The Case for Reparations and the Strongest Objections to It

In 1989, Representative John Conyers of Michigan introduced a bill numbered H.R. 40. He picked the number on purpose. It pointed back to January 1865, when General William Tecumseh Sherman issued Special Field Order No. 15, setting aside a strip of coastal land in South Carolina, Georgia and Florida for freed families in plots of up to 40 acres. Within months, President Andrew Johnson ordered most of that land returned to its former Confederate owners. Conyers's bill did not ask for land, or for money. It asked Congress to create a commission to study slavery and the discrimination that followed and to recommend remedies. He reintroduced it in every Congress for nearly three decades. It never got a floor vote. After Conyers left Congress, Representative Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas carried it until her death in 2024. The modesty of the request and the length of the wait are both part of the argument.

In short: H.R. 40 would create a federal commission to study the history of slavery and later discrimination and propose remedies; it would not itself pay anyone. Opponents raise serious objections about who would pay, who would qualify, constitutionality and whether universal programs would do more good. Here is the case for a study and for repair, laid out next to the best versions of those objections.

What H.R. 40 actually proposes

The bill's title has varied slightly over the years, but its core has been stable. It would set up a commission to examine the institution of slavery in the United States and the colonies, the role of federal and state governments in supporting it, and the forms of discrimination that followed in law and practice: segregation, exclusion from New Deal and postwar programs, discriminatory lending and housing policy, and more. The commission would then recommend what, if anything, the country should do, including whether a formal apology is warranted and what forms compensation might take.

In April 2021, the House Judiciary Committee voted to advance the bill for the first time, on a party-line vote. The full House never took it up, and it did not pass in the following Congress either.

So the honest first point in any debate is that the federal proposal on the table is a study. Opposition to the study is opposition to finding out, and supporters are entitled to say so. Many of the objections below are really objections to a hypothetical payment program the commission might recommend. They are serious, and they are exactly what a commission would have to answer.

The case, built from the record

The case for reparations is often caricatured as a claim that people alive today should pay for slavery because they are white. The serious version is narrower and stronger. It rests on what governments, not individuals, did, and on harms whose effects can be measured.

Start with slavery itself. For roughly two and a half centuries, enslaved people's labor built wealth that was legally protected by the colonies, the states and the federal government, including through the Constitution's fugitive slave clause and federal enforcement. Then came the failure of Reconstruction, when the federal government withdrew protection from freed people, and decades of state-enforced segregation and terror.

Then, crucially for the modern argument, came federal policy in the twentieth century. The Federal Housing Administration and the Home Owners' Loan Corporation built maps and underwriting rules in the 1930s that marked Black neighbourhoods as hazardous for lending, a practice later called redlining. Social Security, when it was created in 1935, initially excluded agricultural and domestic workers, occupations in which Black Southerners were heavily concentrated. The GI Bill after World War II was administered largely through local and state institutions, and in much of the country Black veterans were steered away from the mortgages and colleges it was meant to open. Homeownership was the main way American families built wealth in the twentieth century, and the government helped decide who got to start.

Those effects show up today. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances has found for decades that the typical white family holds several times the wealth of the typical Black family, a gap far larger than the income gap and one that has changed little over time. Wealth is what pays for college without debt, absorbs a medical emergency, or provides a down payment for the next generation. It passes down.

And there is precedent. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan signed the Civil Liberties Act, which apologized for the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and paid $20,000 to each surviving internee. West Germany agreed in 1952 to pay reparations to Israel and to survivors of the Holocaust. American cities and states have paid compensation for specific wrongs, from forced sterilizations to police torture. The principle that a government can owe something for its own past actions is not exotic.

That's the case. Now the objections, at their strongest.

Objection one: no one alive owned slaves, and no one alive was enslaved

This is the most common objection, and it deserves a direct answer.

It's true. Every person enslaved in the United States has died, and so has every enslaver. A program that treated today's taxpayers as personally guilty for slavery would be unjust and would deserve to fail.

The answer is that reparations claims run against governments, which are continuing institutions. The United States government that redlined neighbourhoods in the 1930s is the same legal entity that exists today, just as it is the same entity that still honors bonds it issued generations ago. Many of the people harmed by twentieth-century federal housing, lending and benefits policy are alive, and so are their children, who inherited less as a direct result. Nobody needs to be personally guilty for a government to owe a debt. Taxpayers today pay for wars fought before they were born; that is how public obligations work.

Objection two: who would qualify, and who would pay?

The United States is a nation of immigrants, many of whose ancestors arrived after 1865 or faced their own discrimination. Many Black Americans are recent immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean whose ancestors were not enslaved in the US. Many white Americans descend from people who never lived in a slave state, or who fought for the Union. Drawing lines looks impossible, and any line will seem arbitrary to someone.

This is a hard design question, and supporters should not wave it away. California's state reparations task force spent months on it and voted in 2022 to limit eligibility to people descended from enslaved African Americans or from free Black people living in the United States before the end of the nineteenth century, a lineage-based rule rather than a racial one. Others propose tying eligibility to documented harms, for instance families who lived in redlined areas or were denied specific benefits.

On who would pay, the answer from supporters is that public remedies are paid from the public treasury, like any other federal obligation, not assessed on individuals by ancestry. Recent immigrants pay for Social Security benefits earned by people who worked before they arrived. That is what being a member of a political community means.

Objection three: it would be unconstitutional

This objection has gotten stronger in recent years. The Supreme Court's 2023 decision in Students for Fair Admissions held that race-conscious admissions programs violate the Equal Protection Clause, and the Court has long subjected any government classification by race to strict scrutiny. A federal or state program that paid money based on race would almost certainly be challenged, and a court applying current precedent might strike it down.

Here, supporters have a more careful answer than they sometimes get credit for. Eligibility based on lineage from people enslaved in the United States, or on documented harm from specific government policies, is not the same as eligibility based on race, though opponents argue that it functions as a proxy and the question has not been settled. Remedies for identified victims of specific government discrimination have long stood on firmer legal ground than broad racial preferences. And a commission is constitutional on any reading; studying a problem classifies no one. This is a strong reason to support H.R. 40 as written, and a strong reason for any eventual program to be designed by lawyers who expect it to be tested. Local programs that have already drawn lawsuits, such as the housing grants in Evanston, Illinois, are followed on our housing and courts pages.

Objection four: universal programs would help more people and divide fewer

This objection often comes from the left. Its argument: programs targeted by race or lineage are politically toxic, invite backlash, and help fewer people than universal programs. Raise the minimum wage, expand the child tax credit, guarantee health care, fund schools fairly, and you will disproportionately help Black families because they are disproportionately poor, while building a broad coalition instead of a narrow one.

There's a lot of truth here. Universal programs are popular and durable. Social Security and Medicare survive because almost everyone benefits. The temporary expansion of the child tax credit in 2021 cut child poverty sharply, including among Black children, before it expired.

The answer from reparations supporters is that universal programs do not close the wealth gap, because they mostly support income, not assets. A family that gets a higher wage still starts behind a family that inherited a house. Some economists have proposed hybrid approaches, such as "baby bonds," publicly funded trust accounts for children in low-wealth families, that are race-neutral in law but aimed at the wealth gap in effect. Connecticut became the first state to create a baby bonds program, and others have followed or debated it.

I think the best version of the argument is not either-or. Universal programs and targeted repair answer different questions. A country can raise the floor for everyone and also acknowledge a specific debt.

Objection five: it would deepen division

Polls have consistently shown that most Americans oppose cash reparations for slavery, with deep divisions by race; a large majority of Black Americans support them, and most white Americans do not. Opponents argue that pushing an unpopular idea will harden racial divides and help the very politicians who exploit them.

This is a fair political concern, and progressives sometimes underrate it. But a study commission is a different proposition from cash payments, and the case for learning what happened is easier to make than the case for any particular remedy. Truth commissions in other countries have often preceded, and sometimes replaced, compensation, and their findings changed public understanding over time. The Tulsa race massacre of 1921, which destroyed the prosperous Greenwood district, was barely taught for most of a century; a state commission report in 2001 and decades of reporting brought it back into public memory, even though Oklahoma's Supreme Court dismissed the survivors' lawsuit in 2024 and the last survivors received no court-ordered compensation. Knowing is not the same as repairing, but it comes first.

Repair comes in more than one form

Part of what makes this debate so heated is that "reparations" gets heard as a single check. The proposals on the table are much more varied than that, and a commission's job would be to sort through them.

A formal apology is the simplest. Both chambers of Congress passed resolutions apologizing for slavery and Jim Crow in 2008 and 2009, but the Senate version included language disclaiming any support for reparations claims, and the two chambers never adopted a joint text. Some supporters see an official apology from the federal government, passed as law, as a meaningful first step; others see it as cheap without anything behind it.

Then there are asset-building programs: down-payment grants, home-repair funds, business capital, scholarships, and trust accounts for children. These aim directly at the wealth gap rather than at a one-time transfer. Some proposals focus on institutions instead of individuals, such as sustained funding for historically Black colleges and universities, or for health systems in communities that were cut off from investment for generations.

And there are land and property remedies tied to specific takings. In some places, local governments have returned property seized through eminent domain or discriminatory practices to the families who lost it. The return of Bruce's Beach in Manhattan Beach, California, to the descendants of the Black couple who had owned it, decades after the city condemned it, is the best-known example.

Each form has its own costs, legal risks and politics. That is precisely the argument for studying them carefully rather than arguing about an abstraction.

Where things stand

Federal action is unlikely under the current president, who has been openly hostile to diversity programs, and Democrats winning both chambers on November 3, 2026 does not by itself put H.R. 40 on the calendar; that will depend on the new majority's priorities, which nobody can state as fact yet. Most of the real activity has moved to cities and states: Evanston's housing program, California's task force, local commissions in places from Asheville, North Carolina, to Tulsa. Those efforts are where the design problems described above are being worked out in practice, and where the lawsuits are being filed.

What you can do

Whatever you conclude about payments, the study itself is a reasonable thing to ask for, and local efforts are where the details get decided.

1. Tell your member of Congress where you stand on H.R. 40. Use Find your representatives to get your representative's and senators' phone numbers, contact forms and latest votes. Ask whether they will co-sponsor the commission bill in the new Congress.
2. Look at the wealth numbers yourself. The inequality page shows the wealth shares of the top 1 percent and the bottom half of the country, along with real wages and the minimum wage. It is a useful frame for why assets, not just incomes, matter.
3. Find the local effort. Many cities have reparations or truth commissions, community land trusts and down-payment programs. Search the organizations directory for civil rights and housing nonprofits in your state.
4. Read before you argue. Our racial justice page gathers current reporting on reparations commissions, lawsuits and the history behind them. The best conversations on this subject start with people who have read the same documents.