The federal government has compensated every harmed group except black Americans

Evidence

Getting to Reparations tells the story of how the federal government has historically paid cash compensation: to white enslavers, for the “harm” of ending slavery in the District of Columbia; to Italy, on behalf of Italian immigrants lynched by private white citizens in Louisiana; to Tribal Nations, for the land we stole from them; and to Japanese Americans, for their mass incarceration when our government made their racial identity a crime during World War II. But it has never made any payments to black Americans for comparable losses. The central question raised by these examples is, if the federal government paid compensation to others for the end of slavery, for failure to be protected from lynching, for economic exploitation, and for mass incarceration, then why not to black Americans who experienced each one? — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 28

Categorization

• XREF: The framing of federal compensation precedent resonates with the diamond-trade chapters’ logic of extralegal precedent — established practice becomes a binding norm. Also connects to the reparations-as-accounting reading purpose: the factual litany is Exhibit A for the whole case.
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations: How Building a…, 28