Government discrimination after slavery still privileged white immigrants over black Americans

Evidence

What this argument misses is that even though chattel slavery legally ended with the Thirteenth Amendment, federal, state, and local governmental discrimination against black people, enabled by the judiciary, continued, as described in Part II of this book. The benefits that white immigrants and American citizens accrued from this discrimination were omnipresent. The Homestead Act of 1862 benefited white immigrants but not black Americans. Being able to live wherever they wanted, work wherever they wanted, and buy whatever they wanted (if they had the money) remained a unique privilege extended primarily to white Americans, including white immigrants when Justice Scalia’s father came to America. Think back to the story of Paul Thornton, the editor for the Los Angeles Times, who descended from Norwegian immigrants, and the wealth his family was able to build. They arrived in Glendale, California, a sundown town, in 1954 and became homeowners at a time when black Americans couldn’t even live there, much less buy there. The immigrants to whom the late Justice Scalia refers were ultimately considered white in America, which afforded them access to wealth-building opportunities that were denied to most black Americans, born in America, solely because they were black. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 569

Categorization

• XREF: Directly invokes Part II evidence (sundown towns, Homestead Act exclusion) as the rebuttal to the Scalia immigrant-innocence argument — core of the defense.
• QUESTION: The claim that late-arriving immigrants were ‘ultimately considered white’ presumes assimilation into whiteness — worth probing how quickly and uniformly this happened for each group.