The Color of Law A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America by Richard Rothstein (z-lib.org).epub

concept of remedies to make victims whole is a familiar one in our legal
system. I also prefer the term remedies because they also include policies
that do not involve payments. While we should subsidize homeownership
for African Americans in suburbs from which they were once banned, we
should also require repeal of exclusionary zoning ordinances that prevent the
construction of affordable homes in such suburbs. “Affirmative action” in
education and employment is also constitutionally required to remedy de
jure segregation.
But I have no quarrel with Coates’s preference for the term reparations. If
you prefer to think of the policies we should follow as being reparations, not
remedies, I won’t disagree. What’s important is that until we arouse in
Americans an understanding of how we created a system of unconstitutional,
state-sponsored, de jure segregation, and a sense of outrage about it, neither
remedies nor reparations will be on the public agenda.
Isn’t your argument completely unrealistic? Supreme Court justices will
never go for it.
The observation that the Supreme Court “follows the election returns”
may be too simple, but Supreme Court justices certainly do come to new
understandings only after a substantial portion of informed opinion has done
so. Yet although reparations cannot be won by lawsuits, the courts do have a
role. Were Congress, for example, to enact a “Fair Share Plan,” opponents
would challenge it, insisting that such a policy would be “reverse
discrimination” and violate the Fourteenth Amendment. A future, bettereducated
Court would be called upon to reject this argument, as well as to
rule that the plan was an appropriate exercise of congressional power under
Section 2 of the Thirteenth Amendment, the clause that authorized Congress
to abolish the badges of slavery, of which none other is as important as
segregated neighborhoods.
Whether a future Court is better educated is entirely up to us.