Reparations by Race Do Not Repair a Nation. They Divide One.
Harmeet Dhillon Just Said What the Constitution Has Said Since 1868
Begin with a simple picture, because the law in this case is finally as simple as the picture. Two families lived on the same Evanston street in 1955. They shared a fence, a school district, and very likely a set of grievances against the city that zoned and policed them. Today the city of Evanston will write one of those families a check for $25,000 and turn the other away at the door. The families are identical in every particular the law has ever cared about, with one exception. One family is black and the other is not. That single fact, and nothing else, decides who is paid and who is refused.
When a government sorts its citizens that way, it is doing the precise thing the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified to forbid. This is the heart of the matter, and it is worth stating plainly before the lawyerly fog rolls in. The Equal Protection Clause protects persons, not races. It was written after a war fought over racial caste, and it was written to abolish caste, not to license a friendlier version of it. A program that pays citizens according to the color of their skin, or the color of their parents’ and grandparents’ skin, does not repair the old hierarchy. It rebuilds it with the beneficiaries rearranged.
On June 16, the Department of Justice said so, formally and on the record. Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon, who leads the Civil Rights Division, moved to intervene in the lawsuit against Evanston’s program and put the point with a clarity that the courts have spent 30 years approaching. There are sound ways for a city to help its poorest neighborhoods, she said, but simply handing out money based on race is not the answer. It is race discrimination, pure and simple, and it is illegal. That is the government of the United States adopting as its litigating position what an honest reading of the Constitution has required all along. Dhillon deserves credit for it. For decades the federal civil rights apparatus enforced the colorblind command in one direction only, against discrimination that injured minorities, while averting its eyes from racial sorting dressed up as benevolence. To enforce the rule evenhandedly, against a city that discriminates by race for reasons it calls noble, is not a betrayal of the civil rights tradition. It is the fulfillment of it.
Consider the doctrine the city must overcome, because it is not some recent conservative invention. The Supreme Court has held for more than three decades that every racial classification by government, at every level, must survive strict scrutiny, the most demanding test in constitutional law. In City of Richmond v. J.A. Croson Co., decided 6 to 3 in 1989 and written by Justice Sandra Day O’Connor, the Court struck down a minority contracting set-aside in a majority-black city governed by a majority-black council. Richmond had a real statistical disparity to point to, minority firms receiving under 1% of contracts in a city half black, and the Court still said no. General societal discrimination, however genuine, cannot justify a racial remedy. The government must identify a specific instance of unlawful discrimination and tailor the remedy narrowly to it. O’Connor warned that the alternative was a future in which the dream of a nation of equal citizens would dissolve into a mosaic of shifting preferences based on inherently unmeasurable claims of past wrongs. That sentence reads today like a prophecy of Evanston.
The Court only sharpened the rule afterward. Adarand Constructors v. Peña in 1995 closed the supposed loophole for federal programs and applied strict scrutiny to every level of government. Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard in 2023, again 6 to 3, ended race-conscious admissions and reminded the country that distinctions drawn solely by ancestry are odious to a free people. Then, just this past April, the Court decided Louisiana v. Callais, a 6 to 3 opinion by Justice Alito holding that a congressional map could not use race as its organizing principle absent a compelling justification the state did not have. Callais matters here for a reason that has nothing to do with voting maps. It restated, in the freshest possible terms, the two conditions any remedial racial classification must meet. The government must identify the specific past discrimination and the precise scope of the injury, and it must possess a strong basis in evidence that the race-based remedy is necessary. And it reaffirmed the disqualifier directly. There is no compelling interest in generally remedying the effects of societal discrimination across a region or an era. A century-old, generalized grievance is entitled, in the Court’s words, to much less weight. One struggles to imagine a sentence more precisely fitted to Evanston’s case if it had been drafted for the occasion.
Here a careful reader will pause and ask the natural question. Surely Evanston has done its homework. Surely a city would not stake millions of dollars and its moral reputation on a program without first identifying the specific discrimination it claims to remedy. The honest answer, drawn from the federal complaint and from the city’s own documents, is that it did not. The enabling resolutions contain only boilerplate acknowledging harm to black residents. They identify no specific unlawful act, name no precise injury, and rest on no strong basis in evidence. The city’s own policy report, the nearest thing to a factual foundation, is a working document whose authors expressly declared themselves neutral and disclaimed any responsibility for how it would be used. A government does not build a constitutional defense on a paper its own authors refuse to stand behind.
It is worse than an absence of proof. While the program was being written, former White House Counsel C. Boyden Gray submitted a detailed warning that it would be unconstitutional and that the city had given only perfunctory thought to race-neutral options like income-based housing aid. The city adopted the program unchanged. Later, when officials added the unrestricted cash payment, the city’s own Corporation Counsel conceded on the record that they did not have the research to show a cash benefit would be a narrowly tailored remedy. The defendant’s own lawyer admitted the fatal flaw before the plaintiffs ever had to prove it. And the program’s nominal escape hatch, a provision for people who can document post-1969 housing discrimination, turns out to be gated by race as well, because such claimants must first submit proof of race and then wait until every race-qualified ancestor and descendant has been paid. The fig leaf is itself a racial classification.
Look at the mechanics and the figures, which the city funds, fittingly, from its cannabis tax. Eligibility runs entirely on bloodline. An ancestor is a black adult who lived in Evanston between 1919 and 1969, and a direct descendant is that person’s child, grandchild, or great-grandchild. The city has paid at least 141 ancestors a total of $3.525 million, identified at least 454 descendants for payment, distributed well over $5 million already, and would owe more than $11 million to the descendants alone, against a $10 million pledge it has effectively blown past. Now widen the lens, because Evanston is a pilot, not an endpoint. California’s reparations task force, drawing on its own economists, priced a statewide program at figures reaching $800 billion, more than 2.5 times the state’s entire annual budget, with per-person estimates running past $1 million. Those are not a critic’s numbers. They are the proponents’ own arithmetic, and they vindicate O’Connor’s warning that once race becomes the measure of who gets paid there is no logical stopping point and no end date.
The deepest objection is not fiscal. A nation is held together by a shared idea of who its members are to one another. The American idea, the one Justice Harlan defended alone in 1896 when he wrote that our Constitution is colorblind and tolerates no classes among citizens, is that we meet the state as individuals, equal before the law, and not as delegates of our ancestry. Reparations by race quietly replaces that idea with another. It tells citizens that their standing before the government is fixed by descent, that the relevant fact about a man is the color of his great-grandfather, and that public money flows along the channels of blood. Whatever its authors intend, the program teaches the citizenry to see one another as members of racial classes with competing claims on the treasury. That is not repair. It is the manufacture of division, the conversion of neighbors into rival castes, and it is precisely the hierarchy the Equal Protection Clause exists to dismantle.
Chief Justice Roberts gave us the rule in a single unforgettable line. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race. The conservative legal tradition, from Heritage to Cato to the Pacific Legal Foundation, has insisted on this for a generation, not as a partisan slogan but as the plain command of equal citizenship. Two-thirds of Americans agree, including majorities in deep-blue California. Evanston placed itself on the wrong side of the Constitution, the wrong side of the Court, and the wrong side of the public. The Justice Department has now placed the United States on the right side of all three. That is worth celebrating, and it is worth defending until the last race-keyed check is voided.
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Alexander Muse is a Fellow at the John Milton Freedom Foundation and publishes daily political analysis at amuseonx.com. Primary sources cited in this piece are linked inline; campaign finance figures are drawn from FEC filings, polling data from publicly released crosstabs, and legal claims from filed pleadings. Corrections are posted to the original URL with a dated changelog. Readers who identify errors are invited to contact the author directly.
Race-based reparations do not heal a nation. They divide one. The left wants Americans sorted into ancestry groups, grievance classes, and treasury claims because division is the permanent political class’s operating system. But equal citizenship means the government sees individuals, not bloodlines. Help poor neighborhoods. Fix bad housing policy. Punish proven discrimination. Build opportunity. But do not write checks by skin color and call it constitutional virtue. Evanston’s program is the old poison in a new bottle: racial preference, public money, and moral blackmail. Dhillon is right. The way to stop race discrimination is to stop doing it.
We should take a page out of the (possibly apocryphal) speech given by Representative Davey Crockett when asked to approve a special government pension to the widow of a naval officer. He disapproved the request, despite its good intentions, saying, "We have the right, as individuals, to give away as much of our own money as we please in charity; but as members of Congress we have no right so to appropriate a dollar of the public money." This should apply to ALL governmental entities, local, state and federal, but sadly, has never stopped the robbery of the public treasury to favor special interests.