GETTING TO REPARATIONS

A legal analysis, accessibly written, on the necessity for reparations to Black America.

Brown, a professor of tax law at Georgetown University, admits to having once been a skeptic on the matter of reparations, partially in recognition of the generations of enslaved Black people whose labor went unpaid. Her mind changed after a chance remark by a colleague, noting that reparations had been paid to white victims of injury, Japanese interned during World War II, Native Americans robbed of land, and indeed “everybody but Black Americans.” Those payments, far beyond the “forty acres and a mule” of old, constitute a legal precedent. Moreover, Brown argues, financial restitution must be extended not just to Black Americans who can locate enslaved people in their ancestry, but to all Black people, including immigrants from Africa: “Because blackness is what has been targeted post-­slavery, then blackness alone should be the test. If you are black and live in America, then you are eligible for reparations.” In a bracing history backing up her case for precedent, Brown notes the irony that in many instances white slaveholders were compensated, with federal funds, for the loss of their slaves on emancipation. Similarly, money was paid out to the families of several Italians who had been lynched in Louisiana; Black Louisianans were lynched as well, of course, but “Italians had one significant advantage that black Americans did not: They had a country and government willing to fight for them.” Brown also identifies precedent in legal actions undertaken by communities around the country, including payment to a Black family in California whose ancestors had been dispossessed from their valuable beachfront property and compensation for a long pattern of housing discrimination in Evanston, Illinois.

A cogent argument for putting long-overdue dollars on the table to compensate for injuries past and present.