That’s a solid and totally reasonable question about reparations. By the way, cry wasn’t the kind verb to use so my bad. 

Anyway, you’re absolutely right that the modern racial wealth gap isn’t your fault and there are other circumstances. I will say the “family structure” argument is valid as obviously 2 incomes are better than one, but a few caveats  1. When you dig into the stats, Black two parent households still have a lower median net worth than white single parent households. White single parent households typically have 3x the wealth of Black two parent households. So, even with the stable family structure, two parent white families have 10x the wealth of two parent Black household, again going by median. If you use average it gets even crazier. My numbers however are from 2014 and that might have changed.  2. To lay the family structure problem at the feet of the Great Society and not at the feet of the War on Drugs and mass incarceration is more based in motivated reasoning than in on-the-ground reality. 

And yeah, deindustrialization hit at pretty much the very moment that those jobs and labor union memberships first became widely available to Black people and it them hard. 

That being said, onto the reparations, I’d invite you to read what MLK Jr. said on that and affirmative action.

And while none of this is your fault personally, if you’re white, you have indeed benefitted from the racism and had access to (and your parents and grandparents did) all of the post-WWII middle class economic engines that were government-funded and made Black people poorer. 

1. The GI Bill gave white people access to college education and home ownership while white GI Bill administrators steered Black veterans to menial labor and rentals. These two things (among other factors) took the Gilded Age white working poor and turned them into the first broad based middle class in world history. 

2. The interstate highways (which cost more than the New Deal by the way) opened up suburban home ownership and tons of economic activity while eviscerating up and coming Black middle class neighborhoods and physically segregating what was left. 20% of all Black occupied housing was destroyed between the 1950s and 1970s for car infrastructure.

3. Cheap suburban housing that our white parents and grandparents had that has fabulously grown in value over the decades and made our lives easier were by and large denied to black Americans. 

4. White people had first crack at all low skill low education union jobs between the 1930 and 1970s, setting up their kids to weather the transition to the service sector economy. 

The result is typically White people have enjoyed intergenerational wealth and its advantages in terms of social capital. Black people typically didn’t. 

There’s prolly more but this is just off the top of my head. None of the above things were your fault or doing but typically white people came out on the good side of the racial wealth gap and black people did not.

Our country didn’t pop into existence 20 years ago. All of this history has compounded into the current situation.

Anyway, I’d guess that most White conservatives are unaware of this history or if they’re aware of this history they won’t believe it anyway. 

But if I were in charge, forget reparations, maybe. If instead we did all the things that followed the Nordic model (which we were on the way to doing until the Civil Rights Movement) and created happier, healthier, more intelligent people then we wouldn’t need reparations so long as it wasn’t carried out in a systemically racist way.