Getting to Reparations
How Building a Different America Requires a Reckoning with Our Past
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- Pedido anticipado
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- Se espera: 20 ene 2026
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- USD 10.99
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- Pedido anticipado
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- USD 10.99
Descripción editorial
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
