Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with Our Past

In her expansive follow-up to The Whiteness of Wealth, a study of how the U.S. tax code widens the wealth gap between white and Black Americans, Georgetown law professor Brown turns her attention to reparations. She begins with an incisive argument that, since the end of slavery, the federal government has been active in maintaining systemic discrimination against Black people that has prevented them from building and passing down wealth. Examples include Jim Crow laws, the prison-industrial complex, state-sanctioned violence, and redlining. She also documents cases of the federal government paying reparations in the past, including to Native Americans for stolen land, to Japanese Americans for mass incarceration during WWII, to Italy following the lynchings of Italian Americans in the late 19th century, and to white enslavers in Washington, D.C., following emancipation. With this background in mind, Brown unveils a multipronged, actionable plan to make reparations a reality, beginning with a federal reparations commission established by executive order. While she recognizes that her plan would face sizable opposition, Brown points to focus group findings that Americans are more open to reparations than is widely believed. The author’s research-backed arguments will make readers consider reparations in a new light—as Brown explains, the book “is written for skeptics, of which I counted myself one until very recently. Your objections were my objections.” This deserves to be reckoned with. (Jan.)