The federal government compensated foreign lynching victims but not Black ones

Evidence

What happened instead was that the Sicilians’ “social and economic status encouraged them to empathize with black people and support Republican and Populist candidates over their white supremacist rivals.” This would prove fatal for some. Although the overwhelming majority of victims of racial violence in the United States have been black, it might come as a surprise to find out that “of the [fifty-one] white men murdered by lynch mobs” between roughly 1890 and 1910, some 40 percent were Sicilians. What is even more amazing is that the federal government paid compensation for sixteen of those deaths. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 122

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The entire reparations argument is compressed here: the state recognized lynching as compensable harm only when the victims were foreign nationals — the contrast with Black victims throughout is the crux of the double standard.
• XREF: Directly parallels the sacrifice essay’s logic: compensation follows the party whose life the state values, revealing who counts as a full person.