Reparations are politically feasible because the nation has enacted them before

Evidence

Reparations are not only the right thing to do, but as I have shown, they are also the practical thing to do. We can secure reparations now because we have done it before. I started this project as a skeptic, but I am now a believer. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 610

Categorization

• SEED: The ‘we have done it before’ precedent argument is the load-bearing rhetorical turn — worth an essay on American precedents (Japanese internment, Native land) that show reparative programs are administratively and politically possible.
• XREF: The skeptic-to-believer arc recalls the author’s own genre shift from diagnosis (The Whiteness of Wealth) to remedy design. — connects to: Reparations became realistic to Brown only after concrete historical precedent emerged. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 23