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 Black Americans who experienced each one?

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In her follow-up to The Whiteness of Wealth, which examines how the U.S. tax code widens the wealth gap between white and Black Americans, Georgetown law professor Dorothy A. Brown turns her attention to reparations.

Brown became a tax lawyer to get away from race. Growing up in the South Bronx, she saw how racism constrained the lives of her family and neighbors. Law school offered a contrast: tax law was about numbers, and the only color that seemed to matter was green.

One summer morning over coffee, an Emory colleague mentioned that the United States had paid reparations for Italians lynched in New Orleans. The comment raised a simple question: if that harm was acknowledged, why not the harms suffered by Black Americans? Getting to Reparations grew out of that inquiry.