Last week, the Bruces’ great-grandsons sold it back to the county for nearly $20 million. However, equally as shortsighted is treating this case as a model for reparations for all Black Americans, as some have suggested. Doing so would ignore that true reparation requires repair, and this solution doesn’t address the sources of racial inequality in America’s real estate system. Invariably, Blacks’ property was most endangered when it became valuable, or when it threatened the value of white property and business interests. In gentrifying housing markets, tax sales serve as a lucrative profit source, whose main victims are Black, elderly and low-income people.

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