Reparations for individuals who have not proven in a court of law to have been injured by past illegalities is a bad idea, like the reparations recommended for Black Californians by California's Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans.
For starters, why only Black Californians? California has historically practiced invidious discrimination against multiple other groups, including Asian Americans, Latinos, Jews, and women. Limiting reparations to Blacks alone smacks of a racial spoils system out of Animal Farm, i.e. all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.
The Task Force recommended more than $1 million in reparations for lifelong California residents older than 70. But none of the beneficiaries would be required to proved they had been injured or handicapped in any way by illegal discrimination. Manna from heaven! Why not simply lift the statute of limitations for any claim founded on historical discrimination as has been done for certain sexual abuse claims? The beneficiary would need to prove a quantifiable harm proximately caused by past illegal treatment.
The corollary of the presumption of innocence is the presumption that you are not a victim until you prove you are by a preponderance of the evidence. These presumptions are embraced not because they yield perfect justice. Some guilty persons go free for lack of admissible evidence and some victims recover nothing because legally admissible evidence is wanting. The presumptions are cherished as begetting optimal yet imperfect justice because their surrender would be a leap into dystopia. A presumption of guilt would mean either the guillotine or the dungeon for all except those armed with AK-47s as during the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution.
And a presumption of victimhood would overwhelm the courts with a tsunami of plaintiffs pointing the finger at their personal enemies and adversaries or history in general as legally responsible for all their hardships. The court system would come to a halt. All work would stop. Every day would be devoted to attempting to calculate the precise injury every person had suffered because the world fell short of perfect justice. Everyone would starve to death because all productive labor would have ceased.
In other words, individual reparations is a cure vastly worse than the disease by orders of magnitude. Let's move on to preventing and remedying proven injustice.