The 1948 Evacuation Claims Act undercompensated Japanese Americans by design

Evidence

After the war, the federal government passed several pieces of legislation to try to atone for this shameful history. The most important was the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act in 1948. Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Truman, it awarded people of Japanese ancestry the right to be compensated for real and personal property losses as a result of their exclusion and evacuation during the war. However, the act did not permit claims for loss of income or pain and suffering. Roughly $37 million was paid out, far below the actual losses. The awards were intentionally low because the requirement of proof was so onerous that claimants were incentivized to settle quickly for lower amounts. In the end, the Evacuation Claims Act did not come close to fairly compensating survivors and their families for the badge of racial inferiority that had been stamped upon them by the federal government. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 186

Categorization

• XREF: This is a key precedent Brown will likely contrast with the slaveholder compensation she is documenting — a federal compensation act that still fell far short, useful for arguing the insufficiency threshold reparations must clear.
• ADDENDUM: Reinforces the ‘accounting not charity’ frame of the reparations case: even where the US compensated, it did so at a fraction of real loss and excluded pain and suffering entirely.