Failing to redistribute land changed the entire trajectory of US race relations

Evidence

We still live with the legacy of this choice. As the scholar Henry Louis Gates writes, “Try to imagine how profoundly different the history of race relations in the United States would have been had this policy been implemented and enforced; had the former slaves actually had access to the ownership of land, of property; if they had had a chance to be self-sufficient economically, to build, accrue and pass on wealth. After all, one of the principal promises of America was the possibility of average people being able to own land, and all that such ownership entailed.” — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 1344

Categorization

• XREF: This is the counterfactual the reader wants to separate from the factual claims — it sits at the line between reframing argument and testable counterfactual. Connects directly to the Wilentz-letter dispute testing exactly this kind of counterfactual.