W. Kamau Bell visits New Orleans to explore the topic of reparations on "United Shades of America" Sunday, August 16 at 10 p.m. ET. The widespread protests against police brutality and racial injustice following the death of George Floyd have brought a new urgency to the debate around compensating the descendants of American slaves. This summer, Democratic lawmakers called for a vote on a bill to study reparations, and a handful of cities and states have weighed in with their own proposed plans to examine the issue. But just how would reparations, focused specifically on slavery, work? Read on for background on this complex and thorny subject. Why are reparations in the news? The idea of giving Black people reparations for slavery dates back to right after the end of the Civil War (think 40 acres and a mule). For decades, it's mostly been an idea debated outside the mainstream of American political thought. But writer Ta-Nehisi Coates reintroduced it to the mainstream with his 2014 piece in The Atlantic, "The Case for Reparations." Since then, the conversations surrounding reparations have intensified. Last year it was a hot topic on the campaign trail, with Democratic presidential candidates voicing support for slavery reparations. Presumptive Democratic presidential nominee and former Vice President Joe Biden told The Washington Post he supports studying how reparations could be part of larger efforts to address systemic racism. Biden's newly appointed running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, has co-sponsored a bill that would study the effects of slavery and create recommendations for reparations. And in the midst of America's current racial reckoning, reparations are being explored on the local level, too. In June, the California Assembly passed a bill to create a reparations task force, moving the legislation on to the state's senate. In July, the city of Asheville, North Carolina, voted unanimously to approve a reparations resolution for Black residents. And that same month, the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, signed an executive order to pursue "truth, reconciliation and municipal reparations" for Black Americans, Indigenous people and people of color in the city. How do you put a cash value on hundreds of years of forced servitude? This may be the most contested part. Academics, lawyers and activists have given it a shot, though, and their results vary. Most formulations have produced numbers from as low as $17 billion to as high as almost $5 trillion. -- The most often-quoted figure, though, is truly staggering, as anthropologist and author Jason Hickel notes in his 2018 book, "The Divide: Global Inequality from Conquest to Free Markets": "It is estimated that the United States alone benefited from a total of 222,505,049 hours of forced labor between 1619 and the abolition of slavery in 1865. Valued at the US minimum wage, with a modest rate of interest, that is worth $97 trillion today." Other formulations are more modest. Research conducted by Univer