Reparations amounts stay unknowable because plunderers deliberately kept no records

Evidence

I am confident that you are expecting me to give you a number or a range of how much all this is going to cost. Sorry to disappoint you—I cannot in good conscience do that because we honestly do not know the full extent of the government’s plunder of black wealth. The plunderer intentionally failed to keep good records of the property stolen from black Americans who were lynched, or were victimized by convict leasing or sharecropping, or were barred from getting USDA loans, or were falsely imprisoned. The theft of black wealth on the one hand, and the prevention of black wealth creation on the other, took place for more than one hundred years at the hands of many who deliberately did not keep records. Would you keep a detailed written account of stealing another person’s property? What if you didn’t think you were doing anything wrong? As a result, I have no idea what the right amount is. No one does. But we could get a lot closer to an accurate count if we were allowed to study the question. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 554

Categorization

• SEED: The rhetorical move ‘would you keep a detailed written account of stealing?’ is a strong argumentative pivot worth studying — could anchor an essay on why ‘how much?’ is the wrong first question in any harm accounting.
• XREF: The appeal to study the question before costing it parallels the reader’s reparations-as-accounting frame and the demand for evidence courts would accept.