Even sympathetic white audiences raise skeptical objections that defeat standard reparations messaging

Evidence

I was pleasantly surprised. The faculty was extremely supportive of the project, but I still faced a lot of skepticism and quite frankly very good questions for which, at the time, I did not have adequate responses. Since this was the beginning of my research, the unanswered questions gave me no real cause for concern. But if this group, which was generally supportive of reparations, was so skeptical, I wondered, how was I ever going to convince a majority of Americans to endorse compensation for black Americans? … My then–Emory colleague, the psychologist Drew Westen, author of The Political Brain, taught me years before that when it comes to talking about race with white people, there are ways to do it successfully and ways that doom you to failure. I needed to learn how to talk differently about reparations if I wanted to change the hearts and minds of others. My job talk made it clear that I would need help with my messaging. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 486

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: World Cup audience skews wealthy and white despite protest claims — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 531