a decent shot at it.  But that's a symptom of a benefit-maximizing society, not a cause, i.e. you can't solve other problems just by moving money from white people to Black people, instead of targeting the people who need it the most.
I do agree that this was insufficiently clarified in the original post and this has caused me to revise and clarify my own thoughts.
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Flat out universal assistance makes more sense than either need based or race based assistance. 
For example: your medical bill? Covered! Don't need to pass paperwork back and forth, wonder if you got it, think maybe you committed fraud ... none of that. 
For example universal basic income? Well, are you a citizen? Yes? Then got it! 
By making things universal instead of need based you eliminate entire buildings of administration and save friction costs. You unclog minds of the people and give them back their attention because expectations are clear. 
In practice the poor will get aid and the rich will get a tax refund. Poor people like aid. Rich people like tax refunds. It works out for everyone. >

I would agree but that still counts as wealth-based transfer (the wealthiest pay the tax bill, the benefits go to everyone else). >

I had to repost this comment because of some rule.... Here's two problems I see with reparations. One is the person or people who put the other into slavery. When it comes to the african slave trade, more people were put into slavery by other african tribes, esp. in West Africa, than by any other parties. That tribe portrayed in the movie Woman King, the Dahomey tribe, were prolific slavers. So if one seeks reparations it will have to be from the original offending party. That sounds impossible today. The second problem I see is many non black folks have ancestors who were slaves. Will they be denied reparations on the basis they're not black? That's a whole  bunch of legal stuff just begging to be brought to the light of day. I do have a question, who would the wealth be transferred from? >

Nowhere is it mandated that reparations of any kind be collected from the original offending party. Practically All descendants of American slaves are black by certain definitions (specifically by lineage) because Africans made up the vast vast vast majority of slaves in the new world >

I hate how this is going to sound...how do you justify collecting from the slave owner? They bought a product that was legal at the time no matter how disgusting it is. You buy something from the store that makes you sick, you don't sue the store. You sue the manufacturer. So who manufactures slaves? The original seller. It's quite complex and there will be some where that's not the case but I'm right in this. You can't penalize someone who bought something legally. And you're right, practically all. But that's not all. All is everyone. There will be people who are white whose ancestors were slaves. >

Interesting ideas your cases aren’t exactly equivalent, it is not the consumer suing the seller for faulty merchandise it is the merchandise suing the store for stocking it in the first place. In other words descendants of slaves are suing the USA government for the crime of allowing slavery to exist legally in its borders >

I can't really argue with that logic. But how do you sue for something that was legal at the time? I really don't know what the solution is. Slavery has been (and still is in some countries) a huge problem. But it didn't start with the African slave trade. The origin of the word slave is from Slav because in the middle ages the slavs were often forced into slavery. So one sets a legal precedent of suing for history. It's a clusterfuck bro. My ancestors were Cherokee. Can I sue the government for the eradication of my people? Or the enslavement of them? My people were enslaved with africans in some of the lower states. And in Mexico. There's gotta be a solution but idk what it would be. >

African Americans are not suing citizens over something that was once legal, they are suing the country for allowing it to be legal in the first place >

I understand that. I just don't think it will work. There's gotta be a solution that will work though. I don't know. I hope a solution can be found. Or if they win then good for them. The descendants of slaves  should get something if they are struggling. >

Some of them are some aren’t but yeah super complex issue no purely correct answer >

Is that what were going to do when the police kill someone and the family sues the department? Of course not and that's why these two concepts your talking about are different. Reparations for our ancestors is different than food stamps or cash assistance. >

I don't like the whole reparation idea. I'm Middle Eastern, everything my family and I owned got bombed in 1992. We had to flea the invasion from the US. All the infrastructure was destroyed. We lost family members.
Now that my family is in the US, why do their tax dollars go for reparations while we get nothing for all the current trauma we have.
It doesn't feel right that you're compensating one race when slavery had nothing to do with us. You can say we'll Africans were used to build the USA. Middle Eastern oil is used to build modern USA. It wasn't a coincidence that when Saddam was hung, all the US oil companies swooped in and bought the oil at a cheap rate.
All that oil was used to build the USA.
So are we going to talk about compensation? Or we do not talk about it? >

What exactly do you mean by need based financial assistance? Because that could refer to a ride range of things at a range of degrees. >

This is true, of course; I'm not taking a position on which type of need-based aid would be the best, I'm just saying it shouldn't have anything to with anything that happened before you were born. >

Well it's hard to change your view when the view itself is vague. Need-based financial assistance already exists and that hasn't solved the financial disparity between the Black and white communities. Do you then think that disadvantaged groups should receive even more funding? Should the funding stop when they are above the poverty line? Middle class? Would it be based on income, salary, assets? What defines need? >

I am intentionally not committing to any position on what kind of need-based aid is the best; my entire argument is that helping people based on their needs, is morally and practically superior than compensating that person for things that happened before they were born.
(I think, separately from that, you could argue that if we've had need-based aid for a while and there's still a huge wealth gap, we should probably have more of it.  Free health care and free college seem like the easiest places to start.) >

Well if you help people based on their needs, you will be mostly helping people based on things that happened before them, the difference is just how you frame it. The problem comes from where you draw the line. If getting them out of poverty is the goal, that doesn't make up for the lack of wealth in the Black community and doesn't necessarily address the issues that people want reparations for in the first place. But in order to give assistance based on needs, you would first have to determine who fits into the category of needing assistance and at what point would they no longer fit into that category.
A race based system would directly address the concerns at hand and contribute to the community as a whole as opposed to singling out the people that the government has decided is poor enough. From personal experience, the government doesn't like assisting poor people unless their circumstances are dire. But if a community is paying the price for things that happened before they were born, why shouldn't the solution also be based on things that happened before they were born? 
The other thing is that the wealth disparity is about more than slavery. Sharecropping and Jim Crow also had a huge effect on the wealth gap for the Black community. Can segregation be counted as being something that occurred before Black people today were born if plenty of people who were alive during that time are still around today? If we are still seeing the effects of that period in time is that really something of the past? >

Well maybe “need based aid” is the wrong term. I’m not saying it should only go to people who are poor enough to what we usually call “need based aid”. I’m saying that any wealth redistribution should only be based on actual wealth levels. If some form of assistance goes from a family making $130,000 to a family making $60,000, fine - as long as it’s not factoring in grievances about things that happened before you were born. >

And how do you determine what's fair and what someone needs? If people want the community to be paid back for the disadvantage the community was put at for centuries, how do you ensure that simply redistributing wealth to poor people will alleviate those grievances? After all, redistribution of wealth is not the only method of reparations. 
You keep bringing up the factor of things happening before people were born but does that mean that those who were born in times that have affected the Black community should receive race based reparations? Should people born during Jim Crow receive reparations? Where do you draw the line on what has harmed the Black community and what hasn't? >

I'm saying you should be compensated/helped only to the extent that the disadvantages from past events carried over into your own life.  And anyone with equivalent disadvantages should be compensated the same.
In other words, like I said in the top post, if one person is poor because their ancestors were slaves and another person is poor because their parents lost everything at the track, they both get the same amount of help.
Additionally, for people who were alive during Jim Crow, I don't see anything wrong with compensating them for what they personally went through, since they had to carry a burden in addition to (possibly) being born poor.
Basically I'm saying that any formula for compensation:
1) should be able to factor in things that were done to you specifically in your lifetime
2) should be able to factor in economic assistance for poverty
3) should NOT factor in "payback" for anything that happened before you were born, except to the extent that it's reflected in your financial circumstances, which would be priced into #2. >

If we are compensating people based on things that happened in their lifetime, that still raises the question of where to draw the line. How do you guage the level that the past has disadvantaged someone's life? Who makes that call? Given that the Black community is still disadvantaged not only in terms of money but also in terms of circumstances and opportunities, will they also be compensated for that factor too?
You want to base it on economics but you still haven't explained how that would work. Where is the line drawn for who is poor enough to receive assistance? If the only requirement that they make less money than someone else because that will always be the case. If the line that they are less than middle class? That's a lot of people, how do you coordinate that process and accommodate those changes? How will you ensure that this system is just and addresses the concerns of the Black community by adequately repaying the damages to the community? >

Can you clarify, are you saying:
1) "You haven't specified how this should be done" - I agree, I'm not specifying the details of how any wealth-based compensation should be done, I'm just saying it should be based on your circumstances, not factoring in things before you were born.
or:
2) "You cannot accomplish your goal, without explicitly factoring in things that happened before people were born" - I tentatively disagree, but this is a subreddit for changing views after all.
Also, do you agree or disagree that all of the potential problems that you raised, would also exist in a system where you DID try to compensate people for things that happened before they were born? >


Also, my ancestors still gave their lives toiling for slave owners in bondage even if my parents managed to find success, that doesn't eliminate the intergenerational trauma and addiction and mental health issues that have plagued my family to this day, which do impact me and which, while hard to quantify, would be the kind of thing that people can sue for as "emotional distress" in other types of legal scenarios.

Context gets lost in text but this is an earnest question for my benefit-
Is there a scientific mechanism in which trauma is passed down through genes or is it behavioral changes to the initially affected party based on trauma that were then taught in early development to the subsequent generation? 
I've heard this several times and I am very ignorant of  the concept.