Black wealth was invisibly converted into white wealth across generations

Evidence

Most black Americans have not received any measure of justice. They never received the land they were promised at the end of the Civil War, for one thing. Instead, they were systematically denied the right to acquire property, thwarted in their attempts to purchase property, and stripped of the property they held legal title to. The story of wealth in America is a story of black wealth being converted into white wealth. That conversion often occurred invisibly, which makes it easier today for white beneficiaries to claim ignorance. Black people were prevented from purchasing homes in sundown towns, so that white people could build wealth there. Black homeowners’ land was taken away through eminent domain. Black farmers struggled to work with a discriminatory USDA to operate their farms, only to have future generations lose everything when their property got purchased by developers because they died without a will. All this has led to an intergenerational black deficit. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 450

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The compressed claim ‘black wealth converted into white wealth, invisibly, so beneficiaries can claim ignorance’ is the heart of the reparations-as-accounting case; the invisibility point answers the strongest objection that today’s whites are innocent beneficiaries.