In the last week of March, the movement to demand reparations for the economic effects of slavery took a step into the spotlight. A major federal lawsuit filed in Brooklyn asks for damages from three U.S.-based corporations whose predecessors profited from slavery when it was legal in the United States: Aetna insurance, FleetBoston financial services group, and the railroad company CSX.

The actual filing of the suit has been a double-edged sword -- highlighting the basic flaws of reparations demands, but, at the same time, demonstrating that slavery's impacts are not nearly the vestiges of a distant past that reparation's critics claim. Slavery is a topic that white America would just as soon avoid, and usually does. When it is unavoidable -- as when Steven Speilberg gave us names, faces, and a story to personalize some of the horrors of the practice in Amistad a few years ago -- the tendency of whites has been to wring our hands nervously, shake our heads at the barbarity of it all, and change the subject. Quickly. After all, it was a long time ago.

Slavery, along with the eradication of most of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, established the social and economic fabric of our hemisphere for centuries, and still does today. Its effects are undeniable. Even after slavery's eradication in the 19th century -- with far more resistance in the United States than in most of the rest of the Western Hemisphere -- survivors of the African diaspora, from Seattle to Kingston to Sao Paulo, have continued to face formidable social and economic barriers because of both the disadvantages of their ancestors and the ongoing social attitudes of their oppressors. The American ghetto is a direct descendant of slavery.

Slavery was an economic institution, one built on the premise that profit was of greater importance than the rights (or survival) of a people -- an attitude that survives just about anywhere you look in today's global economy. But while slavery produced lasting disadvantages for a race (African-Americans), and lasting advantages for another (Euro-Americans), it doesn't follow that slavery built America's economic power; the peculiar institution was just as widespread and pernicious in Brazil, which remains avirulently racist society but is also still a largely impoverished country.

The same argument applies to companies. Did Aetna profit from slavery? Undoubtably. So did many other companies no longer in existence, and most of Aetna's more profitable competitors weren't around then. It's not nearly as easy to draw a straight line across the centuries for the economic prosperity of a company, or country, as it is to trace social attitudes.

Last week's lawsuit almost certainly won't succeed, but in a sense, it has already succeeded -- it has made an uncomfortable issue (slavery, specifically, but more generally, our accountability to America's bloody, conquistadore history) a topic of conversation, whereas otherwise white America would continue to avoid it.

But beyond slavery, the lawsuit brings up a host of other tricky issues, starting with the accountability, or lack of it, of inherited wealth in our culture. Whether it's a trust fund kid who gets a cushy job, or doesn't have to work at all, while more talented peers struggle in lousy jobs, or a company that inherits its assets from the dubious practices of the past, equal opportunity, in America and elsewhere, has always been a myth; the ideal of this country are something we work toward, not something we have already achieved. Reparations speaks to that struggle, by channelling yesterday's profits to those who, even today, are disadvantaged by how those profits were in part made possible. But asking companies to be accountable over a practice that ended several generations ago makes little sense; simply put, too much has happened since then. And if too much hasn't happened, what, exactly, is the statute of limitations? Native Americans would undoubtably love to know.

Much more explosive is the precedent suggested for global economic practices today. While outright slavery is now rare (though not rare enough) in the world, economic servitude certainly isn't. Any number of U.S.-based companies -- including all three named as defendants in the reparations suit -- operate internationally, and more and more, how humans in the work force are treated in the far corners of the world impacts not just American corporations' profitability, but the fate of U.S. workers at home. If Nike's profits come in part from contractors who treat Asian women like serfs, who owns the profits? It's an explosive question, and one that doesn't deserve to be dismissed lightly; it strikes at the heart of the beastliest aspects of global capitalism.

So far, however, the debate has focused on historical slavery, and its impact on African Americans today. Whatever the merits of the suit, political and media response to it has been depressingly vivid in showing how far Africa's descendants haven't come. Reparations, as an issue, are taken very seriously by blacks -- not just in this country, but internationally, as shown at last year's U.N. conference on racism in Durban, where the issue was a flash point. And as at Durban, the response this past week has been predictable: an issue treated very seriously by blacks has generally been dismissed out of hand, often with a veiled or not-so-veiled sneer, by whites. And that perspective, almost uniformly, has dominated "objective" media coverage as well. Viewers and readers not familiar with the issue have been almost certain to come away with the impression that a lawsuit demanding reparations for slavery is some sort of freak show, to be considered more for its novelty and absurdity than any actual merits. Or, in the widely quoted words of Aetna's public response, "[the] events -- however unfortunate -- occurred hundreds of years ago..."

The reparations debate has serious limits, both because it's politically impossible and because it's impossible to separate the economic impact of any one historical factor from any number of others. The energy is often better spent demanding help for the victims of the realities of racism today, not the (related) realities of 1850 or 1650. But only a white person would call Europe's centuries-long enslavement of Africans "unfortunate," rather than calling it one of the great outrages in the history of humankind.

Those attitudes, attitudes from white America, have been portrayed as the attitudes of all America. Response to last week's lawsuit suggests, once again, that Euro-Americans consider ourselves "America," and everyone else to be outsiders -- unless they think and behave like we do. Until those attitudes change, slavery, "unfortunately," is a mindset still very much with us.