Prior federal cash compensation establishes legal precedent for Black reparations

Evidence

These four instances of federal cash compensation are more than just data points. When we connect the dots, they establish something called “precedent.” For a lawyer and law professor like me, precedent is the holy grail of legal arguments because it means that since we have done something in the past, we can do it again today. The answer was there all along, staring us right in the face. If cash payments to Tribal Nations, Japanese Americans, former white enslavers, and even the country of Italy—everybody but black Americans—were possible, totaling a whopping $2.5 billion, then that is a well-established precedent for the federal government to make long-overdue restitution to black Americans for the harm inflicted after slavery was supposedly ended under the Thirteenth Amendment. The government failed to protect black Americans from being re-enslaved through convict leasing and sharecropping, threats of racial violence and lynching, sundown towns, eminent domain, Jim Crow policies that were designed for black economic exploitation, and mass incarceration under the guise of a war on drugs. The fact that the United States has stubbornly refused to compensate black Americans for centuries of continuous harm is not a justification for doing nothing today. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 29

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precedent defined as ‘since we have done something in the past, we can do it again today’ — the legal engine that converts the factual litany into an argument.