WASHINGTON — I’ve just tossed away another losing lottery ticket. This one would have fetched the tidy pretax annuitised sum of $80 million. When the jackpot builds up once more, I’ll probably try it again.I’m trying to make it clear, before I start to talk about reparations for slavery, that I’m not above developing an interest in money I didn’t earn. If the group headed by Charles Ogletree, the Harvard law professor, can get me a few mil as compensation for the fact that my great-grandparents (and many generations of their ancestors) made unrequited contributions to the development of the country, I’ll take it.

So why have I hesitated to become a full-fledged advocate of reparations? In part, I suppose, because I have no way of figuring out — even of thinking<$> about — what the American people owe me for my grandparents’ unpaid labour. Or my parents’ undercompensated labour. Or the jobs I couldn’t get, or the income I was denied based in large measure on race.

The whole reparations idea starts to sound like an appeal to national guilt, but an appeal that requires me to assume the victim’s role.

That’s one hand. Here’s the other: There are problems that black Americans suffer that have their deep roots in slavery and racism. It doesn’t seem reasonable that the thing to do about this legacy is ... nothing.

Which is why I’m glad I ran into James P. Comer the other day. The Yale University professor of psychiatry and extraordinarily successful public school reformer was at North Carolina State University, where the two of us were among the school’s commencement honourees, when I broached the subject of reparations.

It’s something he’s thought about. Listen.

“My feeling is that we need an approach that is fair to everybody — that allows the larger society to get off its unproductive guilt-and-defence response and that allows African Americans not to feel victimised, while at the same time making it possible to address the problem that was created by the conditions of slavery.

“The problem manifests itself in underachievement and underpreparation in all the things that require high levels of development, and overrepresentation in such things as criminal activity and dependency. This is largely the aftermath of slavery, the failure of African Americans to have access to the same political and economic situation as everybody else when everybody else had it.”

And what would he do about it now? He would enact legislation to allow black taxpayers to direct up to 95 percent of their federal income taxes directly to a series of foundations set up specifically to help those blacks who have been most hurt by slavery and its legacy. These black-run foundations would have two main focuses: educating young people for work, family life and citizenship, and promoting economic development and economic access for the rest of us.

Here, as they used to say, is the beauty part. The proposal wouldn’t take any money out of the economy, but merely redirect it as you might designate all or most of your United Way contribution to the Girl Scouts. And, says Comer, “it would be in the interest of all of America. It’s important to the health of the entire society not to have another generation of non-mainstream and nonproductive — even counterproductive — African Americans. It simply costs too much, economically, socially and civically.”

One problem with his proposal would involve choosing which foundations and which leaders would become custodians of black America’s redirected taxes. Comer says it is the sort of problem private foundations have to deal with all the time.

“We’d have to have the same sort of process — very careful selection of directors and officers, a careful development of a set of criteria based on the understanding that the purpose is to bring our people into the mainstream of society. It would be important to pick people who have a track record for solid work in this area — perhaps people who head similar organisations right now.”

There might also be the logistical problem of determining which taxpayers would qualify to have their income taxes diverted. Perhaps the way around that would be to make the entire matter voluntary and non-racial from the taxpayers’ viewpoint. That is, any taxpayer could designate up to 95 percent of his taxes for the foundations. Presumably virtually all African Americans would so designate, but a great many others might as well.

Comer may not have a perfect proposal, but I’d sure love to hear it discussed.

willrasp[AT]washpost.com.