Book Review: Time to Start 'Getting To Reparations'

The idea of “reparations” is common in most recovery programs. You pay back the people you have wronged, one way or another. The payment can come through financial compensation or some sort of recognition that the lives of those who’ve been wronged will henceforth be better. In the legal world, restorative justice repairs visible harm, fosters concrete accountability, and meets the immediate needs of victims through facilitated justice. Go back to 1785 and poet Robert Burns’s wise thoughts, themselves the basis of an idiom that has served us well all these years (paraphrased here for our modern sensibilities): “The best laid plans of mice and men often go wrong.” No matter the good intentions, the plans to correct what’s been done over the years, the victims in the darkest times of our nation’s nearly 250 years have rarely been adequately compensated.

Dorothy A. Brown's Getting to Reparations: How Building Different America Requires A Reckoning With Our Past comes to us in the wake of the April 29th., 2026 Supreme Court ruling that seriously weakened section two of the 1965 Voting Rights Act. What had been intended to help majority Black and Latino districts be adequately represented in Congress through gerrymandering might not have been on its surface an attempt at reparation, but a torrential downpour intended to cleanse us of our past transgressions can’t start without the first drop. As overtures towards reconciliation go, few were more definitive than General Sherman’s Field Order 15, instituted in the closing months of the Civil War and proposing to provide recently freed slaves with 40 acres and a mule. President Lincoln’s successor Andrew Johnson overturned it; our Thirteenth Amendment passed by the end of 1865 eliminated slavery, but loose ends surfaced and remain to this day.

Brown effectively sets out her argument for black Americans receiving financial compensation for the sins of slavery in her introduction. White slaveowners were financially compensated for the “harm” of ending slavery in the District of Columbia. The nation of Italy was compensated in the wake of Italian immigrants being lynched by white Louisianans, Tribal Nations were compensated for the land stolen from them, and Japanese Americans received financial recompense in the wake of their WWII imprisonment in West Coast concentration camps. Brown is methodical in setting out the argument that will be detailed through the course of the book and she clarifies exactly what she means by reparations:

“[They]...must include fundamental changes to our present systems for economic opportunity and prosperity that currently exclude black Americans…moving beyond…cash payments but also what reparations can buy you on the other side.”

There are some difficult truths addressed in this book that can either be faced squarely or summarily dismissed. In Part I, “Our Hidden History,” she details “The Compensated Emancipation Act,” in which enslavers are paid for the loss of their human property. The clear accounting of financial loss is mundane until you remember we’re talking about human products. An enslaver named Margaret Barber receives compensation equal to nearly a million dollars today. “The enslaved, who were released without a penny to their name, had to pay a fee just to get papers declaring they were free.” When Brown’s narrative gets to the story of lynched Italian immigrants in the final years of the 19th century, it’s clear what set them apart from black Americans:

“...Italians…had a country and government willing to fight for them.”

The four cases Brown illustrates here are well known, perhaps all but the case of the Italian immigrant lynchings. While there was opposition to “The Compensated Emancipation Act,” it got done. Compensation was eventually made to Tribal nations that had their land stolen out from under them, the nation of Italy was paid for the loss of their immigrants in our nation, and Japanese Americans who suffered at concentration camps like Manzanar did live to see payment. There are conflicting reports as to the source and original date of the idea that “justice delayed is justice denied,” but the sentiment remains in these cases. Justice did come, perhaps a little muted with the passage of time, but it was still potent. Brown notes that this compensation 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.”

Part II’s title, “Everything, Everywhere, All at Once” is less a reference to the recent Academy Award-winning film than it is a reflection of the enormous and complex series of problems faced by newly emancipated people in the wake of the US Civil War. There were Civil Rights Acts of 1866 and 1875, promises made and promises taken away Sharecropping, lynching, and Jim Crow laws became what Brown calls “Slavery 2.0.” Strategies surfaced “...for stealing land and capital from black Americans [by] destroy[ing] official documents and creat[ing] ‘gaps in the public record.’ The G.I,.Bill in the wake of WWII was good for most, but “...colleges could still legally refuse to admit black students.” The :sundown towns” west of the Mississippi were areas “...where black people had to be out by sundown or risk their lives.” Complicating all this was the institutionalized process denying black Americans equal access to home ownership.

Of course, the judicial system was stacked against black Americans from the beginning. Slavery might have been removed via the Emancipation Proclamation and the Thirteenth Amendment, but it really only mutated into other forms. The 1896 Supreme Court decision in Plessy V Ferguson basically maintained segregation as an illegal societal condition. Run through arguments about mass incarceration and the criminalization of blackness and the chains of injustice seem unbreakable. Brown notes very clearly that “[s]lavery didn’t just drain enslaved people of the fruits of their labor. It also resulted in the loss of their bodily autonomy and freedom…No American today can outrun slavery’s taint.” Later, she drops a William Faulkner quote that could be a running theme through the entire text:

“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”

The only problem with this otherwise effectively argued section comes at the end. Brown offers a powerful quote: “Great nations don’t ignore their most powerful moments. They embrace them.” It’s a strong line which Brown quotes but doesn’t attribute. The fact that it came from President Joe Biden as he spoke at the 2021 centennial of the Tulsa massacre should put in perspective the lack of wisdom and dignity now occupying the Oval Office.

Brown ends her book very clearly. The United States has a history of making financial reparations and black Americans are worthy of it based on treatment after the passage of the 13th Amendment. She argues that Trump’s 2024 election “...will make it…impossible…to believe that we are post-racial or have transcended race.” She powerfully rebukes Senator Mitch McConnell’s claim that reparations for something that happened 150 years ago “for whom none of us currently living are responsible is a good idea.” McConnell’s “great-grand grandfathers enslaved fourteen people and benefited from their exploited labor.”

The key to this book comes at the end and is effectively argued. “The trifecta of economic exploitation, mass incarceration, and racial violence has followed black Americans well into the twenty-first century.” The stains and scars of slavery might in fact have made a permanent scar on all our consciousness. When Supreme Court William Douglas wrote that the “...true curse of slavery is not what it did to the black man but what it has done to the white man” he was looking at the world literally and figuratively through black and white lenses. We have always had many more shades than black and white. Still, the sentiment is sincere and affords us all the opportunity to think about the future. Getting To Reparations is a thoughtful clarion call that should be on the national agenda for all of us as we chart the course for a better future. Things are dark now and will be that way for a while, but all darkness eventually surrenders to the promise of a new day.