Until recently, if you’d asked me what I thought about blacks demanding reparations for slavery, I would have said, “Forget it.”

I’ve always thought of reparations as cash that the federal government would be asked to cough up as partial restitution for tolerating a wretched system that kept millions of blacks in abject servitude for more than 200 years, and for the next hundred deprived them of opportunities to work, to educate themselves, to participate in politics and the military, to receive all kinds of federal benefits, and even to live without being victimized by lynch mobs and race haters.

Even though this was the shameful history blacks in America were subjected to until the mid-’60s, I still would have said no to reparations.

Why?

First, since it’s impossible to trace the slaves down to all of their living descendants, the only way to pay reparations would be to create some kind of fund for the benefit of blacks. And if you happened to get a trillion dollars or so, it would set off a huge political battle over who would give out the money and how it should be spent.

I can just see Jesse Jackson’s children, along with a host of black politicians, ministers, and operators of all kinds vying with one another for a piece of the action. And like the federal poverty program, it would probably enrich the people who were hired to administer it as much or more than the folks it was intended to serve.

Nor do I believe for one moment that once all this money was spent, all the boats of all the blacks who are currently mired in the underclass would have been lifted.

Second, reparations paid by the government would set off an anti-black backlash of the kind we haven’t seen in decades. If you think the backlash against affirmative action has been bad, just imagine what would happen if billions in government dollars were offered to a trust fund for blacks. Not only would it ratchet up all those groups that want to take back America; they’d be shooting blacks on the streets.

Finally, I was against reparations because, like other formerly oppressed groups, blacks are rising on their own. For a group that didn’t even get the vote in large numbers until 1965, blacks have made stunning progress in income, education and political clout; in the creation of social institutions; and in sports, arts and entertainment. And this is true despite their having fewer resources, greater obstacles, and having to face down skepticism and disparagement from other groups that view them as lazy, intellectually inferior, criminally inclined and always looking for a handout.

It’s a long process, working your way from slavery and Jim Crow and benign neglect into the mainstream, but by later on in this century, I believe blacks will be as deeply ensconced there as any other group.

Still, I must admit that the reparations lawsuits filed in federal court last week impressed me with their strategy. They aren’t going after the government, but after the corporations a bank, a railroad and an insurance company that were enriched by the unpaid labors of slaves.

If private companies were doing the paying, then reparations would be more acceptable to many Americans. Granted, the lawsuits face all kinds of legal obstacles statute-of-limitations problems, the difficulty of defining the class to be compensated, the argument that these companies did nothing illegal, since slavery was legal at the time.

A colleague made an argument that these and others companies should be made to pay up. The U.S. economy is like Enron, she said, a structure that in its reliance on slavery first and on the devaluing of black labor later is an economy built on business gimickry, accounting fraud and illusion. And at last the whole scam is being exposed.

“We are an incredible overhead that they never had to pay,” she said. “And they owe us.”

I’m still convinced that, with or without reparations, blacks will have to make it on their own, just as most of the progress they’ve made so far has been accomplished on their own. Many of the challenges they face are as much about culture, self-image and attitude as they are about money.

But forcing these corporations to throw their history with slavery and their books open to the public could be revealing and even titillating. And, like Enron, they should be quaking in their boots.