Ignorance of exclusionary housing and lending laws drives opposition to reparations

Evidence

For example, on the first day, a participant (Hispanic female, somewhat liberal Democrat, 53, noncollege, South) who ranked herself at 10 explained, “I don’t think taxpayers should have to pay for what happened with slavery. It was so long ago and just doesn’t seem fair to make today’s citizens pay for what yesteryear citizens did.” Over the four days, she learned how black Americans had been excluded from accessing FHA-insured mortgages and denied the business loans that had helped build today’s white middle class. She learned that black Americans paid taxes into a system that intentionally denied access to black people. By day four she had changed her mind and ranked herself at 0: “My thoughts have definitely shifted. I had no idea of some of the things I learned about in this study. Like about the laws that were enacted to further keep Black Americans from having what all other Americans had after they were freed as slaves.” — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 498

Categorization

• XREF: Evidence for Brown’s first pillar (hidden history): participants flip once they learn the government exclusion story from Whiteness of Wealth and earlier chapters.
• SEED: Undecided-respondent persuasion data could become a ‘what changes minds about reparations’ article: presentation of specific mechanisms beats moral appeals.
• ADDENDUM: Supports the three-part architecture claim (‘say the hidden history and opposition drops’) used throughout this book’s argument.