At the start of the Civil War, enslavers in the nation’s capital were compensated for the loss of their human property. The payment scheme hoped to ensure enslavers’ loyalty and garner their support for ending slavery. Three decades later, after 11 Italians were lynched in 1892 New Orleans, strained diplomatic relations and the Italian government’s threatened military action convinced President Benjamin Harrison to compensate the murdered men’s families. Native Nations whose property was confiscated during America’s genocidal expansion fought for compensation for almost two centuries. Claims based on the U.S. Government’s repeated treaty violations were filed, “as early as 1831.” Yet congressional chicanery, foot-dragging, and bureaucratic inertia kept these claims sloshing through the Indian Claims Commission and the U.S. Court of Federal Claims for the length of several lifetimes. Settlements and payouts slowly dripped out, with the final claim paid in 2006. For their staggering continent-spanning losses, the US Court of Federal Claims ordered the Native Nations to be paid what amounted to about $1.3 billion in total. Despite no evidence of disloyalty, WWII-era Japanese Americans were stripped of their land, rounded up, and sent to domestic concentration camps during the war. After another decades-long struggle, 60,000 Japanese victims of American fascism received token remuneration ($20,000 per person) for the persecution their government inflicted.

In other words, the United States government has repeatedly endorsed the idea of paying reparations to wronged parties (and even enslavers). Black Americans, who have been enslaved, lynched, had their land stolen, been locked out of jobs and homeownership, and faced disproportionate and unjust incarceration are owed a similar debt. But reparations are an American tradition that, like many American traditions, has excluded Black people.

Dorothy Brown’s Getting to Reparations: How Building a Different America Requires A Reckoning with Our Past is a narrative of the possible that hopes to get the federal government’s debt to Black Americans paid. The Martin D. Ginsburg Chair in Taxation and a Professor of Law at Georgetown University, Brown is widely known for her pathbreaking work on race and the tax code. Her new book is a history of reparations, a case for the necessity of compensation that goes well beyond slavery, and a policy platform for getting reparations paid. True to her legal training, Brown’s argument rests on precedent. Reparations have happened before. She aims to make them happen again. Brown’s ethical case for reparations convinces, as any fair reckoning would acknowledge the horrors visited upon Black Americans cry out for restitution. The political barriers to reparations are, as Brown acknowledges, more difficult, as the social and legal regimes designed to strip value from Black life must be convinced to pay their debts.

This book is full of maddening facts that show the injustice of refusing to pay Black Americans for the crimes committed against them. Although enslavers in Washington D.C. were compensated for the loss of their property, the formerly enslaved were often left penniless after decades of toil. Enslavers were given the benefit of the doubt as to their loyalty, which was assumed unless they took up arms against the United States or were in overt rebellion. Having a “son or brother in the Confederate army” was not a bar to compensation. In contrast, the fact that not a single Japanese American was found to be disloyal didn’t stop the federal government from stealing their land and shipping them off to American gulags.

Near the end of the Civil War, 400,000 acres of land were deeded to formerly enslaved Black people by General Sherman’s Special Field Order No. 15—the genesis of the mythic 40 acres and a mule promised to the formerly enslaved. But when the white supremacist Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency following Lincoln’s assassination, that land was returned to former enslavers.

Brown shows that racial oppression has always been primarily material. Calls for reparations are usually followed by the phrase “for slavery,” but Brown doesn’t limit herself to what the peculiar institution stole from Black people. She notes that the “badges and incidents of slavery” that were allegedly outlawed by the 13th Amendment continue to shape Black people’s opportunities and life chances. Brown reads the 13th Amendment as expansive, recognizing that racialized slavery had so stigmatized its victims that badges and incidents of slavery are present anytime anti-Blackness motivates discrimination. De facto and de jure segregation, which limit Black peoples’ economic prospects by locking them out of labor markets and housing, are badges of slavery. Racially unequal policing and mass incarceration are badges of slavery. Sundown towns, where Black Americans were likely to be murdered if found out and about after dark, were badges of slavery. Anti-Black discrimination stretches from slavery to the present. And thus, according to Brown, so does the debt to Black Americans that this discrimination incurred. Slavery is only the first outrage in a cascading series of harms uniquely targeting Black people and that the federal government tacitly or overtly supported.

Anti-Blackness is the anchor of America’s racial system; Derrick Bell’s “faces at the bottom of the well” below which other groups hope to never fall. Being at the bottom of America’s racial hierarchy makes Black folks the historical exception to equal rights, federal protections, and at the extreme, notions of shared personhood. This anchor is why it’s so difficult for some to see reparations for Black Americans as a viable policy. Some conservatives, including President Ronald Reagan, supported reparations for Japanese interment because he saw what happened to them as a violation of the colorblind ideal conservatives were then promoting in opposition to the supposedly special rights of (Black) Civil Rights constituencies. Brown takes Reagan’s support for Japanese Americans as confirmation that conservative opposition to big government and belief in equality of opportunity is occasionally sincere, and sees this as a starting point for the possibility of bi-partisan buy-in. I take her point, and think Brown is right in the abstract world of political theory where conservative commitments to individual liberty are more powerful than the profit motive or personal interest. However, the Trump era, and the history chattel slavery and state-sponsored discrimination that Brown recounts, shows that when given a choice between supporting individual liberty or open racism, the latter often wins, and conservatives’ concerns about overbearing centralized government evaporates. Conservatives committed to abstract notions of individual liberty welcome masked storm troopers taking over American cities and raiding day cares, as long as the state is hurting nonwhites.

Brown recognizes that, under current conditions, her preferred policy is not politically feasible. She notes that public opinion is largely against reparations and that the political will for transformative policy designed to improve Black people’s lives is low-to-nonexistent. But a great thing about this book is that Brown goes big with both policy suggestions and plans to accomplish them. Black history is, in part, the story of overcoming the politically impossible—slavery’s abolition, desegregation, Civil Rights protections—and making it common sense. Brown knows political opportunity is created by people who understand that politics is always moving and that ideas can create opportunities.

Brown goes about figuring out how to achieve buy-in through message testing. In cooperation with the independent polling firm Goodwin Simon Strategic Research, Brown created focus groups to educate people on what reparations entails, teach about America’s racial history, and develop a convincing story about why the nation should pay its debt to Black citizens. The data from these focus groups is striking, as some who were opposed to the policy changed their minds after learning the basics about the economic exclusion and violence to which Black Americans have been subjected. Listening to Brown’s respondents, it becomes easy to see why the right is banning books and harassing teachers who are honest about America’s racial history. For the fair minded, even a relatively superficial understanding of federal complicity in Black oppression can change opinions.

To make reparations a reality, Brown calls for the creation of a Post-Slavery Discrimination Commission (PtSD) tasked with studying the varied ways that Black Americans have been denied their constitutional rights. Reminiscent of the prior expansive studies of American race relations like Gunnar Myrdal’s 1944 An American Dilemma or the Kerner Commission Report of 1968, the PtSD Commission would attempt to provide both a comprehensive examination of structural racism and policy suggestions for implementation. Although most of the specifics of any reparation plan would be hammered out by the commission, Brown does offer some suggestions for both committee membership and potential policies it might promulgate. Academics can advise the committee but shouldn’t serve as full members given our propensity to inaction. Media-savvy speakers are essential to promoting the program and garnering public support.

An expansive notion of the causes of America’s debt to Black citizens shapes Brown’s understanding of what the nation owes. Reparations need not only be simple cash payments (although her proposal doesn’t exclude the possibility of direct transfers) but can also include public works programs designed to benefit Black folks who have been excluded from communal goods. Given that the American economy is set up to transfer Black wealth to white hands, cash payments uncoupled from broader community programs are likely to end up further enriching whites. Subprime loans, discriminatory banking, and tax system normed to benefit white families have long funneled Black wealth to white communities. Reparations, without reforms of the broader discriminatory system, would face similar predation.

In thinking through the tricky calculus of who should be included in a reparations program, Brown couples her expansive understanding of the debt owed Black Americans to a broad conceptualization of Black identity. Here, the “one drop” rule designed to bar people with any Black ancestry from full political rights is used as the measure of inclusion. Even Black folks who passed as white would potentially be included, as denying one’s Black ancestry was often a survival strategy in the broader white supremacist system. Because reparations aren’t limited to payments for slavery, Black immigrants, who upon arrival are socialized into America’s discriminatory racial order, are also eligible. Fraudulent claims of Black ancestry will be punished, as will false challenges of a person’s Black identity. People opposed to reparations can opt-out, but “no proof on the part of Black people will be required” to opt in, because the federal government “failed to keep adequate records” about the destruction and theft of Black property.

Brown understands that people, even supporters of reparations, will undoubtedly take issue with these parts of her policy prescriptions, claiming that some people are more deserving based on enslaved ancestry, skin tone, or time in the country. But Brown makes Blackness—not formerly enslaved status—the eligibility test because the white supremacy’s maximally exclusionary definition of “Black” should be countered with a maximally inclusionary policy.

Given the makeup of the current Supreme Court, legal challenges to reparations programs would undoubtedly get a hearing. White wealth was built upon race-based policies that provided preferential access to land, jobs, and loans. Nonetheless, the current conservative Court has ruled that although using race to profile immigrants is fine, using race to fix historic and ongoing structural racism violates the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of equal protection. On this, Brown takes the long view by anticipating temporary legal defeat leading to a further delegitimization of an embattled Court. Banning these hypothetical reparations would “serve to point out the continued victimization of Black Americans at the hands of the judiciary.” This delegitimization, in turn, would create the political space for future congressional action justified under the 13th Amendments call to end badges of slavery. Here, I think Brown is putting greater faith than is perhaps warranted in the ability of her proposed committee when it comes to changing white Americans’ hearts and minds. Despite professing an abstract commitment to equal opportunity in surveys, white Americans typically balk when comes time to implement policies—such as affirmative action—designed to create equal opportunity.

Economists’ best efforts can’t price the spiritual cost of a childhood lost to the cotton field or a father lost to the lynch mob. Compensation received by Native Nations and Japanese Americans falls far short of their losses in land and status. Similarly, even the most expensive estimates of programs for reparations for Black people will similarly fail to balance the ledger. If reparations were paid, Brown notes, Black Americans “are going to receive less than they deserve.” Nonetheless, some compensation is better than the cold refusal to fully acknowledge the tortures that America routinely imposes on Black Americans. Brown’s hope in making the case for reparations is that addressing this history, however imperfectly, will move us toward a more perfect union.