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

A bold manifesto arguing that there is a clear precedent for paying reparations to atone for America’s original sin of slavery, offering a compelling legal strategy to achieve this goal--from the acclaimed author of The Whiteness of Wealth.

The idea of reparations is not a new or original one; it is one that is baked into American history.

When the District of Columbia Emancipation Act of 1862 went into effect, wealthy slaveowners like Margaret Barber were compensated for the loss of their enslaved workers. Barber received ＄9,000--an equivalent to ＄250,000 today. When a group of Italian immigrants were lynched in 1892, President Harrison compensated Italy a total of ＄25,000 for their deaths--an equivalent to almost ＄766,000 today. The Indian Claims Commission, an arm of the federal government, paid Indigenous Americans ＄818 million for underhandedly stealing their land in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries--an equivalent to almost ＄350 billion today.

Dorothy A. Brown addresses the glaring question: if reparations can be achieved for others, why not for Black Americans? If lynching can be remedied for Italian immigrants, and slaveholders compensated for losses associated with abolition and emancipation, then the government’s failure to provide such remedies to Black communities harmed by similar violence, loss, and destruction is long overdue. The fight for reparations is truly a fight for the soul of America, to produce the country our founding fathers idealized but never achieved.

Getting to Reparations makes a logical and necessary case for reparations for Black Americans. It lays out a path as to how we might achieve this, built on the frameworks used throughout U.S. history by the government to pay restitution. It is now time to do the same for America’s Black population.

Dorothy A. Brown is a professor of law and the Martin D. Ginsburg Chair in Taxation at Georgetown University Law Center. She is also the author of The Whiteness of Wealth. A graduate of Fordham University and Georgetown Law, she received her LLM in taxation from New York University. A nationally recognized scholar in the areas of race, class, and tax policy, she has published dozens of articles, essays, and book chapters on the topic. She has appeared on ABC’s The View, CNN, MSNBC, PBS, NPR, The Armchair Expert, New Yorker Radio Hour, and Code Switch, and her opinion pieces have been published in The Atlantic, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. Born and raised in the South Bronx in New York City, Dorothy Brown currently resides in Washington, D.C.