As you have probably heard, there was a spat the other week at the Democratic presidential debate between Sen. Kamala Harris and former Vice-President Joe Biden. Biden was first elected to the US Senate in 1972 as a moderate Democrat from the state of Delaware, the northernmost southern state. (Delaware was a so-called “border state” during the Civil War, a state in which slavery was legal in 1860 but chose to remain in the United States.) He was an opponent of what was called at the time, “forced busing,” court-mandated plans to address discriminatory patterns in primary and secondary schools. Sen. Harris rightly called him on his opposition to busing, which he called at the time an “asinine concept” and “liberal train wreck.” She talked about her own educational experiences at the time, bussed in Berkeley, California as an elementary school student. Biden was defensive, clearly annoyed that anyone would question his civil rights credentials, adding that he was never opposed to busing per se, just mandatory busing.

Harris was absolutely correct to point out Biden’s statements on busing, and to remind those watching the debate the crucial role that opposition to busing in the 1970s played in this country’s headlong retreat from the ideal of integration. Biden strikes me as a politician who has absolutely nothing to offer to the ongoing debates on the future of this country, other than his deep conviction of his probity. That said, he might well prove to be the most popular Democrat in the primaries, and who knows which Democratic candidate is best situated to defeat the monster in the White House.

But when Harris clashed with Biden, a question immediately arose in my mind. It’s not as if Harris, or any other Democratic candidate has been talking about busing, or suggesting that the congress or the courts start to reimplement desegregation plans. And when questioned, Harris too said that she was opposed to forced and mandatory busing. The idea of using compulsion in school desegregation has simply dropped from the national conversation. There were once over 1000 desegregation plans in effect in American schools. Now, hampered by court restrictions and public hostility and/or indifference, there are fewer than 200, and their numbers are dropping. And our schools are more segregated than ever, and most people shrug and say, without addressing segregation in housing, wealth disparities, and a whole set of “root causes” of residential segregation, there’s nothing to be done.

Meanwhile Sen. Harris, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sen. Bernie Sanders, and some other presidential candidates have expressed some support for reparations, for some sort of financial recompense to African Americans for centuries of slavery and oppression. Someone whose opinions I respect recently wrote that anyone who doesn’t support reparations is a racist. I guess that makes me a racist. It’s not that I oppose the idea of reparations in principle, I just don’t see how it is going to become politically possible, and I don’t see how it is going to work. And I think that either it is symbolic, in which case it is hardly worth doing, or will be substantial, and will run into all sorts of political and practical roadblocks.

Comparisons are often made to the reparations paid by the West German government to Holocaust survivors after World War II. This is a big subject, but let me point out a few differences between the two situations. One, the West German government paid money to people who were not, with a few exceptions, living in Germany. And two, the West German government had a strong motivation to pay reparations, that is, to demonstrate to the rest of the world that Germans had rejoined the club of civilized nations. Neither of these conditions exists in the US today. Furthermore, the West German government saw this as a package deal; pay Holocaust survivors, and de-emphasize the hunt for Nazi war criminals, and get permission to be less than thorough in scrubbing ex-Nazis from German institutions. Germany would eventually come to real terms with their Nazi past, but it would be in the 1980s, not in the 1950s, when reparations began. And finally, it was only money. Money is important of course, but paying off someone for your evil deeds is in many ways much easier than really coming to terms with the consequences of your actions.

Let us return to the United States. The opposition to busing was of course an opposition to integration, and white America telling black America, in effect, “what do you people want? You don’t have to sit in the back of the bus anymore, or drink from colored water fountains, and anyway, that was in backward states like South Carolina and Alabama, not where we live, so please, leave us the hell alone, we have problems of our own.” We have regressed backwards since the early 1970s in addressing the segregation, the election of a black president notwithstanding. Indeed, it is difficult to recreate the political and legal space that made mandatory busing possible, and I don’t see it happening now. So this is my advice to Harris, Biden, Warren, Sanders, et al. Spend less time talking about reparations, and more time talking about integration. If you want to open your wallets to address the centuries of injustice to black people in this country, fine, the money is needed. But it is more important to open your schools, your homes, your neighborhoods, your hearts to those who have suffered from oppression.