The full extent of black wealth plunder is unknowable because record-keeping was deliberately omitted

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? — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 554

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: Refusing to supply a number is a strategic-evidentiary move: the absence of records is itself an indictment of the plunderer, and fixing a figure early would let opponents litigate the number instead of the harm. This is the reverse of a typical legal brief.
• XREF: connects to: Sealed records prevented citizens from testing Moses’ public legend — Robert A. Caro, The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the…, 89