Federal land policy reserved property for whites by race alone, not competence

Evidence

The federal government excluded the most qualified workers from the benefits of property ownership, while reserving the land for those with merely a single qualification: their whiteness. Such preferential treatment by the federal government did not always lead to successful outcomes, and many white homesteaders predictably failed. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 335

Categorization

• XREF: Direct evidence that federal action, not private prejudice, denied freedmen land — key link in the causal chain from hidden history to systemic harm that reparations must establish. — connects to: Traditional Seminoles hold land only through a white family’s goodwill lease — Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations: Native Struggles for…, 218