Americans who prefer gradual approaches that do not radically disrupt inequality and who label their approaches “plain, peaceful, generous, just,” to use Lincoln’s words, carelessly ignore or understate the complex, violent, stingy, and unjust damage wrought by inequality. These Americans care more about responding to political expediency than about the emergency of inequality, care more about repairing alienated white Americans than about repairing pillaged black coffers, and claim to be horrified by slavery and “not racist” but end up, knowingly or unknowingly, compensating the white beneficiaries of slavery and racism.

These Americans claim they oppose racism and reparations. They support the drive for economic equality between the races at the same time they are pumping the brakes on the only foreseeable policy that can dramatically close the growing racial wealth gap. Only an expansive and expensive compensation policy for the descendants of the enslaved and relegated of the scale Lincoln proposed for the enslavers and subsidized could prevent the racial wealth gap from compounding and being passed onto another generation.

The reparations debate returned to Capitol Hill this week for the first time in more than a decade. Ta-Nehisi Coates and Danny Glover testified on Wednesday in a hearing before the House Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties. Is this hearing, and the fact that some Democratic presidential candidates are endorsing reparations, the beginning of the reckoning? Is the United States finally beginning to acknowledge the economic damage that state-sanctioned racist policies have wrought since slavery? Is the United States finally beginning the process of eradicating those policies and repairing their damage?

For every $100 of wealth that white families hold, black families hold just $5. One in four black households has zero or negative wealth, in contrast to one in 10 white households. White households make up 96 percent of the top 1 percent, while black households constitute 2 percent of that highest wealth bracket.

The racial wealth gap will not repair itself. And it is growing.

From 1983 to 2013, the wealth of the median black household declined 75 percent as the wealth of the median white household increased 14 percent. By 2020, black people are projected to lose an additional 18 percent of wealth, and white households will own 86 times as much wealth as their black counterparts. By 2053, the median black household is projected to flatline at $0. Generally speaking, black people are facing economic death.

State-sanctioned racist policies, which have opened, sustained, and broadened the racial wealth gap, have often been ironically framed as reparative for white people. Wealthy-white victimhood has been the creed of racist history since long before Donald Trump vowed to repair America’s greatness from the tyranny of the first black president. The Founding Fathers identified only themselves as the victims of tyranny. Slaveholders cast themselves as under siege by abolitionists, runaways, and especially revolting captives. Confederates fought the so-called War of Northern Aggression. Whites described civil- and voting-rights bills and judgments as “made to operate in favor of the colored and against the white race,” to quote President Andrew Johnson’s reasoning for vetoing the first Civil Rights Act in 1866. Klansmen and lynchers said they were fighting against black debauchery. Whites complained they were subjected to affirmative action, welfare queens, the Central Park Five, reverse discrimination, race cards, and roving and ravishing migrants and immigrants.