The US government has paid reparations to non-black groups but never to black Americans.

Evidence

What these four case studies tell us is that the federal government, through a variety of different mechanisms, has paid cash compensation for the end of slavery, for the racial violence of lynching, for economic exploitation and land theft, and for mass incarceration because of race. The government faced steep opposition to making each of these historic payments, yet it still got done. Calculations on the harms done and who was owed what were complicated, yet it still got done. It was incredibly expensive, yet it still got done. What has never been done, however, is paying compensation in any form to black Americans for similar harms. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 242

Categorization

• XREF: Central through-line of the book: the government-does-pay-compensation precedent establishes that capacity is not the objection — only race is. Connects to the reparations-as-accounting framing.
• ADDENDUM: The document-‘suffering harms us all’ payoff line parallels the saturated-system harm argument developed across the book’s earlier chapters.