No majority society has ever voluntarily paid large reparations for historic wrongs

Evidence

Theoretically, you can make, obviously, a powerful argument that centuries of slavery, Jim Crow, discrimination are the primary cause for all those gaps. That those were wrongs done to the black community as a whole, and black families specifically, and that in order to close that gap, a society has a moral obligation to make a large, aggressive investment, even if it’s not in the form of individual reparations checks, but in the form of a Marshall Plan, in order to close those gaps. It is easy to make that theoretical argument. But as a practical matter, it is hard to think of any society in human history in which a majority population has said that as a consequence of historic wrongs, we are now going to take a big chunk of the nation’s resources over a long period of time to make that right. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 514

Categorization

• XREF: This is the strongest objection to the whole project — a historical-unprecedent claim — and the reader must know it. It also partially conflicts with Brown’s own precedent arguments (Japanese redress was a minority-favoring program).
• DEEPTHINKING: Obama’s formulation of ‘theoretical moral obligation versus practical impossibility’ is a genuinely sharp articulation of the gap between moral and political feasibility that the reader’s whole brief must navigate.