Compensatory payments for loss are deeply embedded in American practice

Evidence

Get ready to put aside everything you thought you knew about the case for reparations. I’m not going to make the argument you’re expecting me to make. The stories I’m going to tell you shocked me—a scholar who studies race in America for a living. What I discovered was that compensating for the types of loss experienced by black people in America is as American as apple pie. That’s when I became a believer. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 27

Categorization

• XREF: This is the thesis frame — reparations as ordinary American accounting, not radical exception — which must be defended against the ‘unprecedented and un-American’ objection.