An executive order could bypass Congress to launch a reparations study commission

Evidence

The next elected Democratic president could issue an executive order creating a commission tasked with the following objectives: to establish a commission to study and consider proposals for reparations regarding the post–Thirteenth Amendment discrimination faced by black Americans in all facets of life as well as analyze the roots of white wealth in America; to study the government’s role that, directly and indirectly, prevented black Americans from having equal opportunities, including the complicity of the judicial branch in subordinating black Americans; to quantify the wealth and economic loss stripped from black Americans due to continuing racism and to analyze the white wealth building that occurred simultaneously; to examine the link between that governmental failure and the loss of untold intergenerational black wealth that could not be created as a result; and to recommend appropriate remedies to Congress. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 519

Categorization

• SEED: The executive-order path is a concrete, non-obvious legal lever for reparations advocacy; an essay angle: how to route remedy-design around a deadlocked Congress using the Article II toolkit.
• DEFINE: This passage crystallizes the book’s causal chain—post-13th Amendment discrimination, judicial complicity, white wealth building, stunted intergenerational black wealth—into a single formal charge.