A BEAN COUNTING NIGHTMARE TO AVOID.(reparations for slavery)

How big a reparations check should Tiger Woods get?

Applauded as one of America's most prominent black athletes, the champion golfer actually is only part black. He coined the word "Cablinasian" to reflect his Caucasian, black, American Indian, and Thai heritage.

As someone who is 25 percent black, Woods arguably deserves--at most--one quarter of any sum Washington might deem sufficient to compensate a typical black American for the allegedly lingering effects of slavery.

Woods's black blood clearly has not held him back. He has won $24 million in career prize money--a record--plus over $100 million in endorsements. He is internationally adored as a gracious sportsman and model son. Tiger Woods is a celebrity without detractors. And he's only 24.

Who should pay Woods whatever reparations fee might be appropriate? Should the descendants of former slaveholders send him money? They cannot be held responsible for a brutal, immoral institution that went kaput 138 years ago. And how would they even be identified? Some intermarried with Yankees--white and otherwise. Does this get them off the hook, even a little?

It would be even more pernicious to force the progeny of Union soldiers to hand Tiger Woods anything. Many of these Americans lost their great-great-great-grandfathers and other relatives from Shiloh to Gettysburg in the North's struggle to defeat the South and end slavery. It is unthinkable to expect such families to pay anything atop their forebears' ultimate sacrifice.

How about paying reparations out of general tax revenues? This also is unjust. Government reparations checks would send Tiger Woods the tax money of Holocaust survivors who came to America in the 1940s, Vietnamese boat people who arrived in the 1970s, and Russians who fled the Soviet Union for the USA in the 1980s.